Happy New Year, everyone! This year is already starting out swell for me, my work at Toys-R-Us has finally paid off and I am now the owner of a digital tablet! The only problem I have now is trying to learn how to use digital art programs, something that's going to be difficult for me considering how techno-retarded I tend to be. It's going to take me a long time to figure things out but at least I can confirm that it does indeed work.

I'm back to being unemployed again now that my seasonal job at Toys-R-Us is over. It was good having some employment again for awhile but man did the late hours mess with me. I almost wrecked
a few times driving home in the wee hours of the morning after staying up all night due to a lack of sleep. Not sure what I'm going to do now in terms of future employment, Toys-R-Us was a lucky break for me with a major emphasis on “lucky”. I don't know if I'm going to get lucky again and find more work but if I do, I at least got something good to put on my resume that I didn't have before. One thing I won't miss is the constant playing of the song “Dancing Queen” on their speakers. Ugh, I've heard that song more times in one month than what the average person will ever hear that song in their lifetime. Sometimes I'd end up hearing it quite a lot in only a single night.

Last night, I had something really horrible happen that I wasn't expecting. My mom's dog ran inside after tromping about outside and then ran all around the house. She ran up and down the stairs, brushed against the walls, and rolled around in some dirty clothes that were by the washer. A few seconds after, I realized what happened.

My mom's dog got sprayed by a skunk.

So now the whole house smells wretched awful. On top of that, it's freezing cold. I don't think I've ever felt my nose burn so bad from a smell and I can't escape it. It's ALL OVER THE HOUSE! The tomato sauce trick didn't work much either.

Art-wise, I have a few projects I want to work on soon. Of course making more Demordicai Diamonds comic pages is one of them. I haven't been able to make much progress on that at all these past few months, December especially. If I can learn how to use a tablet and do digital art, I might try doing the comic digitally if it will save me time and aggravation.

Besides comic work, I would like do work on character faces and expressions. At this point in Demordicai Diamonds work, I have so many characters that I'm starting to lose track of them and have trouble differentiating and remembering all of them. The vast majority of them have no art whatsoever of them and most who do have only really old art from years ago of them. If I can at least draw their faces, I could probably keep track of all them much better. This project would also be good to help me practice with my tablet but I may still do it traditionally for better results if necessary.

One other little art project I might work on, mainly as tablet practice, is drawing some forest spirits from Demordicai Diamonds. Many of them are of small and simple (and cute) designs that would be easy to do on paper and hopefully just as much so on a tablet, even for a digital noob like myself.

One last little project, this one I've already sorta started, is making use of a huge stack of notecards my dad absent-mindedly bought by doing character sketches on them. I have two sketches done at the moment and if I get more done I might upload them as a sketch batch all together. These sketches may not be the final design of most of the characters but more as a first step in conceptualizing most of them.

That's about all I got planned for the immediate art future. I may need to get a nose transplant first before I can do anymore art or maybe I can buy a few oil drums of Febreeze to deal with this infernal skunk smell!