Hello. Sorry for not posting anything for a while. I have been making updates...just not writing anything. Anyways, been doing lots of thinking on my Jebuti story. Things are coming along pretty decent. Writing some of the background mythology to help me in get a better understanding of the world i am trying to create. I hope to develope these mythologies into short prologues to each story arc. Which also means i will have to work on developing/borrowing a style of pictograph to tell these stories. Sort of like cave paintings and such to describe the Spirits and how they came to create the world. I think this will add a great new dimension to the story.
On another note. Been trying to spend alot more time drawing lately. Have had some great Paint-chat sessions with some of my friends and with some new ones i have met just by running paintchat. I gotta say that drawing with people really gets my imagination burning.
Also been playing with color again after looking at some other peoples Oekaki art on some other oekaki boards and am starting to get a better idea on a way that I like to apply color. So things are starting to look better in that respect. Just need more practice. But a new color pic of Shelly can be seen above. As well there have been a couple pics posted in the Oekaki board.
Other than that things are moving along pretty decent...oh an i am playing around with trying to do animation again. Havn't animated in a while. Look forward to some fun animations of Shelly. Anyways...back to the drawing.
Yesterday i downloaded another new artprogram from PortalGraphics.net called openCanvas 3. I have seen a number of artists mention this program on their websites so I thought i might as well check it out. Some of the artists that I am speaking of produce stuff that I find amazing and after viewing this program I have to say that so far I am really liking what I am seeing. This program is rather small (less than 5 megs) and does not have many of the amazing powers in a program like photoshop. But overall I am very surprised at what this program is able to do.
One of the unique things I just stumbled on was the fact that you can rotate your canvas to any angle while drawing. Anyone who has done any drawing knows how sometimes such a thing is necessary for drawing certain curves. I think this is a rather cool feature. Oh and can't forget to mention the history function. The program keeps a complete history of your drawing so that you can play back the entire process you used to create an image. You can also send this history file to another openCanvas user, which is nice for sharing painting techniques and other such things.
If anyone is interested to check out this program head over to PortalGraphics to download the free trial version which is limited to 30 days or 30 times for program start (whichever comes first.) Once this time limit is up you will have to order a registration key for around $50. Thats not bad compared to purchasing a program such as Photoshop or Painter8
Spent the last few days upgrading the website again. Been playing with CSS stylesheets. As you can see it can have some interesting aspects to the design of my page. As I learn more i hope to continue adding more things. One thing about this though is I am moving more and more away from using WYSIWYG programs for creating my webpages. Once you get the hang of it, it's not so hard to type in all the HTML code yourself, and using CSS makes things alot easier too. Plus CSS makes the webpages within my site conform with each other more. Of course I ended up having to go through most of the pages I already created to make changes to the code as i integrated my own CSS stylesheet throughout the site.
Anyways. Enough about webpage coding. Did some more painting in my Oekaki board. Going to try to finish that image that I started...between working on my webpage anyways. I had to reupload a new PNG file of the image that I had done a screencap of before I uploaded it last time. Though after I uploaded the PNG file it seems you can still load that into one of the drawing applets on the board and retouch it up that way. I think that is really cool.
But in any case please come in and enjoy the Paintchat app for now.
Now western Ontario is a whole different drive. I liken it to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. But at least with the foothills of the mountains there is an end....plus at least you can see those cool towering peeks. But western Ontario the roads just seem to go on forever. The terrain is rocky and so the roads keep going up and down and turning left and right. You might slowly ascend for 100-200 meters and then descend down the same in just a couple kilometers. Or vice-versa. Plus this was not divided highway either. So there are constantly semi-trucks coming and going on this road travelling from one city or province to another. Can't say i enjoy descending a steep hill with a semi baring down on me. Plus passing lanes come by only every 10-15km.
I was very glad my father came along with me during this road trip to move to toronto. Those first two days i could have managed myself. But it was really tiring for those last two days through Ontario. Every few hours we would find a place to pull over and switch drivers.
So 4 days after the start of the trip we arrived in Toronto. I had been able to find someone looking to rent out their basement on the internet a couple weeks earlier. We were able to find the place by 7:00pm on July 1. Being that it was fairly late, my father and I unpacked my boxes into my new place and then left to find one last Motel to stay at for the night.
My Dad stayed with me for two more nights. During the days we drove around shopping for various things to get me settled into my new place. Of course it would still take me the better part of the week to find everything I was missing in my new place (there are still a few things i need to buy but just havn't found to buy yet). Either way things are starting to look much better now in my new place. I am planning to take a bunch of pictures of what my little place looks like and i will post them up here soon so that you can see what my place looks like. So stay tooned for that.
In any event, I updated my contact info on my portfolio page. Made a few other changes in some other areas. Other than that i have been playing around with Paintchat. Paintchat is a chat and shared drawing board i was planning to set up on my site a long time ago. The only problem has been that the programs was written in Japanese. Though i can read some japanese, i have a difficult time when i have to read alot of Kanji (complex characters of chinese origin). Either way i have been making some headway now on how to set it up and customize some things. Mostly i am leaving things at their default settings. Don't worry though when it comes time to paintchat with me though. The user interface is all in english.
Look forward to seeing it soon in the BBS section. (yay....the coming soon sign on there will finally come down). The only thing is that at current the paintchat will only be active when i am online seeing as i have to serve it from my own computer. But no worries. I will also set up a stand alone online painter too. With that people can go, do a sketch and leave it for people to comment. Should be lots of fun as long as people don't abuse it. :p
Anyways. That is enough for today.
Alright. Finally finished the portfolio section of the page (mostly). Only a couple things left to finish up or add. But you mostly won't notice much of a difference from now on. At least not for quite a while. :p
I have also finally gotten around to creating a banner for my site. Overall i believe it to be much nicer to look at than the little text logo i had created earlier so i also replaced that with my new banner. Still might be making changes to that but there are other more important things to worry about. Either way i have put up the drawing i had used when i made the banner. Its one I did on the flight back from my vacation to Japan and Hong Kong 2 years back. There is another pick along the same theme and they will both be placed in a miscelaneous section in the gallery right away. Enjoy the pics. ^_^
Well today is my birthday. Made a few changes. Mostly in the Daily Sketches section. I uploaded a number of sketches from the weeks since my last update.
On another note my younger brother had returned from Alert North West Territories a week an a half ago. After he got back it meant i had to move all my drawing stuff (programs and files) off from his computer. It sure had been nice to use his room and his computer as my own personal work area for a while. But now i have to cram myself back into my bedroom again. Ah well. Perhaps when i move out i will have enough room to have my own study room.
Hmm. well havn't been producing as much as i wish i was. Been feeling down for some reason. But today i was starting to feel better. Well i at least put up a new top pic today. maybe tomorrow if i feel like it i will try to use color on it. Still don't know why but i still feel like i struggle with color when i try to use it. Computer color seems more difficult than working with watercolor or some other paint medium sometimes......maybe its just that i haven't been playing around enough with photoshop or painter to paint. Well hopefully things will start to turn out better soon. I just got to keep up my spirits and keep working away at it.
Well i updated the Figure Drawing section a bit. I still have a few more images i want to add to that section still so i will get that done tomorrow. Darn this daylight savings time though....i feel like i lost an hour of time today. I did do some work on my pick of grenda as well. The highlights and shadows are only ruffed in right now. I plan to finish that up soon and paint in the background by the end of the week hopefully.
Well posting a few more sketches. Did some nice stuff today so i replaced the index page image today. My figure drawing was not so good this week. <sniff> Ended up feeling a little too tired to do a good job. Oh well. Still next week....and the week after. Hoping this weekend to photograph more of my figure drawing from the past month and get that added to the figure drawing section. I think i should reorganize that section. So hopefully i get that done by sunday.
Another day and more drawing. Very nice it is. Didn't really get as much done today. New sketch in the junk section....and there is a good reason it is called junk. Mostly just experimenting with colors for painting skin. So not much to that. Other than that i spent time cleaning up the sketch from yesterday. Hopefully i will get a chance to add a bit of color tomorrow. But seeing as wednesday is a Figure Drawing night don't expect much from tomorrows sketches. :p Anyhow...have fun.
Well...I thought i would work more on the sketch from yesterday. But since I thought I would just do some sketching first before working on it, I ended up drawing this....and seeing as this one is looking much better than the sketch from yesterday this one has moved up to being the sketch i will color. Of course maybe tomorrow i will have decided on something else again. :p
Anyways...Guess i should start my junk Daily Sketch section
Sunday. Weekends sure do seem short sometimes. Well last week was busy with making some updates to my webpage here. This week i hope to get more drawing done. And some little additions to the page as well. Started this sketch today. Plan to try to finish it in color by the end of the week. That and plan to have the Daily Junk Sketches section set up this week hopefully. There i will be posting all my sketches that i "should" be working on day to day. Hopefully it will be everyday. But knowing myself i doubt it. But hopefully this page will be providing my with some incentive to make sure that something gets done every day. So much to do and always so little time to do in.
Guess i should explain the sketch as well. This character is from an anime i am currently watching. Thought she was a cute fun character so i decided to do a fan piece towards her. She is Grenda from the anime "Puchi Puri Yuushi." This princess from the underworld is always trying to come across as some obnoxious destructive creature from the underworld but usually ends up causing more trouble for herself than for others. Quite comical to watch. Expect this top page to be updated constantly as i progress through to the finish of this piece.
Good stuff. More changes to the site. At least it is starting to look a little cleaner now. Most of it was just thrown together before....well it still mostly looks thrown together. But at least things are starting to look a little more presentable. And i was just looking at my site and checking to see that things were looking right when i noticed a major problem that has been a part of my site since i put it up......and i never noticed it before for some reason. The spelling in my site logo pic is wrong.....i mean how can i spell my own site wrong? But there it is. Don't know why it took me this long to notice it. I forgot one "L" in Illusory. Guess i am going to have to redesign my logo again. :p It was time for a change anyways. But will that happen tomorrow? Next week? hehe. Guess we will have to wait and see.
On another note. Though i havn't posted any new figure drawing in a while, it seems that now that i have taken more time away from work to work on my portfolio, web page and other drawing stuff, that my figure drawing has improved again. Got to say it must be because i am staying in a drawing state of mind a bit more than before. I feel a bit more sure of myself as i draw. It also seems that my mood has improved greatly. My friend Yien says i am much more pleasurable to be around. Not that I wasn't before. :D Just better sense of humour i guess.
Bah....this webpage coding stuff is annoying. For the last two days i was trying to set up a webpage hitcounter to see how many people actually come to see my site. Well scrap that idea i say. I finally gave up seeing as the first one i tried ended up resulting in pages suddenly not loading (or forcing your browser to download the page instead of viewing in the browser). Very annoying. After playing around with a different counter (and at least learning a few things) i finally gave up on that one as well and went with a friends suggestion of using a free tracking service called extremetracking.com. Its a neat little tracking service. Very easy to setup and lots of information is given back. Anyways if you are interested in how many visitors i have received at my site click the little planet icon. It may move around a bit over the next little while. haven't decided whether it should go in the index portion of the page, the menu system, or the main page (which you are reading right now). In any event it works...and no more headaches for me on that bit. So much i still have to do on this site yet. Two days WASTED trying to set one up myself....BAH! and double BAH! In any event I have to send a big thanks to my friend Mike for recomending I get myself set up on ExtremeTracking...THANKS MIKE!
Hmm....made a few small changes today. Mostly cosmetic in terms of the layout. Was trying to experiment with the menu links. Might try something different here. We'll see what happens. For now though i moved all the previous news into the Blue's News section. Old news will go in there from now on. Though the most recent couple of updates will probably remain on the main page so you can see what changes i have made if you haven't been to my page in a couple updates. I am hoping to have a much more updated page by the end of the week. I have taken more time off from my job so that i can spend more time drawing and updating my web page. So hope to see my page updated a couple times a week. Anyways that is enough for today.
Hehe...well a month has gone by since the last update. Sorry. I will start to do more work on this again. Starting with this new pic. Just a little doodle i did on another webpage i found. This page had this cool Chat room where you can draw and chat at the same time. I have been messing with the program a bit but i still havn't figured out how to get the thing to work on my own page yet. But none the less expect the BBS section to open soon with PaintChat as one of the sections within there. The other thing i need to get on here is a Hit counter so i can keep track of whether anybody else comes to look at my page. Again hopefully next update that will be working. There are a couple other modifications i plan to make to the gallery sections so stay tuned for that.
Yeah...another update. Put some sketches up of one of my characters from the comic i am trying to write. Her name is Shelly. Put up some comments along with it. So head on over to the gallery section and check it out. This new sketch you see is one i did on a small pad of paper while i was waiting for dinner at a restaurant. Though i think the turtle she is sitting on is larger than i really intent. See the new gallery for more information on that.
Ok...I started to put up the Gallery section. So far only the life Drawings are up. I have it separated into sets (currently anyways.) Will probably change later. Being that it took me longer to create a thumbnailed type of gallery than I thought it would. Istill have to put in comments for each section.
Well I spent a little time trying to design a title. Still needs a little work as with everything. but it looks better than just a regular text title. at least this has a little bit of interest to it. I'll have to keep playing around with it. I have something in mind but needed to figure some other things out. Maybe next time. I would like to get some of the other sections up. Next time i am hoping to get my Gallery section opened. Just have to sort through alot of my Life Drawing from my wendsday classes and see what i can find that is good enough to put up for everyone to see.
Uwahhhhnnnnnn!!!! Why is it I always start to feel tired after i have sat down to try to work on this webpage. well at least it is slowly getting done. Though i still don't know really how i want to have everything layout. So expect there to be many changes as this page continues to develop.
I have alot of work left ahead of me. I still have to try to go through all my recent life drawing work and try to find some decent things to scan in. And really i can't say i have much of anything in terms of color work to show. But really that is one of the reasons i am setting up this site is to give me more reason to sit down and draw. I seem to be very good at finding other ways to spend my time :p
Eventually i plan to set up a BBS with a built in java drawing applet. I have seen other sites with them and have always thought them to be really cool. Then everyone can post messages to me and do doodles online too. it will be lots of fun.
