This year has been a strange one for personal sense of accomplishment. I'm trudging up my own mountain, head down, one foot after another. The sense of motion is there, but the scale just doesn't seem to register until I turn and look back on the valley below.

Art
Four years ago, I was scouring Dynasty Warriors fan sites and desperately wishing ( Read more... )

Last week, we doubled the RAM in my computer and swapped in a faster hard drive. After three successful data migrations, from OS upgrades to moving all my business onto this current machine, OS X decided to put on its best trollface and only copy over some arbitrary subset of my profile. Repeatedly. Which kept me up past 4 a.m. on a weeknight until ( Read more... )

I spent the past three weeks on a new illustration, building up lines and torturing myself with the sort of fussy detail that has a way of bringing out every form irregularity and perspective fail. I finally enjoyed drawing hair, and I'm beginning to learn the ways of fabric. Both are cut from the same cloth, so to speak - flowing surfaces with ( Read more... )

June, my unofficial 2012 month of Pittsburgh reunions.

The first was a meetup with some of my best friends ever at a noodle restaurant that hasn't changed since high school, from the menu to the blown-up photos on the striped orange wall. This week's occasion was my old neighbor's summer party. Her mom and my mom go way back, and we always got ( Read more... )

So I wanted to focus hardcore on novel outlining, and then my Department of Visuals whacked me over the head with an idea. And then it demanded said idea to be used as fodder for style study. Three weeks of grumbling and headscratching alternated with the blissful downhill slide of form and volume falling into place, and here we are. That's the ( Read more... )

After two months of practicing anatomy on shirtless men, my brain craves words and stuff. I really should do small sketches and whatnot to keep myself fresh. I admit to having a serious motivation problem when I'm not studying for a specific piece ( Read more... )

So last year I really got into Mass Effect. I finished the first game and made it through a bunch of the second before being distracted by novel brainstorming and my related marathon of The Wire. With the third game impending, I kept meaning to pick it back up. I was psyched to finish the story of Kira Shepard and her red beehive of mostly paragon ( Read more... )

I spent the second half of last year writing or researching or chasing my tail in novel-related frustration. I missed art, but had neither focus nor inspiration, so I included illustration study in my rotation of casual reading. I pored over pro illustrators' sketches to learn about capturing volume, form, and gesture in that crucial rough phase. I ( Read more... )

I did this Manga Studio drawing with the reasonably successful aim of loosening up my style and improving the realism of my facial features. My hair remains stylized, but I like it that way. Pen doodling is the shit when you have an undo button.

( Cao Ren in Pen )

So I eventually got DW7 because it was in the bargain bin and I liked what I heard about the upcoming Xtreme Legends. The vanilla game had all the misgivings I gathered from watching live streams and not much in the way of hidden "it" factor to compensate. I never made it through all the stories, and conquest mode was a sheer borefest. I appreciate ( Read more... )