When I first joined Tumblr, I thought it was just another blog service. It wasn’t until two months ago when I realized that this is just an image playground. I need more than “likes” and “re-blogs” for the type of interaction I’m going for.
I’ll still hang around. Tumblr has got to be the most abundant (albeit unorganized) art and fashion resource I’ve ever seen, but you can find my new posts at
I am thoroughly pleased with this image. The skin and face was rendered almost exactly as I wanted, and I was able to capture power and arrogance in the pose. (Which are two themes that I haven’t been able to illustrate properly before.)
I did spend way longer painting this than I had planned, about six and a half hours total, but I’m really glad I did. I’ve improved, and I have visual confirmation of my progress. It’s an amazing feeling.
I admit, I’m having a lot of trouble with hair. I’m considering buying a pack of ribbons and sketching/painting them over and over again as a hair exercise.
Anyways, here is a side-by-side comparison of the work-in-progress. I’ll try to show more of these WIPs. I love analyzing the choices I’ve made, especially when it comes to art.
(EDIT: Couldn’t help it. The hair and some of the highlights were driving me nuts. Tweaked the image a little more. Okay, now I’m thoroughly pleased.)
I told myself I’d spend less time on today’s drawing. Instead, I spent twice as much time on it, about four hours total. And half that time was spent staring at a frozen Photoshop. I need to replace my antivirus. Photoshop never froze before installing Norton.
(EDIT: So I realized why I hated the original drawing so much. I made the eyes too small and I was too sleep-deprived to notice it. Okay, I don’t hate you so much anymore.)
There’s something to thumbnails that I can’t quite put my finger on. I’m trying (and failing) to create good images that also look great as thumbnails. There’s something gratifying about a picture that looks good no matter how you view it. Maybe it has to do with bold values. I’ll figure it out later.
The pressure of GDC is around the corner, so I’m doing these black and white studies to calm my nerves. I spent about two and a half hours on this one. It was fun slapping textures on it to give it more character.
So anyways, my dreams are starting to freak me out. When I was a child, I used to have nightmares. All the time. Then for almost ten years, I had sleep paralysis. Now, I’m experiencing two different things.
Lately, I’ve been hearing music in my sleep that I’ve never heard before. I wake up humming a song that doesn’t exist and that makes me paranoid. I knew you could dream all sorts of things, but never knew sounds and music was one of them. Even scarier, a couple of hours ago, I woke up with vivid memories of events that never happened. My memory is bad as it is. Way to make it worse by putting fake memories into my head.
I probably need to stop chugging all this fucking coffee.
This was kinda fun. I spent about ten minutes sketching and the rest of the hour tweaking and messing with values.
I even told myself, “If you don’t finish sketching this image in ten minutes, someone’s going to cut your head off,” which is something I never do. So it was kind of exciting and terrifying to rush myself like that.
Though for some reason, I thought I could do more in an hour. I guess I should’ve told myself that my heart would explode if I didn’t have full color and a completed image in an hour. Maybe I’ll do that next time.
I spent the past few days hating myself when I stumbled upon some old 3D models that I did in grad school. And here I was thinking I was completely worthless. These are actually really cool! Way cooler than I remember.
I remember spending so much time trying to get the robot to look perfect that I never got around to texturing it properly.
A high res 3D model of my old cell phone. I tried to get it portfolio-ready a few months after working on it and the 3ds Max file (and all of its backups) were corrupt. Go fig.
And finally, a toilet. This render is the remnants of another corrupted file. I’m not quite sure why 3ds Max hates me so much. But speaking of hatred towards me,
So by my count, I’m hated by strangers in videogames, I’m hated by 3D modeling programs, and I hate myself. I guess I can live with that.
So my Tumblr got hacked. I am so sorry for the spam. If you clicked on any links (for free iPods, pharmaceuticals, and other stupid shit), you should probably go scan your computer and change your Tumblr password. If I sent you any messages, you can safely delete/ignore them.
At least I know where it came from. I was checking out some artist on Blogspot yesterday and magic browser windows started appearing and downloading kool stuff onto my computer. Hey, thanks for the free software, magic windows! But I’m good for now!
I’d also like to thank Norton Antivirus for hogging so much of my computer’s resources, yet being completely worthless against this attack. When will they finish writing NoScript for Chrome so I don’t have to deal with this crap anymore? Don’t get me started about using Firefox, I will end you.
(EDIT: Found the culprit. Now, I’m only partly angry at Norton for hogging all my resources. So I visited two hacked blogs on the same day. Pretty good odds.)
Back in the Fall, I started my “Image a Day” project as a desperate attempt to be productive again. It died a few times and I resurrected it a few times. But now I’m going to slay it for good.
The main reason I wasn’t getting anything done was because I was depressed and I dealt with it by drowning myself in games. For the most part, I kicked that addiction to the curb.
I did play for a couple of minutes of TF2 yesterday.
But I got my eye on the clock. Limitation could be the key to my success. I’ve also turned my book of nonsensical sketches and rambling into a productivity log and an organized to-do list. I log everything productive and unproductive that I do each day and I grade myself based on those activities.
As awful as it sounds, I find it very meditative to analyze my day, and so far (the past three weeks) it’s kept me in check. The book actually reminds me of a quest log from a videogame. I love it.
Time to get back to work.
I’ve been (kinda) busy the past couple of days. Tried out a jiujitsu class which was great. Not as much conditioning as I’d like, but it was a traditional school and a good learning environment. It’s too bad my neck and lower back hurts now, and I probably won’t go back anytime soon because I can’t afford it.
I also started painting again. It started off awesome, everything going according to plan. I was even painting way faster than I ever have before. Then old habits started kicking in. Without even realizing it, I overworked the face, completely covering the underpainting. I panicked and scrubbed away at parts of the skin with mineral spirits. My roommate asked me, “Is that a zombie?” Yeah, it might as well be.
A local band, Les Rav, is holding an art contest. So I decided to do a piece of art for it because I thought it would be fun. I started off with pencil and paper (on the back of the jiujitsu school’s contract agreement, lol). I sketched a girl squatting. I was planning on having birds exploding out of her spine while she was looking at a flower or trinket or something like that.
The sketch on paper looked great. But after scanning it, I can’t get over how weird the image looks. It looks like she’s trying to pleasure a ghost while performing a bowel movement, but she pushed so hard that birds flew out of her back. And the whole situation either bores or worries her.
(FYI, don’t type “squatting” or “girl squatting” in Google Images. You’ll get things you can’t unsee, even with SafeSearch on.)
So I tried again. I imagined a girl standing peacefully with an x-ray of her spine showing as birds flew out of the front and back of her chest. I was fairly happy with the piece thus far. I was thinking of raising her arms up like she was conducting some kind of bird orchestra. I used Meet the Medic doves as placeholder for my doves and I used an image of a spinal cord I found on some medical site.
But before replacing the placeholder images with my own sketches, I re-read the art concept. “A girl (no age specification) hunching over with her spine coming out.” DAMN IT. So that’s why I drew that silly squatting image in the first place. Back to the drawing board.
Today was fun, watching both the passionate and the ignorant rant about Wikipedia, Google, SOPA, and PIPA.
I was going to paint today with actual oils and other traditional materials, but I chickened out. I stared at a blank canvas for half an hour and was scared of my roommate walking in and seeing me. The anxiety got so bad that I would rather him walk in on me masturbating than painting. I don’t know why it freaks me out so much.
But I’m actually kinda glad I didn’t get to paint because I learned something awesome in Photoshop. I’ve been using that program for God-knows-how-many years and I finally figured out how to make “pencil marks”. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
So it’s extremely obvious, but to make the brush act and feel like a pencil,
It actually feels like I’m drawing with a pencil. Craziest shit ever. Here’s a girl going for her crotch or straightening her skirt. Maybe I should’ve redrew the head after sketching the body. I guess she’s straightening her skirt while gazing at the heavens. I’ll name this, Tryin’ to Look Nice for God.
Behold, the world’s smallest bridge! (Texture is placeholder, though it fits the model surprisingly well.)
