I'm not dead.

I just moved on as I mentioned in a journal a long time ago.

So consider this a proper 'closed' sign.

The individual himself is not dead or gone, this pen name is just out of business and long retired.

I'm still not sure if I want to advertise who exactly I am on FA now.

To keep it short though, I'm flattered and honored that my old art still attracts attention. I'm sorry I didn't keep the page updated that this pen name was out of service though.

Once I start posting frequently/regularly under my new alias I'll update this page so there's not a bunch of people looking at my new inactive account.

Awesome art, awesome price,

how much more awesome can you get?

By helping an artist out, seriously, go look;

Artist:

http://www.furaffinity.net/user/misfitscribbles/

Journal about commissions:

http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/517126/


So go be awesome by getting yourself some awesome art.


Awesomeawesomeawesome xD

So after my 8 day vacation, a lot has sorted itself out.

I've stuck to being JKRoss and that company of aliases as some kind of purgatory for being a stereotypical douche bag teenager. 8 years (amusingly enough) has had it's downs, and it's amazing ups, I'm not quitting the fandom, just starting a new chapter, under a new name. I know I'll bump heads with quite a few of you in the future, and I won't deny who I am, I just do not feel the need to advertise it.

The two outstanding commissions I have, will be completed under this pen name (and any owed art as well)

From here on out, I'm outta here and on to enjoying myself without carrying around all this emotional dead weight.

Consider JKRoss a closed pen name.

So I went in to work for my shift, and I see, lo and behold, I've been cut down to 25 hours a week.

In Ontario, 35 hours a week is what constitutes full time.

For the past 10 months, I've been scraping by on 30-32 hours a week, with the odd week here and there where I got 34 or so. So I called the boss up, asked if something was up, and I was promptly informed that she only needed me to fill in the gaps of the schedule and that I was not entitled to full time hours. I asked 'How so? You hired me on as full time.'

The answer?

"Well we said we hired you full time, we actually hired you as part time and we've been giving you the hours. So tough."

This is where I snapped, so I politely asked.

"Oh well, since we've got all the long weekend campers coming back early tonight, is there another supervisor that could come in to give me a hand keeping the staff working throughout the night?" (When there's 12 staff and one supervisor, on a night that is more than likely going to earn over $6,000 in less than $5 purchases from 5pm to 11pm, it gets insane)

"No, no one else can or will come in."

"Oh, well you're two people short."

"Two? I thought we were only one person short?"

"So? Tough it, I quit."

And now I'm jobless, however, the new rent a cop service in town is hiring anyone my age who's willing to work 48 hour weeks in a 4days on, 4 days off rotation, at $10 an hour. I can do that. :D

After much badgering from some real life friends, I decided to give World of Warcraft another shot.

Apparently the 2.4 patch brought a lot of good changes.

So here, I go, again.

Note me if you play on Forgotten Coast (US) Horde.

The process is started.

9 months to go XD

And I should be able to make anthrocon :D

So I'm going bankrupt!

This is going to be interesting.

So my tenant just up and moved out because of a family emergency. Which leaves me majorly screwed =

If I don't find a tenant soon, I'm super screwed!

I hate my life XD

And the auction ended well. Higher than I had hoped, and I'm looking forward to doing something absolutely extravagant for the winner. Thanks to everyone who looked and commented, it was nice to know that it was getting traffic.

Now, a philosophical quandry;

Would you trade your greatest strength/character trait for love?

At this point in my life, I don't think I would trade my obsession with art for a companion. Just don't think it would work out XD

Hey folks, just a reminder, the auction for the heavy detail, pencils commission ends at 11:56pm (edit, did my math wrong this morning) EST tonight.

8.5x11, heavy duty, bright cardstock, all sorts of other fancy technical terms, 3 characters or less and a modest background if it goes for less than $200, then more characters and more complicated of a background the higher it goes :D

Bid on me pleeeasse? :D

http://www.furbuy.com/auctions/1005218.html

Well after a week of holding my breath, the loan application was denied.

All told shit happens. I've been spending a lot of free time this week tightening my finances and making worst case disaster plans.

There is a silver lining to this cloud. I called up the legal firm that Visa engaged to take me to court, and explained the situation (all my efforts to remain in good faith and pay down the balance despite my rocky financial situation) and the representative agreed, it wouldn't look good in court for Visa. So while this isn't the closure on my whack of debt I had been hoping for, the largest chunk has been appeased, to some degree.

I just hope Visa's not stupid enough to take me to court, because doing some research on previous cases, if they insist on taking me to court now (after trying to get a loan, being denied, and expressing it in writing my desire to continue making regular payments against the oustanding amount) it could be construed as extortion. Which would be grand, because that means the debt would be wiped out and I might even be compensated.

But that's a far fetched dream.

For now, it's time to buckle down, enjoy lots of spaghetti, pasta sauce, garlic and bulk chicken.

Gonna be 20 some odd months until this is all cleared up XD

Yes, I'm still budgeting for AC09, I desperately need a vacation, soooo :D

I'm going to be revising my commission structure, probably leaning heavily towards limited slots per month and an auction or two a month for something very extravagant.

Go here and bid now :3 http://www.furbuy.com/auctions/1005218.html

Oh, so I'm on my way to getting this whole financial crisis resolved. Just a few more painful miles to get through first though, I'm in a cash crunch though.

To my current commissioners, never fear, your stuff is still being worked on. I'm just striving to go an extra mile to compensate for the long wait.

For others, I'm throwing the idea of auctioning off a real media commission in pencil, using the same style and attention to detail seen here: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/1381516/ , you would get the original commission (S&H may be extra if the commission doesn't sell for much), finished with a matte spray on fixing agent (to prevent the lead from smudging/fading)

Go here :D
http://www.furbuy.com/auctions/1005218.html?

And make me rish :3

Status update on life:

Visa no longer wants to wait for me to slowly pay off my outstanding balance in $200-$400 increments per month. So they're strong arming me into either paying the full balance up front or take me to court on the basis that I didn't opt to renew the card (so they could charge me service fees and extras every month and effectively negate my monthly payments.

Soooo I've got 6 days to figure out how to scrounge up $8,000 (they're saying $8,920 because their records don't reflect any payments since December @.@, I've got the frieking ATM slips confirming those payments)

Stress overload in a few words. Excuse me while I die.

2009 e.e


Everyone's heading to 2008 right now, I figure I should start saving and planning for 2009 as my first convention now.

This really was random xD

New article tomorrow! This one will be more decisive and less ranty!

30 Second Reboot
Article #1: An idea and a pencil
June 2, 2008 (Rev #3)

I started writing an article, introducing myself, saying a bunch of meaningful crap. Then I realized, that wasn't the greatest place to start. It was nice to feed my ego a bit though, such a starved little creature.

Anyways, I'm an artist, I like to talk about things, I like to pretend I'm smart and I can notice things as well. So I'm going to get this show started by talking about artisty stuff. I'm going to make an effort not to rant about stuff you hear every day. Do everyone a favor while you read though, and do not forget that these are my opinions and observations.

Today, for my first article, I'm going to tackle a big topic:

Furry Porn!

.... I just actually typed that.

It made me giggle as well, I'm an artist, no matter what kind of crazy mood I'm in, wether I'm admitting my participation, or profession personal exclusion, I'm a furry. It should be of no surprise that I draw furry porn. The definition varies widely, so don't just assume the moment you see a nipple it's furry porn (even though in my books it is). People get away with showing their nipples in our day, ask a grandparent from the 1930's what they had to say about showing anything above the knee.

I've drawn a lot of it, I'm a testosterone influenced artist. I'm not a sex freak though, like anyone else who has a hobby, art is an escape from the daily grind, artist are lucky and they get to choose the content of how they relax. I'm side tracking, I wanted to relate some of my personal observations about being a novice artist in the community, and an amateur at offering commissions.

Furry porn is a lot of things beyond just some fuzzy tits on a canvas. The explicit content has it's pros and cons, and it's all very general. I will not try to argue specifics, I'm sure anyone reading has a vague idea of what furry porn is. Simply put, it's not entirely bad, and it's not entirely good, that's subjective.

After about three years of practising on my own, I decided to take a shot at offering commissions at large in the spring of 2007, on FurAffinity.net. This was different from my earlier attempts, offering them only to people who approached me directly. I was putting myself out there, with a big sign that said 'Give me your money!'.

Surprisingly, it worked, my performance was lackluster, in my own opinion anyways, and that's probably shared by quite a few people. I learned so much though, it's taken me the better part of a year to properly digest it all.

The first and foremost thing about furry porn I've come to appreciate it, is that it is a common thread throughout the community. Love it or hate it, everyone has an opinion about furry porn, and the dozens of different flavors it comes in. A generalization really, but as a common thread, it has a lot of neat wide ranging impacts. Things I'll discuss specifically in other articles so I can really devote a lot of time to them.

I got the chance to interact with a lot of different people in that first batch of open commissions. In my opinion, there's three large groups with a lot of sub-sections. There is the group of us furries who treat furry porn like a playboy magazine, it's porn, keep it discreet, high quality, and professional. The second group of furries, are the kind to be loud and proud about it, we'd be the type likened to the college frat boy who puts up a giant poster of a naked babe with her tits right in your face. The third group in my mind, we're the group that's rather extreme about anything and everything furry porn related, what we're doing, how we're doing it, when and where, so on and so forth.

At that point, I had already come to terms with the fact there's a lot of weird, crazy and down right disturbing variety of furry porn out there for your normal person. The experience though, helped me to break down the invisible wall being on the internet builds up between people, it helped me, start putting names, faces and voices (when available) back to the names on the screens. Crazy that furry porn made me realize and understand that we're not all just assholes on a computer screen.

Seriously, think about it yourself, how many people online, do you know as well as you do someone in real life. How many of them do you rationalize as a real person in your mind, and not just another name on the screen? It's a sub-concious thing really, if you've worked in a call center, you're familiar with the mindset, you know their name, you know their needs and wants, but they are not really a person to you, yet.

That's where the whole furry porn, being a common thread, becomes the common thread to this article of mine. There's a rampant amount of furry porn out there. So much so, that we're desensitized to it, leaving us more open minded then before. It's a little strange really.

Now, don't fool yourself, I talk about furry porn as if it's the only thing that makes up this community. It simply isn't, I'm just taking these articles one thing at a time.

I guess the moral of my little opinion and observation story here is, don't forget the names that show up on your screen, sometimes with praise, sometimes with insults, are real people. We're all people, we're all human.

I really appreciate all of you who wade through my rambling.

Thoughts? Opinions? Email them to kaelross[at]gmail.com
FurAffinity Account: http://www.furaffinity.net/user/jkross/

So while being up ridiculously late, in a chat room I've frequented on and off for five years now and shamelessly harassing a fellow artist who had once come to me for advice.... Well that's not the point of what I want to get at here, eventually the conversation turned to my stance on several issues.

Apparently, people might actually want to hear my opinions and arguments about furry drama/politics and art, and how it all comes together. Now, I just had a giggle about this, but it was a suggestion that I hold a panel of sorts, just to see how it flies at a con. Eventually the conversation died down, and I mentioned it off handedly in another completely unrelated chat room, and I got the same response.

I'm not trying to toot my own horn here, I'm throwing this out, because if you people want to hear what I have to say, I figure it's the least I can do since you check out my art regularly. So starting this Monday, I'm going to start doing articles of sorts. Nothing official, just personal observations and opinions about misconceptions, miscommunications, the good, the bad, and the obscenely pervertedly awesome in our little net cliche here.

I've been stressing this a lot on a lower level, but I absolutely love to hear back from people. I know up until a few months ago, I was a horribly arrogant and egotistical ass. But all the training and learning from call centers on how to give customer's a winning experience finally snapped into place.

I've always promised myself I wanted to take a virtuous pride in the work I did. It's about time I did.

So I want to hear from you people, not just about what I have to say, not just about my art... Well okay, maybe we'll draw the line and just start there to see how it goes.

I shall see you guys on Monday, and probably Friday, two doses of weekly content!

Hey there folks,

I'm looking for a free/low cost place to host images of normal and adult nature. Mainly so I can put commission Work In Progress shots up without showing the whole world. Photobucket and the like is out of the question because they don't allow adult content.

Doesn't have to be anything amazing, just something with like 10mb of storage and a gig of bandwidth or so.

So I somehow managed to get sick. And Buckley's is not working.

The end times have begun @.@

So, first thing I did after waking up today, since I seem to be on a resolution roll, I emailed all of my paid and pending commissioners, with an update. I feel so bad for being a month behind. The past few weeks have taught me a lot though, having helped my mother move out of town, I truly feel as if I have moved on to living on my own, now that I can no longer flit over to her for help.

I finally got work life straightened out when I figured out who the tattle tale/liar supervisor I worked with was. I use the past tense, because after this person was exposed, things were resolved in short order and there's no need to worry about them twisting any more words or pitting coworkers against one another anymore.

Getting out of debt (slowly but surely) has also had a dramatic impact on my mood.

Learning a lot about my sexuality (not just the physical attraction, but the intellectual and emotional components) is another huge improvement in life.

However, I've been thinking back a lot on my three years spent working tech support and customer service in a call center. Filtering everything through the mentor-ship like employment I have at my job. Where my manager is teaching me all the ins and outs of high, mid and low level management while I work as a supervisor.

I've realized, that I can actually apply a lot of this to how I work my commissions. Making myself a happier artist in the long run, delivering a far better product, and building up a reputation as an artist, and not just a hack.

What this means, there's going to be upward moves in commissions prices. I know I'm worth it, especially with what I want to offer the people who want to spend money on me.

This is all just a lot of talk, because it's a plan I'm still working out; what I want to offer is a more individualized experience. So this means maybe ten to twelve commissions a month, probably less.

A more direct experience, if you talk to  Drayk he knows that I'm an absolute whore for wanting to get every little detail straight, this means IM chats with a lot of revisions to nail down what someone gets. This is because I want to deliver something that's spot on, high quality, and high detail (Honestly, I want to give  strype a run for his money in level of detail and quality. That's a ways off, but damned if I don't make it there in two years or less)

In short, I want to work with my customers, to deliver something unique, special, and no less than a breath short of perfect

I pretty much summed it all up above there. I don't want to be an art mill, I want to spend my time creating art, not mass producing illustrations.

I'll probably still offer something low end in the $10-20 range as sketches, and I do plan to follow JollyJack's example with his Apsara portfolio, and offer small, polished sketch portfolios (10-15 page stories) for $2 as digital downloads. Sooner or later someone is going to rip it and post it on the net, so I'll just beat them to the punch and sneak into more pockets while I'm at it :D

I think that's it for today e.e

Screenshot of 9001 page views gets a sketch (and there will more than likely be a vegeta cameo)

Mailed to kaelross[at]gmail.com preferably. First there gets the prize.

So, now that the spring crunch is over and life is settling down. (Yay, starting to clear out all that debt) and I'm finally getting these commissions (re)done (damn cat). I started thinking. What do I want to do this summer? I'm not just going to kick around town, drawing furry porn all summer.

So I says to myself, travel! And considering my budget, I'm looking at traveling to the wonders of Ottawa or Toronto, or generally somewhere very near to Thunder Bay Ontario.

And that's my evening musings. Who knows what's going to happen.

I never thought I'd ever feel this shitty.

Never felt this bad about breaking up with someone, never felt this bad about being wrong, never felt this bad for anything really.

The cat (from hell) which my ex-room mate (who is also from hell) for some reason (from hell) decided to use my work desk to unload his bladder.

I watched, paralyzed with fear and rage, as this cat single handedly destroyed over 50 hours of work. In the form of 5 commissions I was going back and forth between touching up before sending off, two comic pages (11x17s that were halfway inked) and a page from a pet project of mine.

This was all three hours ago, my brain's finally mostly working after the shock has worn off.

I weep for the lost arts ;-;

So after doing the math and retrospecting over my general well being, I figure I have a caffeine addiction. After three days of no caffeine, I was a miserable, depressed, unproductive artist.

After throwing back caffeinated chocolate and some iced tea, I was back to my old self. So I'm going to catch up, take a two week break to kick my caffeine addiction, and then get back to art.

I've been playing around with the animation utility in photoshop (yay), ctrl F5 to load my new avatar. Cookies if you can guess where it's from :D.

For all you artists/writers out there!; What do you keep on hand in your workspace?

I'll admit, mine is fairly overloaded;

2 desks, one laptop stand (for workspace and storage, soon to be inheriting a filing cabinet as well from my mother)
Wacom Intuos3 6x8 tablet
My computer + monitor
Artograph Lighttracer (10"x12" lightbox)
Canon Lide90 scanner
4 different sketchbooks
Pile of 140lb 8.5x11 (I think) bright cardstock
Even bigger pile of 90lb 11x17 paper
Epic sized pile of 90lb 8.5x11 paper
Full spread of Copic inking pens (from 0.05 to 0.8)
Few Microns ( 0.1-0.5)
Lyra pencils (4h-6b)
random miscellaneous art pencils
4x Mechanicals, 0.5mm in 2h and 2b, and 0.7mm in 2h and 2b
20+ mars plastic erasers <3 <3 (damn cats keep stealing them)
4 simple steel pencil sharpeners
30cm t-square + 4-5 other rulers
Three hole punch for letter sized paper
Sharpie Markers
Several hundred mixed colored pencils (laurentians/crayolas)
At least 4 different clipboards.

And this makes me realize just how much god damn crap I have for art XD

So what do you have on hand in your main art space? :3

And there's hardly any art.

There's a lot of reasons why. First and foremost, commissions are being worked on. I'm just being persnickety when it comes to quality. You've all heard the rant 'blah blah blah, I think my stuff is crap and how could people who are paying me $20 think it's any good?'

And well, tough :D When I'm happy with it, you get to see it.

Main reason I haven't been posting anything lately, is I've been doing more of my experimenting thing. There are some elements I'm trying to nail down, and they're proving tricky.

I really should make myself a check list of stuff to do >.>