On So You Think You Can Dance, Tyce choreographed a beautiful dance portraying someone battling breast cancer. It touched many members of the audience and moved the judging panel to tears. Melissa and Ade did a wonderful job with the piece and I don’t think it could have been danced better by anyone else. Nigel went as far to say that he would be surprised if this didn’t get an Emmy nomination next year.

…wow…for anyone who loves dance and/or has been touched by cancer in some way, this is quite emotional.

My HD 238 headphones have arrived and they are very much awesome! The sound is crystal clear, bass is fantastic and overall I am very impressed. They are extremely comfortable to wear as well, I’m yet to get sore ears unlike the over the ear XFX headphones I have for my computer. The only con, given they are over the ear they can emit sound around you so unless you want stares from people, don’t have the volume too loud. They’re also not noise canceling by design so they won’t perform well in noisy situations, if this is important to you, buy noise canceling headphones or in the ear ones.

They are also quite small framed which is good. I think large headphones look silly and these don’t given you an odd appearance.

I’ve recently become fascinated with the simplicity of Chibi characters (AKA super-deformed). The characters take the form of small people or are child like in appearance and are often portrayed as cute and humorous and reveal enormous emotion. The height of a Chibi is typically a 1:3 or 1:2 head to body ratio where as manga characters can be 1:8 head to body ratio.

Other important characteristics are the eyes which should be large and most Chibi’s don’t have noses. It’s important to keep it simple and use as few lines as possible to portray the character, Chibi’s are not meant to be as detailed as Manga.

Woot! Purchased a pair of HD 238 headphones today from http://www.audiojunkie.com.au/, an online based audio shop out of Melbourne. $50 off the RRP price so I’m pretty happy with that given I was going to buy the next model down (228) from JB Hi-Fi for the same price.

I have a set of in ear Sennheiser headphones but I just wasn’t happy with the music quality, I like my bass and these don’t pack a punch in any way shape or form. My Apple headphones I got with my iPhone are better which is a let down. In all fairness, I only paid about $40 for them.

The HD 238′s are known to produce a good bass and lifelike sound so I’m hoping the reviews I’m reading are true! Product homepage.

After a very long absence I started playing again this weekend. I finally hit level 72 and completed Borean Tundra so I’m very happy with today’s efforts.

I’ve been trying out Manga Studio 3.0 and I must say, it is an awesome program to use. You can’t compare it with Photoshop as the two have their own purposes however one reason I moved away from Photoshop is it’s inability to render straight lines. Manga Studio applies a level of correction to line drawing to remove shaking/jerks.

Attached is my very first (incomplete) attempt at using Manga Studio and second attempt to draw manga using digital methods.

Manga Studio

Started work on a new drawing. Some lines aren’t correct so I’m going to re-do it at some point. Used my new Prismacolor pencil for this one, highlights really well.

Saw some really nice drawings being done with a black (PC935) Prismacolor pencil. It highlighted the drawing really well so went down to Deans Art in the city and grabbed one.

Prismacolor’s don’t come pre-sharpened and to my surprise with my trusty Derwent sharpener, the lead kept breaking, not once, not twice but three times before I gave up. Thinking it was a bit strange I fired up Google to find many sites on this issue, a notable one here.

So, it appears that while this brand of coloured pencil is popular, it has a terrible problem with the lead breaking. My workaround, as I am not buying a new sharpener, is to use sandpaper to shave the wood down to the lead and then lightly swivel the lead over the sharpener blade to form a point.

I also picked up another Artline pigment pen with a 0.8mm nib.

I recently purchased a pro Flickr account for my new photography hobby! My other half recently got a Nikon D90 (thanks Mr. Rudd!!) and I got his Nikon D60, though I’m starting to wish I had the 18mm-200mm lens that my other half has! I took that for a test ride on Saturday night and it takes some awesome action shots, I was quite impressed. Anyway, the D60 will do to get me started until I work out how to use the thing.

I’ve added a Flickr plugin to my site to quickly show recently added pictures and I’ve also added a tab up the top courtesy of the plugin to show my Flickr albums. Check it out and feel free to comment!

Quick sketch, probably took about 30 minutes. I’m finding that Rukia is one of the easier characters to draw. Simplistic and easy lines.