December '08.1

I've been busy these past few weeks, and unfortunately, my artwork doesn't show for that. I'm nearing the final days of my colour theory course, and have been spending the last few days in front of my laptop hammering out final design ideas. My four black and white design images can be viewed in my Deviant Art scraps. My favourite of the four was the second one, with the bamboo and the rising sun, but it didn't provide much opportunity to use a lot of the concepts I had learned in class, so I went with the third design (the girl and the cherry tree) which was the most praised in my classroom. I used it for the next part of the assignment, which was to take the black and white design and create several coloured images using a multitude of colour harmony options. I have uploaded those images, as well.

I'm looking forward to having a holiday after this course ends. Classes resume in mid-January, so in the meantime, I'll be finishing my Chun Li costume and clean the apartment. Ian's parents are supposed to be giving us a couple of pieces of furniture next week, and I need to make room.

I've also finished making the armbands for my sister and the other club officers to wear, showing their ranks and names. I also included a little "Anime Club" caption, which reads anime kurabu, in kana. Kurabu, however, not only means club, but crab, as well. My sister found this humourous, and said that anime crabs were an ATD (Anime Transmitted Disease).

Due to the economic crisis (for lack of a better term) work has not been going so well. GameStop has decided to cut hours this week and hold an emergency stockholder meeting. Originally, I was told that our company was surviving the economy because while consumers couldn't afford things like expensive vacations and travelling cross-country to visit relatives, they could afford to buy thier children video games to make up for that. And yet, hours have been decreasing gradually, and our store was only able to hire one seasonal employee...while our company buys a French franchise of game retailers and continues to build new stores across the U.S. I'm a little worried about the amount of money corporate has been spending in the last few months, and I just received a call about an hour ago from my manager telling me that my hours have been slashed this week (in half), and now I'm afraid of losing my job alltogether.

Enough of that.

I get to see my family this weekend and celebrate the holidays. This isn't a time to be dwelling on the negative.