The Second Mouse Digital Painting, Vin

So for my second digital mouse painting I decided to start with a drawing of a character from a book, as suggested by my brother. The book in particular is part of a trilogy by Brandon Sanderson called the Mistborn series. And the character of the books that I drew is the main protagonist heroine called Vin.

Just briefly for some context, I'll describe without going into too much fantasy detail. Our character Vin, lives in a land shrouded in mist. Some people are born with special abilities which basically lets them control metal for different functions. Vin can control all of them, people like her are called Mistborn and they propel themselves through the lands and cities by propulsion of metal. Their signature mark is their Mistborn cloaks. There, that's the easiest I can sum up the basic premise of the picture (and story)!

Anyhoo, I liked the idea of this drawing because I knew it would be more challenging than my previous digital painting. To start, it's based on a human figure, an area of art where I find myself weaker at. Second of all, the clothing and poses of the character in particular are quite elegant and ethereal as described in the books. The cloak in particular is described as ragged and long with ends like tendrils of silk metal. And third of all I was impatient to start so the drawing itself ended up quite basic in comparison to the finished product:

Original Drawing

However I went ahead and started even though I felt the drawing didn't exactly capture what I wanted. I started with the skin tones; in the original picture the moon was behind Vin but I quickly realised that that would mean I would be silhouetting her, thus leaving out detail and making the picture quite muddy:

Starting with the skin, and the moonlight has moved to the top left.

So I moved the moon to the top left corner, out of sight and decided that it would be represented with a glow. This made plotting out the colouring process much easier and allowed me to practice lighting the face and arms with greater definition. After some time I was pleased enough with the facial features, they were slightly Neanderthal but hey, it's all a learning curve for figure drawing right? Her clothing came out better than I expected with multiple layers (literally layers in Photoshop) applied until it began to look natural and have depth. However the main challenge was on the horizon, the tendrils of the cloak:

The tendrils proved a tough one!

I'd I spent 60% of the time on this digital painting making sure I managed to make these look as good as possible. In the end I didn't get the exact look I wanted but there was definition and fluidity there; I was happy with. So I took the stance of "it ain't broke, don't fix it" for fear that I may end up trying to improve things but end up making irreparable damage (and undoing all of that time I spent working on them!):

Tendrils, Check!

So with that the rest of the digital painting began to fall into place easier. The brunt of the work was figuring out the tones and colours, and then also capturing the look of the tendrils on the cloak. It proved a pain in the ass achieving primarily the second of the two, but it paid off as I was basically in the home stretch. I began filling out the legs and second arm, these proved less difficult and after the amount of time shading, erasing and altering the cloak, the legs and arm were naturally much easier to do. After another short amount of time I had them set in place and only came back to them to make minor shading adjustments:

All in place, this gurl need her hair done!

So with that, the only final piece in this character painting was doing her hair. This proved once again a little more difficult as I had opted to go with black hair. This meant harder shading in relation to the light and it was also an effect in digital painting I hadn't encountered yet. After a brief tutorial and setting up the right "brush" for the job I managed to capture a look I liked trying to make it appear as natural as possible. I don't think the final look of the hair is perfect by any means, there's certainly a lot of problems with it but I was pleased with my first effort.

As with my previous painting (I had finished the central character/subject of the picture), all that was left was the background. And as with the previous digital painting I opted to change to a more simple background than was initially planned. In the original drawing I quickly scribbled in some buildings rising out of the mist as the character is primarily based in a city in the books. However I decided that I didn't have the knowhow or time to starting painting buildings digitally (yet!) so I took a more simple ethereal approach: mist! With that said and done, I wanted to make it swirl downwards and have it enveloping the world below Vin, like it had a life of its own. It clings on to Vin as she launches above it and you can see some lights glowing on the land far below.

In the end I think the effect I wanted to give this picture was the character blissfully breaking away into the freedom of the moonlight from her misty world below, almost as if it is soothing her and letting all her worries drift away. The final picture I think is an improvement on my skills from the previous Water Dragon picture. And while I can certainly see a multitude of problems such as disproportionate parts of Vin, not entirely natural posing and some odd shading/lighting (amongst a multitude of other things), I'm very happy with the final result. One problem I plan to rectify in my next panting is to make it less soft. It wasn't intended in this picture but thankfully it sort of lends itself to the atmosphere, I think!

Vin, Mistborn - Final Picture

So that's number two in the bag and another for the portfolio. If you've read this far I'd also like to say that if you ever need help with something along this line of work I'd be happy to lend a hand. For my next painting it will be a Game of Thrones picture, fan fiction of Danaerys and Drogon, and don't worry it won't be spoilerish. It will be an entirely made up scenario! And if you've made it THIS far into the blog, thank you for taking your time to read about my adventures in digital painting!

Until next time, CAOI BEETCHES!

My First Foray into the World of Digital Painting

So in the last few months I decided to embrace some of my very few talents. As of lately I've taken up painting again. I'll post the two I have done in a later post but more recently again I've also decided to enter the realm of Digital Painting. I had always been daunted by this medium as there is such lavishly detailed pictures floating around the net, each with unique, colourful and wonderful styles that I felt I could never achieve such a sense of detail and awe so many of them inspire. That and I only have a meagre mouse instead of a tablet.

But I decided against my pessimism and pushed forward to give it a try! After a few brief tutorials on colour theory and which software proved popular for this sort of endeavour I picked out an old picture I drew in my transition year of secondary school:

-Transition Year Drawing

So with Photoshop in tow, I began to colour in the drawing, using all the techniques I had obtained from previous tutorials. In the beginning I wasn't very pleased with the early results. Without the drawing overlaid, the colours underneath had very little shape or form, appeared blunt and didn't have any sense of the detail the drawing did.

- Phase 1: The nearly giving up phase.

Around this time is usually where my old self would have given up. I don't know where I developed it but over the years I had a bad habit of expecting immediate results and submitting to defeat too easily. And I nearly did here too. But I pressed on. And on, and on. And then something wonderful happened. I was learning to use tools of the program outside of the tutorials, I was losing track of time and most of all I was enjoying it. And when you spend enough time doing the things you enjoy it becomes a labour of love with results that could possibly exceed what you initially planned. Such was my luck in this case. I learnt the virtue of patience all over again and it was paying off:

- Phase 2: Wait, what? This is sort of cool!

At this stage I was enormously pleased with myself. I was liking the look more than the original drawing and I had learnt vast amounts about digital painting. All because I actually had patience and took the time to do it. The funny thing is that, apart from having to draw the subject at hand, the colouring part is not that difficult once you get the theory down and have a bit of knowhow about light and shadow. And even in those regards I'm a beginner at best. But with Photoshop you have all the tools you could need to perfect and fine tune things right down to a small shadow, coarse skin or whatever effect you're trying to achieve. It just takes patience and time!

In the end the final product didn't stick exactly to the original picture plan. I altered the background slightly as I DID spend probably around 6-8 hours colour the picture over the course of time. I felt that I could do a quick fix for the background. But funnily enough the background which honestly took about 15-20 mins max ended up blending well with the picture. I feel like I should take credit for achieving the look of it, but honestly it was literally down to another thing I learnt with my first digital painting. Experimentation. By pure blind luck of testing the use of a few tools of Photoshop I stumbled across a background that is simply but compliments the "Water Dragon" I had created. The end result was this:

- Final Digital Painting "Water Dragon"

Simple background, all from messing about. Mind you that won't always provide results, but now I know how to get THAT result if I ever intend to use it again! In the end I think I can say I pulled off a good first digital painting. Of course, I wanted to show it off and have since been recommended to get  a tablet for drawing, which I do believe could greatly improve the time I spend on each one. Overall though the sense of achievement was something I haven't felt in a while and I hope this is the first of many I plan to post in the future.

So to close, for anyone who is intimidated about learning to digital paint, don't be. Like all things it takes time but you'll be surprised about how quick you can adapt. Get Photoshop or Corel, scan in your images and starting painting, you'll enjoy it, you'll get really pissed off and you'll be proud!

************

And here's a little sneak peak of the next one for anyone interested. It's based off a character called Vin from a book called the Mistborn trilogy. You may have to look her up to get the context of the picture but I'm hoping it will look cool none the less in the end, even for those who have no idea what the hell is going on in the picture:

The Bed, the Brain and the ASMR

I usually hate going to bed. Not because I hate sleeping, I happen to love sleeping and love it more when I can. But the problem is, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who faces this, is that instead of my brain winding down when I hop into my cosy bed, it kicks into FTL overdrive sending my thoughts cascading and colliding across the synaptic universe.

 

Sometimes I really hate you...

While I do enjoy having these sudden spurts of thoughts, ideas and I-shoulda-dun-that's, by a purely time based event...it's not very ideal. I'm a bit of a light sleeper so I have fairly broken sleeps during the night as it is, but for some reason my brain decides to wake up when I want to do the exact opposite. The result is taking an hour if not hours to fall asleep.


To try and remedy this scum-bag brain inconvenience I threw myself into the Google search engine once again, it never failed me before I'd be damned if it failed me now! Of course I tried all the usual results, lavender, reading, breathing exercises, soothing music and what not. Lavender would probably work nothing short of me snorting it, which wouldn't be good for my hay-fever allergies for sure and unfortunately all the other proposed solutions don't work as intended.

See, my brain functions in a way that if I'm thinking about breathing it brings a scene to mind (don't ask what kind of scene...), not from anything in particular but I'll instantly begin making a short film in my head and then the thoughts start firing up again preparing myself for productivity I just don't have the energy for. Reading... well if breathing makes me think up a film you can't IMAGINE what reading does, the same goes for music too. They're all variations of the same problem, my over active imagination. To boot, I'm trying to come up with ideas for a horror short lately and inadvertently thinking scary things does not help one sleep!

I can be ASMR if you want me to be baby

But then I came across something interesting. It's a little thing called ASMR which stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. I'm pretty sure it's not something that people are widely aware of, but I think it's something we've all experienced. Say for example, someone with a soft voice; hypnotic and sleep inducing, it produces an oddly pleasurable and relaxing sensation that could make you drift off into pink and fluffy slumber-land, or a world full of obedient Velociraptors in my case. I won't give the Wikipedia explanation because it almost makes it sound like a pseudo-sexual cult since a lot of it involves role-playing, soft speaking and an overuse of the word "pleasurable".

Jokes aside, It's not only voices either that trigger it either, there's a lot of research gone into what causes this sensation but no one is quite sure from what I gathered since the experience is an inner emotion. It's different for everyone but it can be trigged by things as simple as someone folding a newspaper as they read, a person typing details on a keyboard or someone writing into a notebook with a scratchy pen. Naturally I was quite delighted that I found out the name of my mystery sensation so with a sure fire definition of it at hand I approached YouTube in a semi-sane state of exhaustion.

To my surprise, there is a very large community of "ASMR's" across YouTube. It has to be one of the more interesting sub categories to find as well. I won't lie, when you watch any of these videos for the first time, you'll most likely feel a little silly. More so because you're watching people role-playing, tapping, writing, typing for up to an hours' worth of video and they have no discernible meaning outside of the function of ASMR. Then the weird second reality hits you. Who the hell sits down and makes these? I won't lie, at the beginning I was wielding my sword of judgement; these people are weird and have no friends. But then I realised that I'm the one looking these people up and their videos are helping me sleep so who am I to judge? I'm also giant f'#@king weirdo all the time!

I'll give you all the ASMR you can DREAM of!!! (pun intended)

There's no denying though that there is definitely a large majority of this community that is eccentric and I don't think they would fit into the conformities of the social "norm" (whatever the frak that is, but you get mah point!). But hey, as I said, who am I to judge? These people are still spending their time making these videos and judging by the length some of them put enormous amounts of time into them. People will always make fun, as I have seen in the comments section before but honestly, they're the YouTuber's who deserve a lot of respect. It's not easy to post videos of yourself like that, let alone that a lot of them tell deeply personal stories about themselves. They're also a very supportive community as well, I don't think I have ever once seen a spat between any of them, which is a lot better than the stuff I can say about other sub categories of YouTube I've come across. Also the abusive people who came about them I call "closet-ASMR's", kinda self explanatory, you don't come across these videos on a whim!

Anyways, once I found a niche one to my tastes it has now changed the way I sleep. When you find your ASMR trigger there will be a WEALTH of videos for you to choose from. And trust me, even though it was weird at first, these things work like a charm. As it turns out, people just whispering or speaking softly does the job for me. Preferably I like when they ramble about their lives, it becomes enjoyable like listening to a strange tranquillising radio. Often you just drift off without even realising it. So try it out, give it a go! If you're having trouble sleeping I think you'll very quickly find something that is your ASMR trigger and hopefully that will be the last time you'll ever have to search for sleep rememdies!

SWEET DREAMS, PEACE OUT Biatchs!

Am I Insane?

The answer to the title is no, I am not. But I am doing a thing called Insanity at the moment which is a 60 day fitness programme by a man called Shaun T. who definitely thinks it's "insane" (his own words).

Basically my partner told me about a little thing called Insanity which apparently maaaaany people knew about except me, but sure unless it was advertised somehow in the middle of a game of Metroid, how was I sposed to know about it right? As mentioned before, it's a 60 day fitness programme which is spread across 9 weeks in which you do a roughly hour long workout for 6 days of the week, Sunday being your rest day. It's core muscle training and cardio mixed gruellingly into one horrific package of exercise.

I will admit, it is tough, very tough. It's even more tough when it's apparently recommended for people who are in the fitness range considered "athlete" and when you are trying to work around your busy schedule, which Shaun T. seems to have no problem not taking it into consideration. Athlete is not a category I fall into and I had literally just quit smoking so my lung capacity certainly hadn't (and most likely still hasn't) returned to normal.

But my high strung life of customer service and mediocre diet wasn't doing my body the justice I thought it deserved so I took the plunge into fitness madness and began my march to "having the beach body I've ALWAYS dreamed of!".

And then I could hang out with hot blonde people being hot all day long and never worry about life again!

The first week was painful. I could barely finish the warm-up which lasted a meagre 12 mins of the usual 45 mins workout. And the worst part was, every time I finished that warm-up I knew that that was the EASY part. Being the trooper I was, I forced my fledging spirit forward with ultimate reluctance until my muscles practically sizzled like bacon. That was after 3 mins extra, still 30 mins to go. UGH!

This was basically the whole first week in a nutshell, I stopped consistently throughout the workouts to catch my breath, took non-recommended prolonged breaks during the different workouts and very quickly became bitter towards Shaun T. and his workout entourage. They were all too positive and happy for how I felt. I also recycled my workout outfit since it would be a waste of electricity to wash it everyday so I was becoming stinkier, like some weird smell RPG game, where I levelled up my stinky stat. everyday. To top it off you feel more and more stiff each day, walking in a crippling horrifying gait. It was just...awful.

But then rest day arrived. That glorious Sunday, I will never forget it. It was one of those days when you would wake up and say "fuck my life!" without actually meaning it. It was great, I could be stiff all I wanted and not have the face the 45 mins smugness of Shaun T and his entourage of finely toned superhuman smiles. It was a good day. Until Monday arrived, or so I thought it would be bad. But something strange happened, I was no longer stiff to my bones, I could move freely without having to make sure I didn't look like I was mocking someone with a physical ailment. I was... normal again.

This was too good to be true though, I thought, as I begun my dramatic descent into Insanity workout bitterness. But lo and behold, I made it through without exhaustion, but without stopping, and without any creeping stiffness either. Something was happening to me. I was seeing... RESULTS! That's right, after even just a week I was surprisingly already feeling the results of this Insanity programme and for this alone I could recommend it to anyone.

These results continued into the forthcoming weeks with surprising speed as I got much better at the workouts, I was even beginning to see small changes in my stinky body, I was pleased. But something else was happening that was not so good, I was running out of patience. Not for the exercise, but with Shaun T. and his entourage. I know it's a series of exercise videos made to appeal to everyone with motivational slurs, "dig deeper" being the main one, but my god, the smugness became all too apparent.

The Queen of smug: Tanya, Tonya, Tania (there was no one correct spelling for her name apparently)

As I got to know each person individually from the different workout videos I could almost close my eyes and identify who it was by level of smug shooting out of my screen. Tanya is amazing but what I wouldn't give to switch kick her smug face in some of the videos (although if I did that I would be breaking my laptop screen). Shaun T. also has this awful habit of making you dread the next workout as he says "this is about to get insane, I'm not looking forward to this" non stop. How are you supposed to look forward to doing it when your instructor is telling you how much he hates it?!

I'm actually still not finished the workout programme yet, I'm currently on week 7 out of 9 and the second half of the workout programme ups the ante. They're now 55-63 mins workouts and have severely increased the intensity of the actual workout forms. This is not a problem to me. I actually enjoy the increased intensity because I feel like I'm getting more results. Unfortunately the smugness has also increased three fold. It's making the workouts just about bearable at this stage and I honestly have found myself saying "oh my god shut-the-f@#k-up!" out loud at the screen (much to my other housemates' confusions). Tanya smiles and acts like it's simple, mockingly staring out of the camera at you. I've seen you when you think you're not on the camera, I know you're slinking off for a 5 min date with your water. And Shaun T., while always super positive, matter of factly brags about how good he looks. He does look good though. BUT STILL! It becomes annoying beyond patience. Hence the screaming at my screen.

"SHUT UP SHAUN T. JUST SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!!!!"

Anyways, as it stands now, that is where I am with this Insanity workout. I'm going insane with it for all the wrong reasons, but even with the atomic powered SMUG  I think I can still recommend it even without having finished it. I don't think I've ever been as in shape, built muscle so easily and quickly and genuinely felt as energetic as after doing these workouts for the past 6 and a half weeks. If you wanna get in shape fast and genuinely get fit, this is definitely the way to go if not just a good starting point. Also if you have some sort of anti-smug dwarvish armour than I believe you could really enjoy this as well, it's pretty rewarding and satisfying. In the end, I believe it will be worth it as the expense of some of my sanity. As Shaun T. would say "dig deeper". Whatever the f#@k that means. (I know what he means but it's stupid)

Pacific Rim - I Heart Destruction

So my house mate and I decided that the best cure for our hangovers was a trip to the cinema. In the state of hangovers, the easiest thing to follow is a good ol' big dumb action film, something to excite the brain without having to think about why.

That's what helped us to decide that Pacific Rim fit the bill.

Don't let my comments make you think this is a start to a rant about how bad the film is. In fact, I actually enjoyed it. A lot. There's a lot of reasons people could easily point out why this movie is bad or dumb, but in my opinion I think the film deserves a free pass, since it embraces these "dumb" elements for the fun ride it takes us on. That's not to say that these "bad" elements are necessarily always a fun thing though, every action movie usually has a good ol' cob of corn thrown in for hell knows why. Pacific Rim unfortunately plants a field of corn and then tries to serve it to you. All of it.

That aside, these things are just there to drive the simple story along. Giant monsters named "Kaiju" have come from a spatial tear at the bottom of the Pacific ocean. They are huge (seriously, they're enormous) and they're here to destroy everything. This of course forces the world to stop fighting with each other and work together, which results in building giant robots to fight them and blah blah blah... The story is nothing special, same ol' apocalypse story that is just slightly more fleshed out then the usual tripe. The more unique story elements in the film is the idea of "drifting" which is joining two minds so to operate the films giant robots, which means the operators know everything about their co-operators lives for the time they are driving the machines, but unfortunately it is used to little effect. But that's fine, because given the tone of the film, Mr. Del Toro wasn't giving us a thoughtful exercise on the intricacies of the human mind.

 Kaiju, the stars of the film.

The film basically picks up year after the first encounters and the situation is becoming more and more dire as the Kaiju appearance becomes more frequent. That in combination with them getting larger and more deadly.
Our main hero is basically an every action hero cliché with a traumatic past which becomes a central struggle for him to overcome (by fighting giant monsters in a giant robot). Then there's a slew of others who are there too. Honestly I cared little for all of the characters as they were all literally there to fit the respective roles required in the action hero roster. The only stand-out mention was a fun cameo from Ron Perlman as a black market dealer and a much less, but slightly touching story, involving the lead lady characters' motivation and past. Apart from that, there's little emotion derived from relating to the characters in the film.

Now, that's pretty much the bad stuff out of the way, I'll get on to the good stuff which happens to be really good. The real stars of the film here are the Kaiju. They're animated and designed wonderfully with tonnes of character for giant monsters. They are also pretty terrifying in their own right. The films many action sequences show shots of them lunging through buildings towards the camera and you can't help but feel the sheer terror of a skyscraper sized creature barrelling through a city towards you. This combined with giant robots, called Jaegers, fighting them makes for some sizeable spectacle and action sequences.

Indeed it is here the film elevates itself most, the creative team behind this clearly had more than fun choreographing and plotting the directions and developments of each battle. The spectacle of it all is off the charts, the Jaegers are all unique with their own silly but hilariously destructive and fun weapons, the Kaiju are all different and each match different purposes for the destruction they wreak and then to top it off the bigger action scenes makes for some crazy city wide fun destruction (using a cargo ship as a baseball bat was a hilarious stroke of genius). You can easily spot out all of the plot holes and logic holes of these sequences as you watch, e.g. Why would you not try to lure a gigantic monster out of a city before pummelling it to bits so as to save the destruction of a city? Why pummel them with giant metallic fists when they clearly have weapons which do much more catastrophic damage to these creatures? But these are questions that you can easily ignore because it's just too damn fun to care about them, in particular an action sequence about two thirds into the film makes the price of your ticket worth it alone. These are also elevated by a simple but great score that gives some life to the "horn of doom" which has become abused consistently since Inception.

The Jaegers, the giant fighting robots of the film

 The film is a little over-long at about 2 hours and 10 mins, but thankfully the action sequences are frequent enough that they break up the mindless story and cardboard characters. What you're here mainly to see is the monsters and robots and that's it. Some people have also complained that it is basically a mish-mash of other big action films; transformers, cloverfield, godzilla. And I agree, but I don't see it as a problem. I see it more as a respectable love letter to these franchises and it does do some things much better than the more recent iterations of these franchises too.

Overall the film in a whole is just a big loud dumb but really fun action movie, with sprinkles of genius and truckloads of destruction and action welded together into a pretty cohesive machine. It's definitely elevated by the great creature design, creative action sequences (and you'll probably say "wow" to one or two of them) and Del Toro's obvious visual flare. Go see it in the cinema, it's what big screens are made for.

One To Watch - Avatar The Last Airbender: Legend of Ang

So I recently had the privilege of finishing a show that I consider to be one of my favourites. You may have heard of it since it apparently was (and rightly so) wildly popular back upon it's initial release. It's a little Nickelodeon show called Avatar The Last Airbender: Legend of Ang. I know I heard of it back in the day, but it wasn't something that caught my attention initially, as I had the naive perspective of kids channel = kids programming. This is even true to a certain degree within the show (all deaths are merely mentioned off screen, certain situations are implied instead of shown), this show still managed to maintain an amazing balance of being a energetic fun show for children while also being a rewarding and thoughtful show for adults to digest.

"Sokka, Katara, Ang and the rest of the gang"

The show does come with the usual tropes and themes of an epic fantasy; a world at war, fire is bad, water is good, magical elements, coming of age, finding ones' destiny, life/death, etc. But while that's all the typical ingredients to a show, it's really how you execute these themes and story lines that makes them stand tall and fresh in their own right.

The show manages to combine a blend of western and Japanese animation while strongly drawing from oriental influences and stories to give a surprisingly rich and detailed world for a children's programme. While having an interesting and well populated world is all good and that, where the show really shines is in its characters. Everyone from Ang, Katara, Sokka to Iroh, Zuko and Azula, all have interesting back stories, believable arcs (in the context of the show) and intriguing perspectives on their destinies. Indeed one of the most fascinating characters to watch throughout the course of the three seasons is the evolution of Prince Zuko. Without spoiling anything, he becomes one of the most fascinating characters to watch because while the tried and true themes of destiny and choice are woven through his character arc, the writers really always nail his emotional consequences and ordeals. He's a tragic character that is a product of his upbringing which the writers use to propel the show to dizzying emotional heights.

"Prince Zuko, The Firebender"

In fact, this is one of the prime reasons I was so impressed with the show. The writers never, and I mean NEVER forget what has come before each episode in the show. They consistently build upon it's foundations from the beginning and never let each character forget the choices they have made and it's extremely satisfying to watch these choices shape each character in the show. Too often with any TV programme that follows a serial storyline, the writers are willing to just drop previous choices or plots to bring a new dramatic arc for the sake of providing a new energy, but not here. Here, every story is seen through to the end, never even forgetting characters or plots from standalone episodes. All I can say is it is an impressive feat.

And while it is a kids show at heart, avoiding on screen death (which is actually something that becomes a central plot point towards the end), the show certainly has its darker moments which the writers aren't afraid to insert, particularly when a nasty spirit called Koh makes an appearance. I won't spoil him for you but I was fairly shocked that he was allowed to be written in, considering his appearance, nature and story. The other end of the darker spectrum comes in the form of the character Azula. She adds an intensity to the show that is savage and violent, really upping the ante when she makes her appearance. She also has a particularly morbid and scary climax to her arc I won't say any more about.

"Water, Fire, Earth and Wind, the four elements that shape the world of Avatar The Last Airbender"

To top it all off the show has a wonderful sense of humour. It combines a slapstick childish humour with more outlandish and bizarre jokes to give it a truly unique energy that I'm not quite sure I've seen in other programmes. This in combination with the animation, which still holds up well by today's standards, helps Avatar The Last Airbender stand that much taller among the usual crowd of children's programming. In fact the animation is extremely detailed and accurate to martial arts fighting styles during many of the shows' intense action sequences; you will be impressed by some of the pivotal action scenes sprinkled through the seasons.

I don't think I could go into much more detail about the show without spoiling it for you, all I can say is watch a few episodes, let yourself become absorbed into the show and enjoy the ride, it's a great and emotionally fulfilling one and if you enjoy animation, this is one not to be missed!

Sound off in the comments below if you have seen it and would like to discuss!

Vlog Entry 7 - Why I Hate HP

Well at long months last I've gotten back to doing another Vlog on my NEWWWww Dell Laptop! Horrraaay!

Check it out ya'll, I have a special little advert at the end for HP, surely they'll love me for it...