The addition of a laptop to my possessions has made the impossible, er... more possible. That's right, I should be able to start updating every once in awhile now. The laptop being wireless makes it possible for me to post pics without worrying about lag I'd normally suffer on dial-up, so I'm pretty happy about that!

Now let's see if I can finally start using this page for what it was meant for...

Oh, and while I haven't given up on being a writer, I think maybe this page isn't meant for samples. I don't have a whole lot of need for critiques, as much as I just want general opinions of completed work, so I'll save that for private activity.

Oh, and as part of my "fresh start" I'm clearing the slate on collabs. From now on, art I work on will be originated solely by me, or at the very least at the request of someone else. Collabs that start from someone else's sketch, well... that's gonna be rare. Most people work at a scale larger than I enjoy working on; projects that are too large tend to seem like I will never finish them, with few exceptions, so I've pretty much given up on working at any scale larger than 640x480 pixels.

As for *what* I will post, art will come in multiple formats. Doodles and rough images (not posting anything that has less than 2 shades of grey, and usually it will be in color) will be at least once a week provided I've had time to work on them. Everything else won't be updating at regular intervals unless I have a batch of pics to put up. If I do upload them, expect them to be more or less twice a week occurences.

Photos will be uploaded all at once provided I can find an easy way to upload multiple photos; otherwise they'll be posted once a day when I have the time to get to the library for it. Yes, that's right, I'm an amateur photographer now. In the event that anybody cares to order them, I'll look into selling prints. Though I don't really expect that, and don't know how it works yet, I could use a source of income, and I've learned I have to stop providing work I do for free all the time, or I'm going to end up a starving artist. I am told I have a good eye for composition, so I'm encouraged enough to attempt this if I actually get a real request.

Other than that, I don't have a lot to say...

Wow. It's been forever since I put anything up here, even though I've been around and browsing.

I guess it wouldn't hurt if I uploaded a few of the things I've been working on... they're really tiny, though. I'm not much for pixel art; in fact I pretty much hate doing it. But working with a decent brush on a small scale, now that's something I can get behind. I'm using the same techniques I used to make the last character design I uploaded, just I'm a bit more used to using them now; that was pretty much a first attempt.

I'm still going to do landscapes as well, I'm just working on getting the right perspective and feel. I had been attempting to learn and use someone else's graphical style for that, and I just wasn't succeeding the way I wanted to - it might be because I'm using different tools, or it might just be because I'm not that other person and therefore don't have the relevant skill, but either way I've decided I'm going to have to pursue my own style without copying others as much as possible.

It occured to me, though: most 2D artists working with real media do their work on a 1:1 scale that suits the size of the media they work on. So why shouldn't I draw at a scale appropriate for the pixel medium that still looks the way I want it? Thus I started adjusting to the style I've adopted. It works for characters only right now, but I will eventually extend it to landscapes. I just have to figure out what size is the maximum I can tolerate.

If I don't update with new work today, I'll update on Thursday or Friday.

I'm sitting classes out this semester, there wasn't a whole lot of interest, and what classes I was interested in taking were either inconvenient or not available due to lack of demand. Dammit...

Oh, and I'm still looking for a job. But that should've been pretty obvious.

I haven't spent a lot of time working on art lately, despite my claims that I would. That includes the charcoal work that I said I'd be doing after classes ended, as well as the digital/scanned-in stuff that I haven't gotten around to doing yet, and the collaboration that I promised I'd do so long ago.

Part of the reason for this is I'm studying what others do, in an attempt to reach some sort of "higher level" of art. Futility, thy name is Passion.

I also have other hobbies (music, writing, game design), which are proving to be fairly fulfilling but time-consuming as well.

And of course, having to drive someone to and from work, taking them shopping and/or doing their shopping for them, and other such activities have been eating up a lot of my free time (which isn't helping me get a job either, but I dare to say I'm still spending my time in a way that's better, on some moral level, than pushing shopping carts around all week long).

In any case, I'm lucky my current occupation as a "care-taker", as it were, allows me a relatively large amount of downtime during which I can pursue game design in text form. I have a concept for a pen and paper game I've been working on - this time a totally unique one of my own creation that is somewhat of a genre-bender - that is actually mechanically sound and feasible at the same time. Hey, maybe somebody will play it someday, instead of listen to me babble on about it! But nobody cares about that yet.

Today, I also came up with a fun story idea that will hopefully develop into a project I can justify spending time working on. It seems like a solid plan, although at the moment I only have an outline, and things often look better on paper than they do... on manuscript paper. We will see where it takes me.

So, to sum up what I've been spending my time on:
- Building decent decks in Magic: The Gathering, because apparently I still enjoy it.
- Ferrying around a sick friend, to and fro from different places, at different angles.
- Designing a pen and paper game
- Wondering if I'll ever get to play a creative role in making a video game
- Haphazardly writing one story that used to be two
- Suddenly coming up with another story idea (which is really, really cool, and seems as if it won't need to merge with another one to be a solid one)
- Trying to plan next semester's classes around the possibility of work
- Looking for a job with variable hours that I have some control over, that pays at least $8-10/hr. and has benefits at some point
- Letting my video games collect dust
- Wishing I had cable, a new piano/hookup set, and a gamepad, all for my computer
- Wishing I had a Tablet PC
- Studying old/new artwork and thinking about doing some of my own
- Being sorta bored of TV
- Wishing I had more games to play with my friends

Well that was a fairly pointless post. Hopefully I'll post something of substance soon.

Oh, and here are a few of the things I'm looking at for classes, in case anyone wants to suggest I should go for one or the other:

- Novel Writing/Fiction Writing/Science Fiction and Fantasy (pick one)
- Painting
- Another Design class, maybe
- Photography (not high on my priorities, but it would give me an excuse/method to take pictures of stuff for art references)
- Some sort of sports-oriented class that's noncompetitive (would make exercise easier, but still sucks since it'd be a group sports thing, and I'm required to take one at some point for my degree)

And I'm sort of interested in Archaeology, History, that sort of stuff, as well as maybe some more Liberal Arts stuff since that seems like a sound job option to keep the rest of my interests funded (assuming I can actually get hired somewhere, jeez!).

It's always sort of irritated me that it's so hard to get other artists (or hell, even mildly popular ones whose work is really good but underrated) to talk about how they learned their trade. It's like they just came out of nowhere, POP! and suddenly had all of their skills as finely honed as they are.

Come on, guys.

Sure, I'd like to be able to say I got as far as I have without relying on anyone else, but let's be realistic; you can only reinvent the wheel so many times before you get tired of what's wrong with your work and go learn how others worked around the same issues.

Especially in a place like this, when you see a good artist you'd like to ask a question of, you probably want to leave a comment, and then if you do actually decide to go ahead and try, you'll probably spend a lot of time afterwards hoping and praying they'll get back to you.

Unless of course you're somebody well-read (like, um, a journalist) who offers to blog about them in front of everyone - then a few of them might jump on the bandwagon and give you a lot of interesting trivial information about themselves. So, okay. But in my experience, the majority that goes along with it do it just so they can increase their own popularity, and a large majority of the rest of them refuse to do it because that's exactly what it looks like (which, while it'd be an acceptable and valid form of self-promotion, doesn't mean it's not attention-mongering), so that's really not fair either.

Bleh... anyway, I continue to mumble into the depths of the internets.

School starts in approximately 11 hours. Figure I'll have to post up something soon... I'm still working on Moonshaft's thingagummy, er... damn, for once I have to complain about the name chosen for someone else's creation. I just can't spell it. Anyway, the whole elf foresty-place scenery will be getting some attention in the next day or so. Been putting it off again; I think it's just the scale of the piece that makes it hard to finish.

Or I'm just being flippant. It happens. Hope nobody's too disappointed with me now. >_>;

Oh well. On the upside, with school starting tomorrow, I may meet some interesting new people!
Or a bunch of plain, mumbling fools who remind me of what I'd be like if my IQ were about 50 points lower. Okay, that's sort of mean, but after all, you never know who will be giving you the awkward looks when you walk into a classroom on the first day of the new semester.

Oh, and squirrels.

So here's an update with some tentative plans that will likely:
A) Fail miserably
B) Get delayed
C) Be ignored
or
D) Otherwise take more than a reasonable amount of time to see through.

First off, I wanna say I've restarted the project of coloring Moonshaft's Gwahilorn, Heiianir (the first attempt, scaled down, can be seen in my scraps). By restarted, I mean I went back to the lineart and decided I could do a much better job on it if I started from scratch. I know it's a really old project of mine, but I promised I'd get it done and I'd like to see that through. And of course, you really can't rush art, now, can ya?

Second, I've got another original landscape in the works, hopefully much better than the last - it'll be more detailed, and the quality of the workmanship overall will essentially be much higher.

Neither of these two projects will be getting posted before the end of May, as I have things coming up like school and I've been very busy trying to find a job. I also have another personal project which takes precedence over both in terms of getting it done. Needless to say it's one of those things I won't be posting up here. Such is life. But I'm not a career artist yet, so they'll be done when they're done and no sooner.

As for character concepts (which are at the moment easier for me than landscapes but still harder than writing), I'm taking a hiatus from doing them. I love the fact that at any given moment I can sketch out the form of some random character's head, but I need to study clothing a lot more before I'll really feel confident about my designs. My biggest sticking points (or so I feel) are textures and minute details, so I'll be working those issues out before I upload another one. Unless of course someone asks me to do something special for them.