Jeez, it's been this long already?!

Okay, well, I've been neglecting my blog, which is doubly irresponsible now that my brother lives far away and I'm terribly out of touch with him.  The biggest news, I guess, is that I did the above art piece to be auctioned for charity.  Every year, this local coffee place does a silent auction event called Valentine for AIDS.  The money raised goes to help cover treatment for AIDS patients that isn't covered by their insurance.  My piece went for $150, woo!

I also got a commission to do another like it.  I guess this would be my first ever commission for real money by a complete stranger  .I say "real money" because I've taken for-fun requests from people for online game items, and "complete stranger" because I've done commissions for substantial amounts in the past, but always for family or,  in a couple of cases, coworkers.

This piece was one of those  not-for-real-money commissions.  It was a lot of fun:  I did quite a bit more digitally in this piece than usual.  The darkness and foggyness, as well as the dark beam that the little guy is shooting through the green cyborg mutant hamster; all added digitally.





This piece actually languished unfinished for years in a file among other works.  If I remember correctly, I was agonizing about how to color the sky without oversaturating it with over-strong American flag blue.  I finally figured out that a plain blue colored pencil does the trick.  The drawing had been finished all the way back in 2004, but it made its internet debut just a couple months ago.





This drawing was a commission for a Christmas card.  It was important that this be a Christmas card, not a holiday card or a "season's greetings" card, but a celebration-of-the-birth-of-Christ card.  A snapshot of a homely church Christmas play did the trick nicely.





Last and possibly least, this is just another mandala that had its beginnings as a lowly at-work doodle.












Let's see, what else. . . Since September I've gotten a wicked, yellow-and-grey vaccuum cleaner with a built-in mini-vac thing for getting pet hair off stuff.  I went to Portland during a week when the Interstate between Boise and Portland had been closed most of the time because of snow, spent a week with my mother-in-law there and didn't even come close to getting in a wreck (or wanting to). 

After playing the RPG Persona 3: FES on the PS2 nearly every night since it came out last April, I finally gave up on it and bought the next installment, Persona 4.  Boy did I ever get my money's worth from that game.  Speaking of, I also borrowed The World Ends With You for Nintendo DS from my brother, and I've been playing that game into the ground as well.  Zero Punctuation's Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw's review of TWEWY is correct all around, but I still really like both the game and Yahtzee's reviews.  I recommend watching even the ones for games you've never played.

I also (finally) got subscribed to Netflix, and have sampled a good number of anime series that I've liked and a couple not so much.  Although it's difficult for most people to find anything to complain about with Netflix, I have to say that it fills me with an inappropriate amount of rage to have single volumes out of multiple anime series showing up in my queue as "very long wait" (basically, forget about renting it through them) when it's a brand new popular series.  Yeah, you guys might want to invest in a copy of the 8th volume of Fate/Stay Night.

I finally finished reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle novel series.  I managed to make it the third time through, thanks to the audiobooks.  I've also listened to his latest, Anathem. 

The only other thing I can think to add in this update is that I discovered the music of Jonathan Coulton.  His music often speaks directly to/about geek culture, usually in a humble, unassuming way with just his guitar and a mic.

Yep, it's Cyberpumpkin (my original art/story character) playing hide-and-seek with his true love, Chocobo Princess (here represented by a stuffed girl-chocobo from Square).

The Cyberpumpkin stuffie was crocheted from scratch by a fellow artist and friend.  She literally took these super-long pieces of yarn, and some wads of cotton or something, and just. . . made this thing!  I keep being amazed every time I see it, it's so awesome.

The lush jungle environment pictured is actually my mother's amazingly-landscaped back yard, in which she can often be found chasing grandchildren and puppies around with prodigious stamina

Here's a few more shots of the Cyberpumpkin stuffie in clickable thumbnails:

This week's art project, another hextich.

Rather than the bars alternating warm and cool colors, I had the circles and background carry cool colors, except where they pass through the straight-lined, angular symbol in the middle, where they switch to warm colors.

I tried to keep the direction of the color-fading the same (lighter towards the outer edge of the circles, except where the circles crossed. At those places I blended colors and tried to have the gradation sort-of follow the combined motion of the two (or more) directions the color flowed.

I wonder if it's a little sacreligeous for me to be doing something that looks "churchy" for something that is, at its core, so devoid of meaning.

I guess I settle for the Autobot symbol instead of a crucifix, since the crucifix sets off auto-hate in so many people nowadays, and it's better than, say Superman's logo because everyone knows that deep down (see www.superdickery.com), but it's a symbol of a group who always tries to do the right thing even if they are boneheads sometimes . . . maybe even a lot of the time.

Yup, pure design. No, there's no "deep meaning" here, sorry.

Materials Used: Mechanical pencil, Sakura pigment pen, Tombow brush pens

Original on 8.5x11" paper, digital shading.

I began this project with the intent to give the piece a steampunk or Industrial Revolution look, and specifically chose a copper-and-brass color scheme.

I don't think it counts as art, but I was careful in choosing the color and textures I wanted for the piece and was as absolutely careful as I had patience for in executing my plan.

I chose these pieces because of the science-fictiony and somewhat overcomplicated, unstreamlined look they present, completely unlike most modern handguns.  The flashlight built into the upper part is passably functional, and at a range where a dart can actually reach, the red light built in under the dart-launching barrel does a fair impression of a laser sight.

Due to time, cost and, above all, hassle considerations, I decided not to do any modification of the body of the piece to add extra steampunk features like more external pipes, glass tubes with colored liquid or dials and gauges.  I'm saving those for a more ambitious project.

It came out looking pretty slick, I think, and I'm proud enough of it that I'm putting it up here.



Materials:  Nite-Finder Nerf blaster and N-Strike Mission Kit Tactical Light (both from Hasbro), metallic hammered copper texture spraypaint, metallic gold spraypaint, dark brown spraypaint, Chaos Black and Tin Bitz paint from Citadel, high-gloss spray coating

"Don't bother practicing your lightsaber skills if you haven't mastered the kitchen knife."
--Cyberpumpkin, on the subject of learning to draw with Photoshop without learning to draw

This one was originally conceived as a thank-you for a friend who loaned me a dollar to get a Winnie-teh-Pooh cell-phone charm from a Gatchapon machine.  She'll get one of the first prints, because her desk at work doesn't have enough happy stuff.  I used this as an excuse to put my steam-powered librarian idea to use.


One of the things I thought about quite a bit while designing the cart was the handle.  In the original line drawing, it just had two straight handles, like a wheelbarrow. I decided that would be too cumbersome even for a robot, and awkward to draw if I wanted to picture him, say, waving at someone.

That problem would actually occur to a kid like I was.  He'd immediately think "How can he still pull it by one handle?" and it would continue to bother me every time my mom or dad would get to that part in the story.  I'd obsess about how hard it would be to keep the cart from just going around in a circle, pulling it by just one handle.

So I put in a crossbar in between the ends.  I also added the little bell with a leather holder, so people can hear him coming when appropriate (like an ice-cream truck!) but also keep it quiet when he wants to.


I also put thought into the idea of a steam engine in such close proximity to a wooden cart filled with dry paper.  I decided that he doesn't actually have a fire burning in his belly.  Instead, he has a continuous energy reaction that doesn't necessarily require a steam-drive, but it's more efficient that way.  He's basically a hybrid, I guess you could say.  If he needed to, say, be really quiet, he can turn off the steam works entirely, but that would deplete his energy source more quickly, and the little puffs of steam aren't enough to even worry about making the books damp (yeah, I thought of that too), but he looks cute with little puffs of steam coming out of his stack.

I like the idea of a little guy roving around the countryside with his wagon full of books, lending and delivering with his stack steaming merrily, clanking along and waving to people in the fields.  

Materials:  Mech pencil, Sakura micron pens, Tombow brush pens, colored pencils, photocopier, Corel Painter Essentials 2

  Yaaay!  I finally finished Final Fantasy III for the DS.  I ended the game with three characters doing the job of Dragoon and one as a Devout.  I decided since I'd put in so much time on the game, I'd draw a little something to commemorate finishing it.

This is a sort of techno-dragoon in a suit designed for aerial combat.  For the life of me, I couldn't come up with a way to give it jet-booster wings that looked good, so the concept is that the suit has an antigravity power, and he jumps way up into the air and uses a jet booster built into his spear to pull him through the air and/or give it an extra little strength behind a stabbing or slicing attack..

While it might make more sense to have wings on a flying suit, or a jet pack, I actually kinda like the idea of this thing zipping around in a way that looks like it's barely controlled, like The Rocketeer or the podracers in Star Wars: Episode I, sort-of hanging on for dear life.

I was listening to the Initial D soundtrack while I colored this:  It seemed very fitting to be filling in the scribbly trees and dynamic blue-sky area accompanied by Nights on Fire and Get Me Power!

People who have played the game will recognize the long-eared dragon-head helmet design influence.  It was also inspired by an artist called extiva, whose gallery I was looking at last night.

Materials:  Mech pencil, Sakura pigment pens, Tombow brush pens, colored pencil