I promise! Not that anyone is paying attention or has reason to.

I've been grappling with a cocktail of mental health issues and other things, like everybody else. Short version, all the joy in art and creativity has been killed off, not for lack of desire to create.

This doesn't mean I won't be creating anything, I just need to get that juice back. Not just to do art, but for the simple matter of quality of life, and that's what I'm concentrating on right now.

It feels like a losing battle, but I don't mean that in a dramatic way, I'm just fighting the system to try and get on necessary medications to get my brain back in order.

Until then, creative life is on hold. But I will be back.

Especially since, y'know. Tumblr is a deadzone, Facebook is about as civil as 4Chan, and I will NEVER post anything to DA for a host of reasons.

I might begin a project to archive things at VCL, supposing that's still around (Instant Internet Age Check right there)

With Zebra Girl having finished, and Jack coming to a conclusion, the loss of Doug Winger a few years ago and Jim Hardiman (also several years ago), two artists I really liked the work of, I'm feeling a need for some fan art, so that might be in the works.

I was given permission by Sarah Wheeler AKA Noelani Manawolf (And one other artist moniker older fur fans might recognize) to post her entire archive of work for her and even sell some of her originals, but that stalled some while ago because we both have real lives that keep getting in the way and live in disparate locations, but I have plans on that too. She's always been an amazing friend and person I admire, and it seems the least I could do to repay her for all the kindness she has given to me.

Until then, stay safe out there. This world is cruel but we survive through being kind.

Man. Maaaaaan..... I'm looking at my gallery, and it's no wonder I don't get more views. I mean, I, personally, don't have a problem with me doing mostly black and white/graphite work and also having most of it not be pornographic or fetish-ish, but, man. So many things have been scanned in poorly, or uploaded with really poor contrast settings.

I changed a bunch of files to their updated, better file formats and adjustments, so they look more like the genuine article they came from, but there are many that are not, also. They will have to wait All of the images will get an updated thumbnail eventually too, but, again, a thing of waiting.

In other news, I have undergone the redrawing of a bunch of my original works, and things are looking amazing. Three drawings down (from four pieces of source material), two hundred or so to go, and possibly more than that, as I have drawings that did end up on nice, clean white paper back then but were otherwise horribly executed or are faded now. This will all be corrected, and it will be good.

Now, I just have to get the damn scanner going again...

My threats to install all of my art here, with the blessing of the site owner, have fallen far short. It is not a fault of interest, but a reality of technology.

It is one thing to look at these old pictures and see what they are, or what they once were, and a complete other to expect them to translate digitally they same way.

It just doesn't happen with most of them, at least in my case, especially the older ones. All the filtering and editing will not make lines that have worn away show up all of a sudden. And that's why I stopped and haven't continued. I wanted, and still want, to upload things chronologically.

In order to do this, and still make these pictures something recognizable, I'm going to basically have to re-draw everything, from the beginning. In inks, once again in pencils, digitally, whatever.

Mind you, this isn't something for right now. The divisions I have the files in right now will stay their own separate thing, even unto the end of the reorganization I'm doing right now. The sort of drawings that I do, and what they've been done with and on, has changed throughout the years. Once things are all sorted out, though, I will begin again and try and alternate in new work and posting of the old, to make sure both get done

It has been a long project, mostly out of putting it to the wayside, the reorganization of my personal project files into something less redundant and more searchable. Something occurred to me, today, as I made a huge leap forward in it.

Not too many years ago, when I worked a graveyard shift at a job I did not hate, I took to drawing on breaks and during lunch. It was only a few months that I did this during, and with materials that were on hand. Namely, cheap pens and the back of forms from the drawers on the wall in the break room.

Nearly 300 drawings were done this way, and I still like most of them.

The reason this is important is because the era I consider my most prolific, the years where I first started drawing, had a number similar to this, and that was over the course of several years (High School, specifically). Among those drawings, my first of any relevance, I see inspiration in many but like very few of them, though the creations wrought there endure in my work to this day. This second burst, though it saw less original creation than innovation of concepts already done, had never seemed as hearty as it turns out it apparently was. It gives me some great hope that I have a lot of creative juice yet to spend. I sort of feel it, but, it's like a headache that has yet to happen. It's just there on the edge while you wait for it to take effect.

I know that's not how you're supposed to look at the creative flow. Sometimes you've just got to force it to get it started, even if that work looks forced. If it gets the feeling going, it's worth it.

I've certainly been working on doing quality rather than quantity, but, there is that urge also to rework that which has already been done. It's tempting, but, I want to do new things too.

As usual, there are so many things I want to do it feels like I don't do any of them as I try to run in all directions at once.

Still, it's nice to stand on the trail and look back, and realize that the path behind has been a good one.

Now about that path ahead...

Yes, I'm on some kind of retarded hiatus again. Not because I've stopped working on creative stuff, but because the creative stuff I'm doing doesn't specifically belong here.

Specifically, 3D modeling of structures and other static objects, which don't have any relevancy here unless and until I use them for character images, which is part of the point

...Mostly.

Finally, after a lot of hand work, I have EVERY drawing scanned in that isn't poster sized. This doesn't include current works or a few sketchbooks I haven't torn up yet to ready for scanning, but, My greater referenced body of work is finally fully digital.

truth be told, a lot of it already was. However, the majority of it had been done when I was ignorant of methods and modes conventional to archiving images, and was more concerned about used drive space and just getting the damn things transferred in some way.

Now everything is in at no less than 400 dpi in TIF format using LZW Lossless compression.

For me, this is a milestone. It begins Mk II of my personal, overarching project for my body of work, and will stand alone from my previous works as such, starting a whole new filing system for things from this point out.

The next step is getting the rest of the large format work scanned in, prepping it all and posting it for the delayed continuation of my FDP project.

In review of the site's standards, most of what has already been posted, as well as some general other older works that have been around here for a while, will be moved to the scrap section of the website. Other works that are currently available will be moved that way as the overall quality and composition of my body of work gets better. Depending on how the FA site format changes in the May update as proposed, if the feature is available, I will begin categorizing my works by character, work type and age.

The schedule of this work will take a back seat as necessary, as I don't want it interrupting current work too much, as I have noticed it will tend to do, which is why my FDP schedule fell through as soon as it began.

The Morrowind journals will resume shortly also, as there is no near end to the material I have already prepared, I have just been lazy and not wanting to have to wrestle with the comic link format the site supports

I was going to post a couple images in triumph of being able to finally scan them with the new flatbed that I got the other day, only to discover that I've already uploaded them. They were one of the small handful of pictures that the photography experiment I did last year ground out the way I wanted it to.

So, no, no new pictures for you this night, grungemuffin.

However, there are many like-sized pictures I've got that didn't turn out a year ago. Between my new flatbed and the Photomerge feature I didn't know photoshop had until now because I could never get the images scanned in the correct pieces.

SO, yes.

However, though I have these images in photo form, the new versions are MUCH more detailed in resolution due to the many scans done to get them in. Even in their joined, downsized form they capture much better, and I look forward to what the others will turn out into.

Keep an eye out, they're coming. Just like all those other pictures/projects I've promised that haven't turned up yet but are all being worked on

/Head Asplode

Not that anyone is reading them yet, but, I DO have more Morrowind Journals coming, I just needed to find a new font for the the next stage of the project, and it was hard to find one that didn't cause Photoshop to force the PDF to be about 10mb compressed. WTF?

Sad, because I had a font all lined up for the next few (Absynth's handwriting improves after she's had some much needed food)

Well, all that's really an excuse, I've been too occupied by Minecraft for the past couple days to remember to post anything.

but I prepped the next batch already, and I'll be back on schedule tomorrow

I realize no one actually reads these things. I know I delete journal notifications first thing when I check site updates. But, I look back at them eventually, so I might as well jot what's going on down.

I haven't updated the FDP files, or anything for that matter, because a typical event happened that stalled EVERYTHING. And then another little thing happened and then two conventions happened and I had some idea and... yeah.

So, firstly, I was presented the idea that I could mass scan the whole lump of drawings that I have been wanting to upload, which is to say, every drawing I've ever done. That wasn't able to happen for about three weeks after the idea had been given to me, and even then it didn't get completed because I have a lot of images cropped, and page feeders are all about conformity.

But, the idea sounded so good that i stopped actually scanning stuff by hand, and thus, I ran out of stuff to post, and so the project came to a screeching halt, with all intention to start again once I had the body of work digitized.

Then THEN I realized that some drawings were missing from the pile, because while I don't remember every drawing I've ever done, which has become more and more apparent as I go through them all, there are some key images I've noticed missing that really put me off when I discovered that they weren't there. So, that search began and held off things that little bit longer

Then, Skyrim gets announced, and I get all uppity about doing a journaled game quest, telling the story as I go. That was actually going really well, though you wouldn't be able to tell as I haven't posted any of it yet. I've got a rather HUGE buffer of story written up and edited, and I haven't even caught up to where I am in the game yet.

And then there were two conventions that got me all distracted, both in their preperation and cost, and in just being taken off track by having a good time at them.

I got a couple drawings done in that time, but haven't scanned them in yet, or posted anything that I should have by now.

At the last con, I got a discount copy of 'Hash Animation Master', which I'm struggling to learn, though I'm getting there....

In short, I have so many projects going on that I don't know which one to do anything with. Besides what I've already mentioned, there's a long standing project of a randomized drawing rollup toolkit I'm gearing up for releasing here for free, derelict computers I'm trying to turn into a new XP box for various programs that don't run well in Win7 or it's virtual XP machine, and my ever-present novel, not to mention commissions that I just can't shake the pencil at.

So, there is where the entry earns the 'Ugh' title.

Minecraft hasn't been helping. I've spent an unhealthy amount of time playing it lately, and built a replica of Stonehenge that I just finished today. The game has become more and more buggy of late, though, and it decided to crash on me and destroy several hours of work, which has made me decide to put it down for the time being, again, which means that the map I've been playing will probably never be returned to. Though, I'll extract the buildings I made in it as models for MCEdit for the Adventure pack I've been working on.... Yeah, there's another project that hasn't gotten finished.

But, now that I'm done with that game for now I can go back to other things and try and trace my steps backward to what I need to be doing.

/Rant

I started a game journal for Morrowind. I plan to play all the way through and write about my character's journey.

I know, not a terribly new idea. I'm sure a million other people have done the same thing, but I want to do it in anticipation of Skyrim, coming out later this year if everything stays on schedule.

I'm using the Morrowind 2011 module compilation and nothing else except maybe Tamriel Rebebuilt for once I do the Tribunal expansion. I don't want to change the core content too much, but I do want to see the game in all its glory, and what it might have looked like if it were done with the technology used on Oblivion.

Once the game, and the journal, are over, I'll continue on to Oblivion. Though the official lore states that the Nerevarine disappeared not long after the events of the main quest, I'm supposing, given the character's supposed gained immortality from the blight disease (and potential long life in general if you played one of the Mer), and the fact that you're on par with the Tribunal by the end if you play your cards right, that your character lives on well beyond the events of the game yet to happen, but chooses to fade from public view.

So, in Oblivion, I will be playing a character that is a child of my Morrowind character, who ironically ends up in the same prison that his mother started out in (My Morrowind character is a female Dunmer), though we never see it in ESIII.

I've played both games extensively, but in their console formats. I've spent about 700 hours on Morrowind and 400 in Oblivion, and I look forward to this project, to re-live those experiences from a new light on my PC.

I've already got a few journal entries written up, which is what the whole story is going to have its perspective from, but I want to get a good queue going before I start in in this project so that I can update consistently, unlike my other projects.

So, keep an eye out...

So, it apparently didn't take long to get off track with the project.... Still working on it though. Tomorrow, I should be able to get the whole lot scanned in, and I may have a bead on a large format scanner to put future images through. Good stuff.

In other news, I discovered tonight that Win7 doesn't play well with old image programs very well, without much surprise. Specifically, Deleter Comicworks doesn't recognize the full tablet area when open, causing warped input. I didn't realize what was going on until I had adjusted to the difference and tried doing something with the program closed.

Hmph.

Anyway, I'm looking into Manga Studio 4 EX now, and have purchased a version online.

Sadly, I was going to have something awesome to post tonight, but this has put a damper on it. Instead, I'm going to raid my VCL account and post several pictures that I have there here, just to put something up. I may abandon the VCL account anyway, as it has limited use beyond its sorting ability.

Not that anyone reads these journals but me, of course...

These are the very first, the very worst images I have still in my possession. They were done on a stack of bulk legal pads bought from a wholesale store because I couldn't bring myself to waste good, white paper on crap drawings. Though the earliest of my focused works, these are also where I had the most flourishing level of creativity. I remember being feverishly self-influenced to draw, draw, draw, every day and as often as I could, wherever I could. This is also where I first started creativly writing, and on the same paper.

[I"ll link to them all below eventually]

This weekend will see the beginning of my full disclosure project, wherein I will post ever picture I have ever done, ten at a time starting from the beginning of my drawing life starting in high school, all the way up to present. Previous iterations that have been posted will not be reposted but will be linked to in some sort of series way.

A fuller description of the project may be found on my LJ, linked on my front page and aging website.

There are so many drawings, including pen sketches and stuff done on old legal pads, that this may take a year or so if I do an upload of ten pictures a day, so, keep an eye out if you're interested. I'll be on the "just posted" page a lot.

The majority of the oldest stuff will end up in the scraps category due to their quality gap from my current works, but that will change if I can figure out some organizing method here on the site. I don't know of one, but perhaps the feature has been implemented since I last earnestly posted works here.

Apparently, taking four (or more) years off of drawing and having never worked very well with color pencils has a way of making you competent at using color pencils.

Using some Koh-i-Noor Hardtmuth woodless pencils I got a while back and working over some bristol prints I did a while ago, and they're looking nice. I should have some scans sometime soon.

Also, reading over the Scott McCloud books, and getting a better understanding of the theory and art in comic making. Might have something to show for that soon if I can unearth my drafting table.

I'm not dead. I promise. I've been in a concentrated state on my writing, which isn't ready to post here at the moment, even in snippet preview form. Also, holidays. But I still exist

EDIT: WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT??? http://www.toplessrobot.com/2010/03.....ren_not_to.php

Well, as suspected, going to a copy center to get my larger format stuff scanned in would cost a small fortune. Not to mention that they are universally suspicious and don't like scanning artwork, a concept I have a difficult time understanding when you HAVE THE ORIGINAL. Most of the work just looks comic-bookish, though there are a few large drawn maps in there and character sheets. Only a few of them are NSFWish, and I wouldn't bother bringing them in to the shop anyway. That, and they won't let me do the work myself. I wouldn't mind paying really if they did, but, even though these people do what they do all day, they seem to know nothing about capturing/printing images. I've done far superior work with a home printer compared to what they've screwed up in the shop. So how can I trust them to scan my items for me?

So, I will have to resort to photographing the work, which is more difficult than it seems. Indoor attempts have been less than successful, though a few of the tries have been uploaded here already. The ones which have a mostly white background give away the lighting setup and I can't afford studio lighting at the moment.

My camera, though awesome of the DSLR variety and finally fully kitted out (range of lenses and a decent flash unit, remote), it's of the 5MP variety (Nikon D50). Now, this is a great piece of equipment, keep in mind, by both ease of use and total power over the picture itself, and would even be good for taking pictures of average format items (8.5"x11" and smaller), as the aspect and total resolution is similar to most average scanner beds. But, for the large format stuff I would lose a lot of detail for print purposes unless I shot several sections individually and stitched them together. Efforts in the past to do this, though, resulted in patchy color construction due to different color sampling between images and the inevitable misalignment of the work somewhere in the image. Patching programs always manage to distort the image, in my experience. I'm a perfectionist, and it's a big road block to getting things done.

This is also why I haven't uploaded any of my other, smaller work either, as this is the first step I want to get done before anything else. *Sigh*

However, I'm still going to experiment with shooting the images outside once I get a clear, sunny day. I've studied where the sun hits the house and when, and I need to shoot at about 3:00pm to get the right light in the most opportune area I have to work with. This limits me to doing it on weekends, and lowers the chance of finding a sunny day to work with, given that I live in Portland, Oregon.

Eventually, I will have a newer camera, though I love my D50. I recognize, however, that I've outgrown the limitations that it has, and my equipment could yield so much better results with a higher level body. I'm looking at the D300 right now, but damn these cameras get expensive. I've had my D50 for about five years now, and it has served me well, over tens of thousands of pictures.

I'll get something new up soon.

I have some new stuff coming up. And by new, I mean stuff that's years old that has never seen the light of the internet or eyes beyond my own. Oh, and new stuff too.

I was going through my pile of sketchbooks (which is a taller tower than I like to admit) and realized that there was all this stuff I'd forgotten about. Some of it is half-finished stuff, but at the same time stuff I'm inspired to finish now. Going through it all, I realize I really like my work, and even though I've been at a plateau for a few years now, I'm at a skill point I never thought I'd actually get to.

The plateau is my fault, of course, because I haven't been drawing nearly enough. I keep thinking to myself and telling others that I haven't really been drawing for the past four years, but, I look at the books and that obviously isn't true, because there are forty odd pictures that have happened since I moved north that haven't been published online yet, and a handful that have. But, even four score pictures is a pretty dry drought to the thousands that came before it.

However the tide is changing and I've got that bug again. My hand is bothering me tonight and I've got band practice, but, I'm going to start getting stuff up anyway, tonight. I finished one picture I had considered dead art years ago last night, and started another that I really like the direction of, even though it's still in the familiar and I'm trying to get out of beaten tracks.

While I'm going to upload a few things, and start working/finishing others, I'm still waiting on getting my new Wacom tablet. I put down some rulers to get an idea of what the size of an 18"x12" active area tablet would look like, and, DAMN. It sounds good on paper, but gives you a bit of a digial art orgasm to think about what you could do on a surface that big. Amirite?

Anyway, I have an assignment for you. I've gotten a lot of watches from a lot of people, and I love that. I love the idea of people seeing my work. That's why it's here, you know? But, I look at the page views, and there's hardly anything there worth noting. There's some good stuff in there, and more to come. I've seen tons of user pages that have tens of thousands of views when they don't even have any work up. C'mon, take a look, give some feedback. I feed off of that, artistically. The more you look at it and comment on it, the more I get hyped up about doing new stuff to show off, and the more effort I want to put in.

I mean, I'll draw anyway, but I'm less inclined to put the effort into scanning, coloring, posting and writing stuff if it just falls into dead space.

So, Look around, point me out, let me know. And I don't mind if you download stuff so long as you don't redistribute it.

So, that's the last of the old that I'm putting up here for now. everything else that is going to get added from this point is going to be new stuff, or things that have never been posted before at the very least. I do have a good bit of new work to show, but, I want to refine it all a bit and there are a lot of things that are only half finished. But that just means most of the work is already done for me, right?

Anyway, keep an eye out. There will be a bit of a lul, and then you'll be seeing new, exciting work come up. I may have a few new posts in the mean time, but, they'll be technical demos of some CG stuff I'm working on.

It hasn't happened yet, and I'm not starting my new push to rescan everything and get my large format items correctly photographed, nor is my web page revamped yet, but, that is specifically where my efforts are going at the moment. Getting the web page going again. Looking at my statistics, I didn't realize that I only had about thirty images up here. I'm thinking I may port all the stuff I've got up over at VCL here just for redundancy's sake. For the time being, though, I will upload a couple of the new images I've photographed that have come out alright just as an appeasement to the art gods for having not put anything up in so long.

While I haven't stated it properly here before now, I'm going to probably tear everything down so that I can upload it again in some form of chronological order, since the archiving system only sorts images by upload date and time when you go to look at the full gallery. Don't worry, everything that is up here now will come back once I've started to do that, but, it means that anything you've favorited from me will disappear. Not that you'd probably notice, since it would have to be so far back in your favorite log by now that you'd really have to be paying attention to tell.

There is a gigantic Wacom tablet in my future, and, whoa boy, the colored images will flow when that day comes.

Till then, if you're worried about any of my images disappearing, download them now. Oh, and I have no problem with people downloading or otherwise saving my images, so long as you don't redistribute them.