Google+ is good for artists :)

I suppose if you're as lucky as I was anyway.   One day I had the luck to make it into a public hangout with a google employee, Natalie Villalobos.  She works on the Google+ team.  It was a fun hangout anyway - everyone talked about their thoughts so far, what features were working, what were not or needed work.  We also just had a general fun time.

One of the other people in the hangouts, Michael Mozart of failtoys.com (I think that's the website, oops!) checked out my profile and saw my art there.  He mentioned it in the hangout and suddenly everyone was looking at it!  Including Natalie!

She immediately asked if I could paint her as a kleptoflorist! :D

I just liked the opportunity to have a little fun and of course get my art seen by a load of people.  8)  I did discover though, that Natalie is a lovely person and very fond of Yoga, Tea and of course….  stealthily stealing flowers from other people's yards, haha! 8)

Web Archive Ghosts

So here it is.  The Web Archive of my domain name.  Aequinox.   I've had to forever -- before 1999 in fact - this iteration is just the first one Web Archive decided to take.   It was even ghastlier before.  I never made a dime off my amazon.com affiliate store.  Did anyone?

So here is the next iteration.   All I can really say is that I'm probably one of the stupidest people alive for not holding onto the i-writer.org domain name and sticking with it.   I could have actually made something with it, I started it so long ago who knows where it would have taken off to.   What an idiot I am!

Here was the iWriter site.   I can't believe I let this go.  This is probably one of the stupidest decisions I ever made.  It had teeth!  If I had only stuck with it, so many sites that were around at the time never held on.  If I had only held on!  Blahhhhhhh!

Now here you see me totally ripping art and using it for graphics.   Everyone was doing this at the time.  It was horrendously awful.   I gave credit for every piece I used, though.  I had stopped wanting to make money off my site and it became a purely personal repository.  Gag!

Now you can tell when I started to really learn about Photoshop.  Look at this hilariousness.  I think it was 2003/2004.   It's ridiculous!   Can you tell my favorite color is purple?  Nawwwww… it's not obvious at all.  o_o  Oooh and iframes.  Eeegads how terrible.

Somewhere between 2004-2007 I started to learn to draw and paint.  Just doing UI elements and graphic design wasn't enough for me and I wanted to actually create images that I saw in my head.  I'm still on this journey now and once I decided, I knew what I was meant to do with my life.   Well, among my other pursuits.   :)

I also really couldn't stand how ubiquitous my name was.  Jennifer.  How boring.  Everyone has that name, particularly within my age group.  There are umpteen bazillion Jennifer Baileys.   So I picked the name my father wanted to give me, Elizabeth.  I used it for awhile.  But then it was so weird going by Lizzie that I just gave up and used Jennifer again.

Interestingly my Dad still calls me Lizzie.

So this is what you will see now:

I love my domain name - but it's true; I always had to spell it over the phone, or even to someone's face.  No one knew what the hell I was talking about.  Aequinox?  What?!   So yeah I gave it up.  Now it's nice and simple.  jensketch.com   Can't screw that one up and it says what I do right smack dab in your face.   But I will never give up this domain name, it just means too much to me haha :)

Apocalypto

So forgive me for never having seen this movie before.  There are some gaping holes in my repertoire.    I saw someone mention this movie in a comment here on G+ and how he had seen the movie 11 times.  I was taken aback a little and thought that it must be good, if someone will see a movie that many times (not always of course) but it made me look it up.

I got to reading and the reviews were good and some reviews were outstanding.

Quentin Tarantino's good word certainly sealed the deal.  He wrote absolutely glowing praise of the film.  I am also a huge Mel Gibson fan (say what you want the man can make movies).

Here's the thing.  I'm so impressed because I knew the story.  I read the wikipedia article.  I usually don't spoil myself but really I just was doing research about the movie and before I knew it, I read the whole plot.   The thing that impresses me though - is that I was still caught up in the film, despite the fact that I knew the story.  I was still holding my breath, tense with anticipation and suspense.   If a movie can still affect me like that -- while going into it knowing the entire story - well damn that makes for a fine piece of cinema.

If anyone is wondering why the hell I've been watching nothing but movies lately it's because I'm a little under the weather.  :)

Guild Wars 2 Demo - San Diego Comic Con 2011

Okay here it is - 40 minutes of Demo time - this game won't even go into Closed Beta until the end of the year, so this was pretty cool!! :) It is NOT me playing, I'm just filming some dude I'm waiting in line behind. He kinda sucked. :p 

When Doug and I got a chance to play, we stayed together and rocked it, killing a veteran or two a couple levels above us.

The guy talking in the video is from the booth BEHIND the NCSoft booth - he was freaking loud and it was pretty obnoxious. Ahhh, the Exhibit Floor at ComicCon.

I've had a busy month it seems.

I didn't realize it's been a whole month since updating.  Been quite busy.  Saw the final Space Shuttle launch, visited Disneyworld and am beginning to plan for San Diego Comic Con.  Also my nephew, who is in the Air Force, is stationed at Shaw AFB down in Sumter, SC and he's coming in tomorrow to stay with us awhile until he gets settled down there.

I've joined Google+ and it hands down beats every other social media platform that I've ever tried - even outwinning twitter by a long stretch.  That's admittedly taken up a decent amount of my time - but alternatively it's also inspired me to work a lot more.  So that being said, I've just recently finished this piece.  

I hope this turns over a new leaf for me.  I really have a lot of work to do to get where I want to be - and I'm no where near my goals.  

I suppose I'm also addressing the issue of really deciding what my goals are.  I still am not quite sure.  It's a luxury, that's for sure - and I'm appreciative in so many ways of that.

Update on B&W doodle. Not B&W anymore!

Just a little update.  Pushed the values while in grayscale further (but I'm probably still woefully conservative) and then switched it to RGB.  Color Layer to fill in the base colors - blue eyes, skintone with blush and shadow and then pink lips.  Then I just start painting right over it all after flattening the painting.  It's just relaxing at this point.  I have no idea what I'm going to do with the hair or how I'm going to paint it at all.  I'm resolving to draw this summer more.

I'm too old and I'll probably never really work in the industry at all, I started too late to get really good - unless I don't mind being about 60 when I get decent.  Not sure that I do.  It's a trifle disheartening to think about how I missed that boat, but what are you going to do?  So I'll just keep on truckin' along.

doodles in black and white

Just tooling around with some black and white today.  I only know how to do faces.  I've figured this out.  It's the only thing I can draw without reference.  Yes, I stylize (obviously) but it's how I prefer and that's just that.  When I first started drawing, I was told over and over and over again that the human face was the hardest thing to draw.  That most artists struggle with it the most, and learning the proportions of the face is one of the most important things any artist can ever learn.  So I went and studied the face the most, and the rest of the body only marginally (torsos are my next most feasibly body part that I can attempt without reference).

So, since we get a dopamine hit from exercising a skill, I find that when I just want to relax and paint and feel like I am doing a good job, I do a pretty face.  I have also learned that in order to do the rest of the body skillfully, I am going to need to spend the same amount of time on the rest of the body parts (and in each gender) to be able to decently approximate without reference.

Yes, I know that using reference is awesome and preferable.  I can do much much better paintings by referencing everything.  It's a lot of work!  Today, I just wanted to relax and have a little fun.  To do something creative (ish!) for me.

I also want to take this opportunity to work on color and light.  That's why it's starting in black and white.  I always get a better result when I begin this way, so call this an underpainting.

Atheism Blog

So thanks to an artist friend of mine, I found a new blog that I'm seriously enjoying.  It's called:

Pharyngula:  Evolution, development and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal.

It's a part of scienceblogs.com

I of course highly recommend it.  For someone like me he's preaching to the choir (haha, religious reference) but I enjoy reading his aptitude for intelligence as opposed to rants and hyperbole.

What made me want to share this was a quote I just read from a recent post of his that was too long to share on Twitter.  So much of my thoughts are filtered through twitter that often this blog is woefully ignored.  Anyway, the quote is this.

"Religion is a barbarous obsidian knife poised over our chests — put it in a cabinet and admire it as a work of art, but don't ever wield the damned thing ever again."

That is how I feel about it and have always felt about it.  I was raised by believers.  Maybe not in typical Christian beliefs, but both of my parents are devout believers.  Often without any evidence at all of what they profess to believe in.  Ever since I was a very small child, this always seemed ridiculous and indeed, dangerous, to me.  I've navigated out of the swampy miasma of faith throughout my childhood.

Trip to England and Wales - video slideshows!

Well for the past couple of days I've been editing my photos and decided that instead of just one link to 425 shots (out of the 1144 that were raw) that I'd set them up into the locations in slideshows and add a little music.

Music is by David Arkenstone - who is quite masterful and wonderful and we're huge, big fans. :)

Here they are, in relevant date order:

If you're interested in just the pictures, they're here on my Picasa page:  https://picasaweb.google.com/nerahla/WalesEngland2011#

Okay, enough waiting. I have two new pieces of art to show.

Okay so, I've been really lax this year.  That's an understatement.  But despite all my moaning and groaning, I DO want to get better at this illustration business.  I have a plan, I figured it out on my own and it's a pretty good plan.  By the end, I should see appreciable improvement because, (1) it's a long, long, long plan and (2) that's what happens when you practice.  You get better.

I have collected some very awesome books over the past twenty years.  A lot of them recently.  Some not so recent.  My husband has found some rare gems as well.  I've plucked one and decided to methodically go through it and Illustrate.

It is a dictionary of Faeries, Demons, Spirits and Mythological Creatures.

I figure it can't hurt, right?

So the following images (and all the ones to follow for the next year or so at least) will come with their very own description.  I guess you could call it my own little CHOW. (conceptart.org lovelies will understand that one) except I won't be doing one every week.

Abbey Lubber:

These are minor devils also known as Buttery Spirits in the folklore of England.  They inhabited the abbeys and religious houses that had become wanton and over luxurious after the fifteenth century.  The Abbey Lubber's aim was to tempt the monks and brothers from their life of piety into drunkenness, gluttony and other excesses so that their souls would be damned.

Next,

Abere:

This is the name of an evil spirit in the folk beliefs and legends of Melanesia.  She is a female demon portrayed as a "wild" woman.   Abere seduces men to come willingly to her in the waters of a lake or pond.  Then she commands rushes and reeds to grow around and conceal her.  Hidden the reeds, she entraps the gullible men searching for her and murders them.

In progress currently:   Coluinn guin cheann

What a mouthful :P  I'm stuck on it, because it's a horrific bit of work, and I like painting different things.  But I should get to work on it, so I can continue onwards!  Both pieces are now in my portfolio.  More to come!