I'm happy to say I'm finally working on Demordicai Diamonds again this week. I've been away from the comic for far too long and I feared I had, like the previous times, gotten rusty at comic work. I started working on DD64 yesterday and was rusty to an extent, enough to cause me to goof up my usual drawing process with comic work. Much to my surprise, my goof up turned out to be a much more efficient and less frustration-prone way to draw comic pages. Sure, it's still a decent amount of work but this time the page didn't frustrate me at all and came together smoothly without any problems. I'm hoping that this isn't just a one-time thing and if it isn't, I may finally be able to make new pages on a more consistent basis. I do kinda feel a little bad for Professor Awesome though. I've had a really easy time with DD64 but I know Professor Awesome is going to be at work digitally editing the text and cleaning up the page for about three to five hours considering the amount of text there is with this page. I have a few things I need to take care of at home for the weekend but I expect to have DD64 done this coming Monday. As of typing this journal, the page is completely inked and partially colored.

Depending on how much free time I have this weekend, I may have some other art to show on Monday as well in addition to a new Demordicai Diamonds page. I have four other drawings that are penciled at the moment waiting to be worked on further. I haven't started inking any of them and I may still add some more pencil work to them but the main content of each one is pretty much done. Two of them are Demordicai Diamonds character concepts of some more of the ikeeri residents, more specifically two more town guards, of Aspen Village. The other two drawings are a little different. I'm going to leave them as a bit of a surprise but one involves pirates and the other involves physical fitness.

Besides what I currently have mentioned about what I'm planning art-wise for the near future, I don't really have anything else planned. DD65 might be coming up fairly soon once I get DD64 done but if you know me and my track record then you there is a good chance that "soon" might not be a good word to use.

I got off to a late start this week due to the incessant attempts of my sister trying to get me to go to a college that I can't afford at all. I don't have any employment and thus I am very limited in the realm of my personal finances and taking out massive loans goes against my conservative financial values. She's already gone and filled out a FAFSA form in my stead to try to get me financial aid though of course the bulk of it is federal loans. Recently, she's been coming to my house and snooping around asking for the mail when she doesn't even live here anymore. Won't say why she's interested but it's got me suspicious that she might try some crap on intercepting college forms in the mail that she has arranged for without me knowing. Of course, turns out she still owes the college several thousand dollars herself from loans she took out that might be coming due soon. I don't know if they have a referral program that if you refer a family member and get them enrolled that you get financial credit that can be applied to loans, fees, or class costs but whatever is going on, this whole thing smells fishy. Her non-stop insistence that I go, and go to college NOW while she takes care of the paperwork, and coming out to my house to snoop about mail that doesn't belong to her is making me very edgy about her intentions. Family should be the one thing you can trust but I know my family too well and all too often it's dog-eat-dog around here. Especially when it comes to some of my siblings.

Now sometime in the future I would like to go to college. I don't know exactly what I want to take and that's something I want to have figured out before I start shelling over my hard-earned cash from a job I will be most grateful to have (and that hopefully my family doesn't force me to drop it). When I do go, I will pay up front, in cash, in full. I won't take out a loan for an already over-priced education and certainly not to go into massive debt. Maybe some art classes would be nice but I don't intend on trying to make a full-time putting-food-on-the-table job out of art. I like the work of some "pro" artists but I hate the arrogant entitlement attitude that often unfortunately accompanies their artistic prowess.

In other news, me and Professor Awesome are putting together a plan to be completed by sometime in September if all goes well. Borderlands 2 will be coming out and we both loved the first one. So we are going to go and pre-order it at Gamestop but this time Professor Awesome will be pre-ordering a copy as well. He doesn't have an X-box 360 though.Normally we play on my X-box but we are going to try to get a second X-box and a second TV so we can system link and play multi-player without having to share the same TV and maybe also have Professor Awesome's sister play with us on one of the consoles and maybe a random fourth person. The second TV is probably going to be the harder thing to get a hold of. Most games nowadays are designed for higher resolution flat-screen TVs and text is often undersized and difficult to read on a regular TV due to those resolution standards the games are built around nowadays. Professor Awesome's TV is fairly old and works decent enough but regardless we need a second TV. All in all, we need to acquire:

1) Two copies of Borderlands 2 (preferably pre-ordered for extra content)
2) Another X-box 360. (preferably new to ensure no X-box live console ban)
3) At least two more X-box controllers and an X-box hard drive.
4) New TV (preferably portable flatscreen with good resolution)

Hopefully we will both find jobs before September or otherwise this grandiose plan (well, grandiose on our financial scale) will probably fizzle out.

So that's it for this journal. Expect more art from me next week!