Almost over

It seems like I blinked and suddenly January was at an end. Where did the month go?
I was completely unprepared for the end of my thesis. The final analysis that the examiner wanted (I think, he was somewhat vague about it) that I spent Christmas trying to figure out and then took me a month to run was finally done (and told me nothing but never mind that...). My supervisor stopped sending me feedback for my drafts. The chair of examiners sent his approval for my changes (he didn't actually read my thesis, just the letter I wrote in response to the examiner comments). Shit, it's actually ready...when did that happen?

I spent the last day reading my thesis. I don't think I've ever read the whole thing before. I don't think I ever what to read it again. There are certainly bits in there that I am rather proud of but there are also lots of bits that sound rather lame. As for the project...bleh...
Lucky I did read it, there were a few mistakes and a lot of missing references.

Base by Lithriel

Now I'm at my parent's place, assembling the digital copy and getting everything ready for printing. We have a market tomorrow so I'm going to start printing on Monday. Then it's off to get it bound. If it goes well then I shall have the hard and digital copies submitted before I head off to a local conference on Friday. Then back to mum's to help out with another market.

Lucky I managed to finish my fairy doll before I freaked out over submission. It's for the new fairy pageant. Although I was super-pumped after Christmas to do lots of art, there's been a plenty of hot days and I haven't been doing anything. And now I have to wait a few weeks before I can finish off stuff that I started months ago.

Redraw

After taking a hiatus to work on my thesis, I've gotten back into doing some art. I still have two more chapters to finish editing (plus performing analyses that won't actually be finished in time so it looks like I'm going to have to try plan B) but I need to do something before I explode.

I've decided to revamp an old picture of mine. The original was done in 2005, before I had a tablet and PS elements. I remember being quite proud of it at the time. I redrew it in November when I was dog-sitting. I know that I'm still a long way off from being really good but I can't help being really pleased by how far I've come.

I have just spent 3 hours working on the hair. It seems that whenever I have trouble, it is usually when I come to shading the hair. I'm not so bad with dolls, though I often have to retry the shading. I just can't get the hang of digital paintings, they're just too bloody big. Another thing that I've been discovering is that I'm better at shading darker hair. So after two failed attempts at shading, I decided to go brunette. And still failed.

Finally I got my act together and managed to get it to work. It doesn't look great at the size that I want so I will have to resize the final version.

The issue with going brunette is that the thickened outer lines are no longer noticeable. Should I thicken them some more? The thick lines was one of the key features of the original picture.

And of course now I'm not happy with the skin shading. It doesn't look as good with the darker hair. I'm glad I hadn't started shading in the nose yet.

Maybe I should have left this until after the thesis is finished...

House-sitting sketches

New Year!

Just got back home. The weather has turned hot and I got bad hayfever from checking out my mum's new alpacas this morning so I am feeling very drowsy and lazy.

Here's the sketching I did over the past three days while house-sitting. I had Will Supervillains Be on the Final? on the table next to me so I flipped through it and drew a few characters. Legs are overrated.

I did take a photo of my legs but the knees looked so strange and intimidating that I told myself that I would try drawing Leah's legs later.

I would like to be able to draw more than legless females so I also tried making a windmill. But I failed. Apparently backgrounds require skill and patience. Who knew?

Christmas bounty

Summer with Kira and Rory's christmas present. It did not last long.

I just saw a lot of people online bitching that they didn't get iPads and cars for Christmas. And I felt bad that mum got me a Kindle and Jamie's 30-minute meals. I have already made a chicken pie and it is awesome (though it took me longer than 30 minutes because I hate cleaning the food processor and so chose not to use it). I do not eat salad but I actually want to try some of the salad recipes. Crazy.
Kindle is awesome too, though I have only purchased one book - Bad Science. I am trying to be good and save money, given that I'm only working casual and have this stupid thesis to edit. I did download some free books but kept finding ones that aren't available in Australia.

Boo!

My sister got me the best beanie in the world. Although it is summer, the weather right now is cool enough to justify wearing my boo beanie constantly. She also got me the graphic novel Will Supervillians be on the Final? by Naomi Novik. I love her Temeraire series and it's so bizarre reading something so different. I don't think it is the best graphic novel out there but I still liked it. And now I have to wait for both the next Temeraire and the next graphic novel.

Now I am house-sitting for the rest of the week. I did plan to work on thesis but I just want to read, sketch, and pat the dogs. And write materialistic blog posts. I should at least look at my thesis today...

Grumpy Helyn is grumpy

My life currently consists of thesis writing and feeling shitty during the day, followed by playing Wii and getting sore thumbs in the evenings. Urg.

I have had to pretty much reanalyse everything in my thesis. All so I can put add an extra decimal point to my P values. This requires increasing my permutations from 999 to 9999. I didn't hink this would be an issue but some of my runs are taking over three hours on my lappy. My poor old desktop has a heartattack. I have tried to do writing and updating tables on the desktop but I get so hot and cranky upstairs that I end up downstairs playing Zelda while waiting for my lappy to finish a run.
And I have to do new analyses too because one of my examiners hates my method. And rightly so - there are many criticisms to my statistical method and it is rather outdated. The problem is that the examiner hasn't specified what he wants. He just mentions "Bayesian approaches", which is no help because a lot of statistical methods use Bayesian analyses. I think he means using Bayesian coalescent-based statistics but I can't be too sure. The problem is the computational power required for such analyses. I did try a coalescent approach before but the power was cut two months into the run (I have no idea how many more months it would take - it probably wouldn't have been done in time). I am currently trying again on a cluster but will it be finished in a month? I can only hope...

I honestly feel more productive playing Zelda while running analyses than speding a morning reading papers only to write a single sentence. Really not looking forward to rewriting an entire chapter.
While I was somewhat lukewarm to Skyward Sword initially, the game has started to grow on me. I still don't like the sword and I still hate flying (I can't figure out why my stupid bird likes to do 180 turns while I try to fly up). I'm only past the third dungeon but so far I really like the items. Unlike the sword, I love how the items utilise the Wiimote. Bomb flowers were initially annoying - I had trouble rolling and kept blowing myself up. But that's not an issue once you get the bomb bag so it's all good. This is what I have been waiting for with the Wii. It's just a pity about the sword...
I love the design of Impa. She's so cool.