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Art

Remember the chickadee gryphons I mentioned in my last post? That got me thinking about them, so I decided to sit down and draw one.. except I got distracted halfway through drawing the head, and when I came back to finish it, somehow it ended up transforming into...this monstrosity, which I have dubbed the "chickasquirrel". Mostly because "chickasquirrel" is really fun to say.

I really think I need more sleep.

Total Time: 1 hour
Tools: Tablet, Photoshop
Finished?: Yuh

Rambling

I got nothin' today. Have a few links that may be of interest to a couple of you? =D

FreeRice - Everyone and their grandma has linked to this one, but it's still a good site to visit if you have some spare time on your hands (or you're trying to avoid doing the work that's keeping you from having spare time on your hands, like me).

Cheap Eats - A really cool blog about uh.. cheap food. If you're like me and you're on a massive food budget, you're probably really tired of rice and ramen noodles. :] There's a lot of good, inexpensive recipes here, along with some pretty fun to read reviews of foods.

Ugly Overload - I'm sure you've all seen or at least heard of Cute Overload - this site is like the antithesis of it. :] If you have a severe aversion to bugs, I'd suggest avoiding it, since he posts them up pretty often, but they're almost always accompanied by interesting factoids, and I've actually learned quite a bit by reading some of his posts.

The Comics Curmudgeon - If you're like me and you have pretty much lost all faith in newspaper-run comics, this site will make you laugh. It will probably make you laugh even if you love to read them. It's a daily blog in which he essentially just rags on various serial comics, and it's almost always hilarious.

Posemaniacs - A very useful reference site for artists, featuring about 2,000 different 3D-model poses that you can rotate. Print-screen to save them, as far as I can tell there's no way to just right-click.

K! I'll go away now. =D

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Art

This actually started out as a portrait of Winley (second down), but his mouth kept pissing me off, so I cropped it. Then, as you can see, I got carried away, as I tend to do. :D I actually had a lot of fun doing this, and I might do another one with the rest of the cast soon.

Erm, from top to bottom, Sort-of-Cai, Winley, Aisha, and Verya.

Total Time: ~1 hour
Tools: Tablet, Photoshop
Finished?: Maybe.

Rambling
PT is really the first full story that I've released to the public. I don't really have any experience whatsoever with writing comics, although I've been writing short (and, sometimes, painfully long) stories my whole life. Most of them I've never showed to anyone outside of high school teachers and a couple of friends. To that end, watching people's reactions to the characters in PT has really been interesting to me, and quite a learning experience. People like (and dislike) characters I didn't expect them to, and have been catching onto some plot elements a lot sooner than I expected (while completely missing others).

The reaction to Margensen, in particular, has been really fascinating to me. In the beginning of the comic, he's really kind of a background figure, and he doesn't really have that big of a role to play until a few chapters from now. Never in a million years did I expect as many people to latch onto him as they have. Without getting into spoilers (since I know most of the people reading this journal came from Drunk Duck), I'm curious to see what the reaction to him will be once his role becomes more apparent, and changes a bit.

To me, the real story is really just getting ready to start as chapter 3 ends. My favorite characters (Winley, Veyra, and M'aar) will finally have more than a background appearance once every twenty pages, and we'll finally start to get some background information on characters. :D

I'm looking forward to it, anyway. I really wish I could manage to update 2-3 times a week, because I kind of feel like things are dragging a little at one page a week. 3 updates a week is not going to happen anytime soon, but my plan is to try to get at least one panel finished (inked/colored) a day from here on out, which will either get me a buffer (finally) or allow me to update more often as I finish pages. We'll see how it pans out.

I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore, so I'll shut up now.

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Art

I...really don't have much to say about this, it's really just some random anime elf that I doodled while we were dead at work.

THAT IS ALL.

Total Time: 20 minutes
Tools: Ballpoint Pen, Photoshop for texture
Finished?: ya.

Rambling
I've been awake since 6am, because I had to work this morning, and I have this compulsive need to get up at least five hours before I have to be at work. There's just something about getting up and going straight into work that's enough to ruin my entire day.

Plus, I'm too cheap to buy a hair dryer, and my hair takes about two hours to try on its own. More, when it's freezing cold out, as it is right now.

Anyway, yeah. Gonna sleep now.

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Art

I'm not exactly sure about the anatomy involved in having an eye on your tongue, but I can't imagine it would be terribly comfortable. Or, for that matter, terribly useful, in the long run. Unless you had some particular reason that you needed to be able to see inside of your mouth.

Er, anyway, this really ended up coming out very dark, but when I tried to lighten it up, it didn't look as cool. So I just left it. This is what happens when I go into "fuck it all" mode and start playing with the dodge and burn tools. :[

Total Time: 45 minutes
Tools: Photoshop, Tablet
Finished?: Ah-yuh.

Rambling
You know, on my way home from work this afternoon, it occurred to me how wonderfully ironic it is when they play censored versions of Rage Against the Machine on the radio. Every time I heard them futilely raging "f**k you, I won't do what you tell me", I giggled. Well, apparently, Mr. De La Rocha, you will do what they tell you, when they're paying you thousands of dollars to play your angsty songs on the radio, at least.

But keep on stickin' it to the man! Power to the people!

Anyway,there was more that I was going to say, but it will have to wait unti lafter I curl up in bed and die for a few hours. I was okay all afternoon, but I think three hours of sleep is finally starting to catch up with me.

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Art

This started out as a reference drawing, with the girl in the middle, but I gave up somewhere around ten seconds into the drawing and just started doodling. Of course, dragons ended up coming out. They always do, no matter how hard I try to keep them from doing so. :[

Total Time: 30 minutes
Tools: Photoshop, Tablet
Finished?: Yaa

Rambling
If you have the option, never ship through DHL. Seriously.

We offer shipping through them at my workplace, and really, they're awful most of the time, but today just kind of took the cake. A guy came in with his reciept, asking me why, when he got himself a rate quote over their website, it told him that it would cost him $12 to ship his package by ground, while we had charged him $38 in the store, for the same service. At first I thought maybe it was just our retail rate (since obviously we mark it up a bit so that we get some profit from shipping), but that's a pretty huge difference, so I tried to look into it for him.

First, I tried re-shipping a package of the same weight and dimensions as the one he had sent, to the same address, same insurance, same everything. DHL's shipping system proudly informed me of my total: $28.35. So now we have three different shipping quotes, for the exact same package.

Boggling, I told him to wait and I would call DHL's customer service and see what they said. The customer service guy took down all the information, typed it into his little system, even used our account number so that he would be sure he was shipping with the same rates... What did he come up with? $21.42. We now have four different shipping quotes, for the exact same package.

Why, I asked the customer service rep, would this be? I am as confused as my poor customer by this point, and would really like to have an answer to give him.

"I don't know," he tells me. "I'd tell you if I knew. Can I help you with anything else?"

And then he hung up on me while I was still boggling about DHL's complete inability to produce an accurate shipping quote. Honestly. I didn't have any idea what to tell the customer, and suggested that he give DHL a call himself and see if he can't get himself a fifth quote. Luckily, he was more amused by the whole thing than he probably should have been, and told me he'd let me know how many different quotes he could get before they got sick of him calling.

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Art

Nothing too exciting, just a study of an old man's face. I used a reference, but by the end it pretty much ended up looking nothing like the reference. He wasn't a farmer when I started, I swear. o_o Well, anyway. I don't know what the hell the deer thing is. Maybe it's running up to attack the old guy or something. :D

Total Time: 30 minutes
Tools: Photoshop, Tablet
Finished?: Yup

Rambling
Bleh. I've been completely unmotivated all day today, and I really needed to get some work done. I've just been so lethargic and out of it for the last week or so, it's hard to motivate myself to actually sit down and work on stuff. I blame the cold weather, just because I can. :D

But yeah, really. Nothing interesting is going on.

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Art

I don't really know what these things are. I was actually messing around with brushes in Photoshop, trying to make something that looked like a pencil, and got a little carried away when I started drawing hair, as I tend to do. Drawing stuff like this makes me realize exactly how little I actually know about anatomy. I usually just start fudging around with lines and hope for the best. :D

Total Time: 20 minutes
Tools: Photoshop, Tablet
Finished?: Yeah.

Rambling

I'm currently wearing three pairs of socks, two pairs of pants, two turtlenecks, a sweater, a pullover, and a hat. And I am still cold. I hate winter almost as much as I hate summer. I really need to find a climate that goes straight from spring to fall, and then right back to spring again. This whole "four seasons" system is really not working out for me.

Work tonight. Is it sad that I'm looking forward to going in because the building is heated?