One Very Special Botcon Photo!

Day 41: Check it out! Check it out! Check it out! CHECK IT OUT!!

That's me! Me and my sister! Me and my sister in an awesome Prowl hat! Me and my sister in an awesome Prowl hat AT BOTCON!

I was cruising through the image gallery on Botcon's website because they had recently put up all their official pictures and I was beginning to miss that amazing feeling of being at Botcon. I was looking through the Saturday pictures, peering in the corners to see if maybe they had taken a picture and accidentally gotten Sarah and I in the crowd.

Nothing. Not even in the ridiculously long line that sprung up Saturday morning for general admission. (We had breakfast in that line and no, we were not in the back of the line. Yay! xP)

So I clicked on Sunday, my peepers ready to peer into more photo corners and then BAM! There we were! It was so cool that I ran up shouting, "SARAH SARAH SARAH!" I was so excited that she thought I was coming to tell her that Steve Blum had called or something. n_n; Which of course would have been cool,  but very very odd...

Anyway that's us! And it's cool! And totally unexpected! Which makes it even better! :)

And dang we've got long hair.....o.O

On the night before Botcon...

My vacation officially started this morning! At like...five-fifty this morning, but still. ;3

My sister and I were ecstatic to arrive in sunny San Diego and man is it beautiful. I mean, back home in Houston, you walk outside at your own peril. I mean you could soak your shirt in sweat without doing anything other than walking around the neighborhood.

And here it's so different! It's cool and breezy and the air outside the airport smelled just the slightest bit like salt water. :) It was really cool in every single way possible! And the land! IT MOVES! What is this land undulation that I see before me?! Is the ground broken? Is that why they have so many earthquakes around here? And what are these 'hills' that people keep talking about...

Oh! Oh! Oh! And guess what we just did! Guess! Guess! Guess!

We just got back from watching the Transformers movie (the live action one from 2007) in the hotel rose garden (they have rose gardens! :D And the roses are the size of my face! o.O They're huge!) and five of the Botcon guests were there. Wheeljack and Shockwave's voice actors from Prime, Wally Burr and Jason Jenson from the G1 80's universe, and Glenn Morshower from the live action movies! They were taking pictures with guests before the movie started and it was such a surprise cause I didn't expect to see them there! I asked Sarah if she wanted to take a picture with them, but she was too shy. I wanted to get my picture taken with them though, but I was too nervous to go up and ask. n_n; We both kinda chickened out...

There were some technical problems with the movie, but it turned out to be even more awesome because of it. It started working just fine and people all cheered when Optimus started talking, but then the picture blinked out. :0 We could still hear it though, and my sister told me it almost didn't matter because she knew everything that was going on just from hearing what was going on. ;P I thought it was funny because I was doing the same thing.

Then the picture came back! Yay! Then it immediately disappeared and took the sound with it! Boo!

But then Glenn Morshower got up and said, "I'll just act out the rest for you guys. 'You will land or we will kill you.'"

XD It was great! It was...it was...it was so great I don't even know what it was! XD

The movie itself was awesome too. I know I've seen it a hundred times, but it was so much more fun when all the other people were cheering when their favorite bots appeared on screen, or when they were all reciting the best lines of the movie. Sarah said it was great being surrounded by 'our people'.

I laughed at her and said she was weird. But then I was forced to admit that she had a point, so...go geeky me! And yay for crowds of Transfans! Woohoo! It was fantastic! Let's go again! Let's go again! :D It was better then chocolate!

Well...okay, so it tied with chocolate. n_n;

And tomorrow morning we're going to get to go to the convention itself! YAY! Tomorrow we're going to get more puggle friends and Transformers and autographs and panels! Hooray!!!!

I also think that my lil sis and I may have ridden in an elevator with Steve Blum....but I'll have to get back to you on that. Needless to say, when we realized why the elevator guy may have seemed so familiar, we both freaked out. Made worse by the fact that we're not absolutely sure it even was him in the first place...

Hopefully tomorrow we'll find out! Or at least get the real Starscream's autograph... ;3

It's getting late, so I'll have to put pictures up here a little later. But if you want to get a little taste of Botcon now, you can check out my Twitter feed. I'm so excited about it all that I've been tweeting more today then I have in the past six months....guess I'm not exactly a micro-blogger. n_n;

The Botcon Quest Begins...

Day 39-40: It's time to party like an Autobot! Just deposited my graduation checks (finally...) and some prize money I got for winning second place in an essay contest (I'm still pretty excited about that :3). And you know what that means? I'll tell you what it means! It means that my sister and I finally went and reserved a hotel room for Botcon!

We're going to Botcon this summer!!!!!!! YAYYYYY!!!

Aaaand...this is how I feel about that. :)

So yeah, the highlight of my day. Now I'm just kind of praying that nothing goes wrong. :_ Because that would be...close to soul crushing really. I'm really looking forward to this. Now that I'm done with school, every time I think about my future it's like looking into a big blank space of nothingness. No purpose. No immediate goals. No point really....

It stinks.

So I guess it's just nice to have something really fun and nerdy to look forward to. And I get to share it with my little sister. n_n; If we keep going on like this we'll have something of a Botcon tradition. And things always seem to look better when you have someone to have fun with instead of just pallin' around with me, myself, and I.

That and we can freak out over meeting Gregg Berger (the voice of Grimlock) together. They haven't released the final guest list yet for the convention (so we don't completely know if he's coming) but we have great hope that he'll be at Botcon this summer. And I can't wait to see who else is gonna come! I'm so getting an autograph band! :D I think I'm going to bring the picture I got autographed last summer and add more signatures to that. ;3 By the end of I'll be proud to have it hanging on my wall for all to see!

And it's such a nice looking hotel too! Maybe it's because we reserved a room early - or maybe it's some kind of attendee discount Botcon's got going on - but it was the same price for the largest room with two beds as it was for a not-as-fancy-looking room with only one. So cool! Sleeping in style!

Now we just have to work on those plane tickets...hmmm......

Lanterns in the Sky

Day 38: Last few day's project finally done. :) I found out recently that those floating lanterns featured in Tangled are actually real. Well, maybe without that purple sun on the side...and there's no missing princess....or magic hair....but still! They exist!

It turns out that there's this big festival celebration in Thailand where they release tons of these things into the night. I found some photos of the festivities on shutterstock that are really stunning. I'll put one up below, but I didn't strictly copy any one cloud of lanterns. Just used them for inspiration really. :)

I think it turned out pretty well. I was uncertain about adding more colors into the sky because I was so taken with just the plain blue, but I think I made the right choice.

...I also may have been thinking about what Van Gogh said in Doctor Who about the sky being all different colors.....

n_n; Oh well. I like it. It turned out well. I want to make a bigger version (this is just a sketchbook sized one). I'll have to look at the remains of my Bristol pad, but I know it's bigger than a normal sheet of paper...I think that'll have enough room though for a good balance between up close, detailed lanterns, and background speck-lanterns.

I'm thinking about turning this into a pendent too. You know, like one you wear. It think it'd look cute smaller. And with any luck I might be able to sell a few and raise money for the ongoing Botcon quest.

That and if it's smaller maybe I won't see all those early mistakes glaring so sharply at me... ^,,^

It would also give me the excuse to add glitter! xP

 A reference/source-like/inspiration thing...

The Hummingbird Sketch

Day 37 - A sketch I did today. I was putting some photos I got from shutterstock to good use and having some fun with my art pens at the same time. The source photo is down below if you care to compare. Personally I think the bird came out rather well for a freehand try, but the stick?

^-.-^ Mrs. Mittens and I say Blech! to the stick.

.....although I kind of like how you can still see the greens, yellows, and reds I put in there to try and make it not look so flat (I only have the one brown and yellow and it needed something more)....

I've been stocking up on lovely photos from shutterstock when Dad doesn't use up all the downloads on his subscription, looking for ones that I could practice my sketching skills. But most of them, I notice now, require more colors than I have, so maybe I should start thinking about expanding my collection. :)

Of course....that requires money, which is a bit of a problem. I've been looking around for a job, but it's so much more difficult than I had first thought. D<

I have applied for some blogger jobs I found....and I'm so nervous I won't get it! The two I really want stop accepting applications today, so hopefully tomorrow or early next week I'll get a phone call. I want it so bad! If only because I have no idea what else to do if I don't get it.... u.u; I'm trying to save up so my sister and I can go to Botcon this summer and I still need a couple hundred dollars.

So, yeah...I'm crossing my fingers and praying real hard, but right now the only thing to do is wait and see. I have a possible plan B with maybe trying to sell some resin necklaces with little collages or Transformers or Disney things inside....My sis and I are going to hobby lobby today because she wants some fabric to make a Prowl pack for the convention (She wants it to look like she has doorwings. It sounds so cute and nerdy!) so I thought I'd look around to see how much the settings cost. I dunno. Maybe it'll work. Maybe I'll be fortunate enough to find some kind of paycheck before the end of the month....I don't know.

*Sigh* Well. At least my little hummingbird looks decent. I'm rather fond of him. Although I wonder if maybe I didn't over correct with the colors when I was cleaning up the scanned version...oops. n_n;