Happy Thanksgiving.

I'm thankful for a dog that amuses me, who never seems to grow old, and football on Thanksgiving.

Holiday cards are done.

I sent my cards off to Moo to get them printed, just in time to take advantage of their 25% off discount, and to get them in time to send off the first set.  This year, I've decided to create 3 variations for different parts of the season.

Obviously I'm not posting them ahead of time, but here's the back of the cards.

Kuropea!

My friend just got this mostly black border collie puppy -- the runt of the litter.  I tried to convince her to call him Kuropea, or, black pea.

It didn't stick.  Still, I think it's kawaii.

Holiday lights in trees.

I've always had a fascination with holiday lights in trees.  The way it illuminates leaves, the shadows, the glow through the leaves, and the contrast against the night just make for dreamy visions.

In Portland's Pearl District, the lights were turned on about two weeks ago, just after Halloween.  The timing seemed right to photograph the trees just as the leaves were just beginning to change color.

Officially official: Portfolio site now live.

Well, I've finally completed it, though the journey was an odd twist.

I was originally going to build my portfolio from scratch using Adobe Muse, and in fact some three years ago or so, I had a template front page figured out.  But then Muse left beta and became a paid app, so that left me hanging in the wind.

I then started working with a jQuery template, but it really was just an image template which therefore required hard coding for the overall layout of the site.

At that point I was going to build it in Google Web Designer, but then I realized that I didn't have the time to build it from scratch.

So I decided I might grab one of those free templates, and I found a really good one that was minimalist and all.  But then after fudging around with it, I realized that it would still take quite a lot of time, first to read through the documentation, then adjusting all of the parameters by hand.

So finally, I decided to go to Wix.  Of course, I started the project, and then let it sit for a couple of months.  But last week I finally got off my bum and worked at it, and in four days I've finally completed it.

My portfolio website.

Now granted, it's currently hosted at Wix and has ads for Wix, because I'm not going to pay $5 / month at this point to host with my domain name that I own.  Eventually that'll change, I'm sure, but for now, it's good enough.

The obligatory screen shot of my portfolio.

Finally rendered: Kuwait competition, blast from the past project.

I finally finished updating the Sketchup model that had been converted from 3D AutoCad, and got through rendering, following some added touches to the interior.  To create the bokeh effect, I popped some of the renders into Photoshop and applied a lens blur to a gradient mask.

Lots of work...made me wonder if it would have been easier to simply rebuild from the 2D cad files instead. Still, I've had my eye on redoing this in Sketchup for a very long time because I knew that it would come out spectacular.

Kuwait competition -- another project reworked.

Here's another blast from the past project that I worked on.  Some 12 years ago, this was built in 3D in AutoCad, then rendered via 3DS Max.  I'm still working on fixing the model up after importing it into Sketchup (there is a lot of work to be done!), but it's definitely going to be worth it.

I didn't do the design; I gave my input on the design to the head designer, though, and it reflects a lot of my personal style.

Here's a peek into where it stands right now.  When it's all done, I'll show the updated model.