I haven’t been doing any work. With the pending move at the end of the month, my focus has been purely on that. So much. I could blather on and on about it, but really, its not very interesting and gets my stress hackles up and no one needs that. But, while frustrating from a creative point of view, it needs to be done and taking a break from drawing isn’t going to kill me. Plus, once we move, I’ll be able to start working in a brand new studio with my brand new drafting table!! Very exciting. My new drafting table is a thing of BEAUTY. So there should be a nice jolt of inspiration and productive.

Now, that said, I do have some ideas for a couple of upcoming projects. I’m still playing a little bit. Sadly, however, they are probably Xmas present type deals for people who read here, so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to post a lot of the progress. But I’ll try and post what I can.

And I know, after last Xmas, I swore off doing artwork for Xmas presents. And I’m not really. No one is getting a portrait or a painting or anything else that would take exceedingly long amounts of work and time. I want a stress-free (or relatively stress-free) Xmas. Nope, the projects I’ll have on the go are easier, less time consuming ones. In fact, they are potentially pretty fun so I’m looking forward to it. And happily, I think I can probably get a bunch done before Xmas without feeling stupid amounts of stress.

At any rate, I’m not sure how much I’ll be posting here in the next month. But rest assured, I should be back in fine form once November rolls around.

PS I’ve posted a new poll on the right sidebar! Over there ———–>

I defy anyone to tell me that this isn’t hilarious - cat person or not. This cat is the raddest. Yup.

G’head, try.

I’m battling one of those days. You know, one of those days in which you look at your body of work and just loathe everything. Hell, I even fought a desire to shove a pencil* through my Joker’s head.

I dunno what happened. I was surfing WetCanvas, checking out some amazing artists and I succumbed to self-doubt, low confidence and general moroseness. It’s weird. It wasn’t any one drawing or piece of artwork that brought up my esteem issues. I mean, to be honest, I’ve probably been battling this for a couple days - the hair is not going well - and it just came to a head this morning. Thankfully, I’m trying to be pretty analytical about the whole thing. Ya know, less emotional, more pragmatic. But it’s hard.

I really was fighting the redesign bug - the pink was finally getting on my nerves, but I really, really didn’t have time to do a redesign. Like at all.  Plus, I kinda really didn’t want to.  So I implemented a template I found on Wordpress.org.

I’m still tweaking it to my liking. But I think it will sate the redesign bug rather nicely.

Most probably won’t notice, but I have made a bit of a change around here. First of all, the URL. I’ve moved the location of my blog from a sub-directory to the main page on the domain. If anyone is visiting the site via the old link, it will still work because I added a fancy redirect on the file and I’ve also updated my feed so unless you are keeping an eagle eye on your URL field, you probably won’t notice a different.

Unless you are poking through the archives, I’m still figuring how out to move my archive redirects to the root folder. I might have to republish each entry which could take some time.

The only other significant change is that I am considering getting rid of the rest of my website - portfolio, galleries, links, etc. Right now, I just do not see the need for it. I think I’m going through a bit of an open and honest transition with myself. Self-examination if you will.

I’ve come to the realization that my portfolio is weak. Ok, it’s amazingly weak*. The rest of the galleries are purely for self indulgent, ego-boosting purposes. Like my trip photos. But really, my reason is a lot more simple than that. I don’t want to put work on the internets just for the sake of putting work on the internets. Cyberspace is already awash with mediocrity and I don’t want to add to it.

Ultimately, my decision is that until I feel like my portfolio is much, much stronger, I’m going to refrain from having an online portfolio. Plain and simple. Though, I’ll admit that I’m probably in a phase of lower than normal confidence in my abilities and work. Yup, I’m having some issues.

Now the blog will definitely stay. This blog has done wonders for my work ethic over the past year so there is no way I’d wanna give it up. So most of my work will - technically - be online through updates and all that stuff. There just won’t be a portfolio/gallery anymore.

To be honest, I was probably the only one going in those galleries anyway.

ETA: Ok, so my permalinks are bitched. Sorta. When I moved the blog, I didn’t account for my .htaccess file (which I don’t think I have access to). So for right now, my archives are accessible, but the only with an ugly permalink (/?p123 - yuck!). I have sent an email to J begging for assistance. I want my pretty permalinks back, damn it!

*Not saying my work is necessarily weak. It just has no direction so its all over the map. Thus, creating a pretty weak portfolio.

I just posted a request for a mentor on ConceptArt.org .. och! How nervewracking! I even posted a sample of my work! Eeee!

If you don’t know, CA.org is home of some of the most fantastic concept, character, environmental and industrial artists on the freaking planet. I mean, Marko Djurdjevic posts there! Amazing, amazing artists - so its pretty scary for a rank amateur like myself to post there*. Ack!

Anyway, I need want to improve my illustration and character design skills and they have a Request A Mentor thread on their forum, so I figured why not? It doesn’t guarantee that anyone will wanna help me. But if I could get a good mentor to help me out, then that would be rad because I decided that I don’t want to just be a portrait artist. I need work on my peoples (especially action), I have no idea how to convey information via illustration and my environments suck turds.

I hope someone picks me!

*Ok, ok, all sorts of amateurs post there. Thats kinda the point. But I had only been lurking there since last year so it’s weird to post. And post my artwork is even weirder because this is the only place I had ever done that online. Weird!

First, let me say thank you for all the comments and compliments regarding the piece I just finished. You guys are the awesome! And all your comments inspire me to keep at it!

I’ve also decided to change the direction of this blog. Ok, that’s not true. I have decided to realign the direction of this blog.

My original goal of this blog was to create an art blog - a place to post updates regarding my work and post the occasional thought or two about my work and the world of art.  Essentially, I wanted this blog to be more about images and art than words. Lately, however, the words have been in excess and the art? Not so much.  As of today, I am fixing that. This blog is strictly going to be utilized for posting my updates (with little or no commentary from me) and maybe the occasional post about the world of art and my place in it.

Still, I am a verbose little girl who likes to riddle the internets with my wee opinion and ginormous levels of my geekdom.

So, to that end, I have created a new blog for all of my everyday, nerdy blatherings. In my head, the new blog has a two-fold purpose:

1. Remove a lot of the unnecessary words from this blog. I want to post images and update photos. Not words. The words are too much sometimes.

2. Consolidate my geek LiveJournal-type posts under one roof - my domain roof.  Thankfully, I also found a plugin that will crosspost my new blog entries onto Livejournal for the sake of my Flist. Basically, I can post my long blatherings in one place rather than MANY . Woop!

So with any luck, this might be the last long diatribe you will have to endure here for a little while.

Now, bring on the photo updates! Uhm, soon, maybe.

Yup, things are looking a lot like they used to around here. Despite loving the previous WP template, I needed to get things back to how they used to be. If only because I am anal about my website looking like my blog and vice versa. Though, I have to admit to a couple pangs of the webdesign bug when I was converting. Pangs, though, nothing more.

Aside from that, I feel like ass. I left work early yesterday and stayed home today. I have a nasty beginning of a cold that I am trying to nip in the bud before it becomes full-blown. So far, the cold is winning. And it kinda sucks because Shan is in Calgary this weekend. We’re picking her up at the airport tonight and hopefully there will be breakfast or something on Sunday Saturday morning.

If the cold hasn’t killed me.

I’ve officially been converted to WordPress. Woop! Josh even managed to salvage my archives and old comments, so even better! The only thing (obviously) is the layout is a temporary pre-packaged template (but it is pretteh!). I’ll convert it to my old template when I have a chance. It doesn’t seem too difficult based on the documentation I have read. Hopefully I’ll take a crack at it this weekend.

I’m just glad all the move shit is over with. Yay. Now I need to play around with this WP business and fine tune it.

But I wanna send a huge, huge thank you to Josh for helping me get converted to WordPress. Not only that, but I was switched over to the Apache server and he helped make sure all my stuff works (namely my gallery) and the switchover was relatively painless. So yay. Yay for a stable blog platform*!

*I do still like Lifetype. I just think it needs a lot of work and a bit more user friendly documentation.

Ok, so my comments are magically working again. WTF?! I did nothing to fix them. Seriously. This thing is freaking sketchy. I’m still going to see about getting Wordpress. But, its a bit of a relief that the comments are working again. Well, for now.

Weird.