Journal
Hannah's musings and website update log.
Sketchbook session
I haven't had a huge amount of energy lately, so I haven't been drawing as much while I've been focusing on life responsibilites. But I did manage to get some time in today to do some quick little paintings. I bought a really cheap ($5) watercolour sketchbook from Kmart, not really expecting anything of it. I tend to use ae lot of water in my watercolours, but less so with gouache and that's what I've been using for these ^_^ It's not too bad actually! I 100% prefer my hot pressed Arches paper, but if you just want to do some sketching or studies, this works ok.
The chibi girl with the stars was drawn as a GaiaOnline freebie for Memer_Schemer, which is their friends OC ^^ Green witch and potion were just...random things I wanted to draw. Seems kinda fitting given it's October anyway!
New website design
Feels a bit odd to say this, but I've gone back to using a static site. A very long time ago, my website started out static, went through various custom dynamic iterations (my own CMS, WordPress etc), so it's just amusing to me that it's gone full circle.
I have migrated most of the content across, but you might notice some things are still under construction, or behaving oddly. I'll just be slowly working on things as I have time ^_^
Well, it’s been a while
For many years, KawaiiHannah.com has been my personal playground – for both art and code. The last few years have been mostly hands-off for me. When I started this site, I was a teenager and now I’m in my early thirties and have all the fun adult responsibilities that come with that XD I’ve been trying to reconnect with the mindset I had back then, where I wanted to make silly mini-games, or create random generators, alongside pixel art and anime-styled art. I really enjoyed making things then and still do now!
The Love of Reading
I rediscovered my love of novels in early December last year (lol, 3 months ago; HOW IS IT FEBRUARY ALREADY?). It was many years before that when I actually sat down to read books. Most of my reading is articles on the internet for work purposes.
So anyway, I discovered a book by Matthew Reilly and was instantly hooked. After devouring The Seven Ancient Wonders in a couple of days, I set about searching for more (and have now also read Contest, The Four Ancient Kingdoms, Troll Mountain, Scarecrow and The Great Zoo of China). In the last three months, I’ve read more novels than I’ve read in the last 3 years XD
Rainy Days
Today is one of those beautifully calm, rainy days. I love days like this.
The kind of day where you can pull your blankets aaaall the way up and feel the silky sheets against your feet. I can hear the soft patter of raindrops on the roof. Perfect weather for a hot cup of tea. Even though it’s February. In Brisbane.
I’ve got today off work! So you know, I’m sitting at my computer, coding away as usual. Wait, I’m off work today. Lol. Something something, if you enjoy your work, you never work a day in your life.
Was going to do some inline-skating practice, but the weather isn’t right for it. Coding it is!
In case you’ve been wondering where I’ve been, try my Instagram. Actually, I haven’t posted anything new on there in about a month or two. Had a few life changes again and took a break to refocus ^_^
New Website
Got my new website up and running! Took longer to deploy that I expected, because of a number of events that transpired after I posted my last update. But it’s finally up.
I think I’ve built (and rebuilt) my website about 6 times in the last few years. I attempted a rebuild every Christmas break XD But then worked out a better way of handling the data and templating, so scrapped it and started again.
This new version works on WordPress, which is the CMS I’ve been working with for the last few years at the digital agency I work at. Back in late 2013, I decided to go back to work full time to support my family. We moved up to Brisbane (about 20 hours of driving away from Melbourne XP) in early 2014 and I’m still living and working here now.
New Website Coming Soon
It’s been a few years! A lot has happened over the past four years and I had to go on an unannounced hiatus. For the past little while I’ve been working on porting my website over to WordPress and it’s nearly complete.
This new one is responsive, so it’ll work better on smartphones etc.
One of the things I am facing though, is that I need to take the plushie maker down for maintenance, because it will need to be rebuilt to suit the new system. So please consider this notice that it will be down for a while shortly!
There are several things that I’ve always wanted to do with it, but haven’t been able to in the past, so I’m hoping to do a bit more this time, including making it responsive so it works on phones.
Once the new website is up, I’ll post some more information about what’s happened etc over the last few years.
Hoping to have the new website up sometime in the next couple of weeks!
Plushie Maker Update
So I finally got some time to make some updates to the plushie maker! I did a few interface updates about a week ago, to make it easier to change the colours.
I’ve had to rearrange some of the items and tabs, because some tabs had lots of content and others were…less so. You can find more information on some of the features on the Maker Help page.
Here’s some of the new items!
Some items have also been moved to different “layers” – for example, you can now wear a hat and the goggles. Or two head-bows, just for the sake of it <w< The sheep skin has been split in two, so you can have a wool hood, or a wool dress, or both ^^
All tails now have a ribbon extra and all ears have an earrings extra too.
Oh and lastly, I added a page to find previous plushies – it only works for plushies made since July 1st. It works based on IP address, so if you make a plushie at a different location, it won’t show up on that page.
Dragon University
Finally managed to finish off a picture that I started in March! I really enjoyed working on it, because it’s a theme I enjoy and it had some challenging aspects with the perspective etc. It’s not perfect, but I’ve learned a lot anyway ^^
Been a while since my last update, but I’ve been busy with work and the usual daily routine XD
Finally managed to finish off a picture that I started in March! I really enjoyed working on it, because it’s a theme I enjoy and it had some challenging aspects with the perspective etc. It’s not perfect, but I’ve learned a lot anyway ^^
Knowing my schedule at the moment, I’ll probably disappear again for a bit. Buuut I’m hoping to organise the screenshots for Dragon University, so I can put together a walkthrough. And then to finish off some of the other pieces I have for my site.
Totoro WIP Animation
Made a gif compilation of the steps I saved while I was working on this. Because it was such a big piece, I didn’t want to screw it up without the ability to back out XD I kept changing my mind about the colours and added a final colour adjustment at the end to better fit the atmosphere <_<
Also, I think I forgot to post an update when I did a bunch of new plushie items at the beginning of this month, so if you haven’t looked at it since then, there should be more in there XD
Been busy with work again, so updates probably won’t be that frequent D: But I’ll try to get things done in between.