• A photo of two sketchbooks, one with a page showing a ballpoint pen tree drawing.
    Digital Painting,  Drawing,  Life Musings,  Sketchbooks

    Catching up: Character Art & Sketchbook Musings

    I finished that mercenary digital painting back in early May. I’ve also been sketching more in my portable sketchbook and picked a few highlights to post. Since my post last spring, I’ve been waiting to post more until I’d figured out a more cohesive plan for how I want to make art, but that is just a laughable goal at this point. I’m far, far too an inuitive person to have a “cohesive” plan. A plan, sure. A plan that goes mostly out the window when the rubber hits the road. The more I wait to think up the perfect plan or perfect order in which to learn and practice…

  • Close crop of a digital painting of a female mercenary, with the words work in progress on top
    Digital Painting,  Life Musings

    Digital Painting WIP

    It’s so much easier to make time for digital painting when I also have a TV show streaming on my other monitor. That’s the trick, I think, to getting myself to work on paintings at a computer, after coming home from working at a computer all day. Shading of the flat layers I’d left off with is going well – I feel like between this piece and last summer I’ve gotten a better handle on keeping the light source in my mind’s eye and having it be a three-dimensional lighting situation. I completely credit most of my progress to regularly dashing off quick life studies in my sketchbooks; even if…

  • Cover of Strathmore Vision mixed media with digital handdrawn letters saying "new sketchbook"
    Drawing,  Life Musings,  Pixel Art,  Sketchbooks

    Zen or stressed out, still making art

    Well, it’s been long enough since I painted digitally that Windows is once again bugging out and not correctly interpreting my Wacom tablet’s pressure. Hooray >_< I forget how I fixed it last time… a text file added somewhere in user config settings? Gah ~_~ adding it to the To Do List of Doom. Been stressing this week – trying to find energy after work has been kind of monumentally impossible. But hey, I’m all caught up on The Magicians. Which means *wipes a tear away*, I have to wait until Thursday to watch S4E7 (because Amazon Prime adds it later than it airs and we don’t have cable). I…

  • Life Musings,  Pixel Art

    I am sick of cold and ice, but hey pixels to warm the soul

    Totally not having it with this weather and feeling trapped indoors, wanting to go hiking or, I don’t know, see more sunlight in a given 24 cycle, is that too much to ask? I feel like I used all my energy up at work today, so there wasn’t much left by the time I got home. I have been recharging with…you guessed it, more Magicians. I finally got to the episode where Margo and Elliot speak in fandom references, and the GoT wiki note killed me. I too started with only reading the wiki, bwahahahaha. At the least I have some new pixel art. Pixel art – the new comfort…

  • Drawing,  Pixel Art,  Traditional Painting

    I just want to watch more of The Magicians

    The full moon was so pretty driving home from Zumba class. While driving back, I wondered: what will I do with my night and how productive will I be after dinner? Honestly, I felt wiped and fired up Netflix after eating; if I could spend my whole night watching The Magicians, I think I would. But I took a break and sketched a little – the water brush is growing on me 🙂

  • Life Musings

    Nostalgia is a Friend of Mine

    Tearing apart my site’s CSS after installing a new WP theme is so much fun ::evil laugh:: But seriously, I was thinking about why I wanted to blog and how to motivate myself, and I kept thinking of Live Journal cira 2001 and how my favorite layouts had dark backgrounds, bright text. I am a bit worried it might be a… bit much… for some folk, but honestly, it pleases me. (Ricky: “Aren’t you…supposed to be designer of some sort?”)