Back on track?

... Doubtful, but I'll give it my best shot.

So things should have calmed down a little now, which means I can get back into the swing of things. Hopefully.

It seems whenever I make a plan or get heavy into something, something else happens that ends up eating all my time. AND THEN something else happens and I have to end up entertaining my dad for a weekend. I could totally write it into a sitcom except it would need to be interesting and/or funny instead of time-consuming and/or pointless.

Never-the-less, in celebration of my recent victories, I quickly sketched up this picture of Winston Churchill riding a Bulldog. We are talking like an hour tops here. Pick out the parts where a) I don't know what I'm trying to do, and b) I just don't care anymore.

What happened to my blog!?!

OH GOD I'M SORRY DREW I SHOULD'VE BEEN THERE FOR YOU...

(But seriously for a second guys and girls... Work has been a massive drain these last couple of weeks. I've barely had any spare time, and when I did, I didn't want to spend it in front of my computer doing work. Hopefully next week will return me to my regular-irregular schedule.)

Revenge of the Suckage.

It's a post. Yay. Everybody party.

Not really having the best of nights tonight, but I slacked off all weekend, so I have to make up for it now.

So this is something I drew in conjunction with something else.. It's nothing to do with the webpage, but I'll probably chuck it in there somewhere anyway.

I dunno... When I say slacked off all weekend maybe that's not correct. I did a pretty impressive winter clean and finally got around to unpacking a stack of boxes that were just sitting around my room. I also picked up a brand new giant monitor, so I had to reorganize my desk for that as well. I have such a ridiculous amount of tech on my desk now that even I scoff at it when I walk in my room and criticize why anyone would need all of it.

So to recap on the current events:
-Stuff I had to do for work that I did tonight sucked.
-Website is still coming along, but it's always a little 2 steps forward 1 step back and I can't find the right kind of voice for the text, meaning what I have written so far has sucked.
- I had sushi for dinner at a new place and it sucked.
- I have to get up in 5 hrs, and which hasn't happened yet but one it does I'll be able to say that it sucked.
-Tenses sucked.
- I collided a couple of hadrons together and created a black hole, which sucked.

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, my new schedule is hell on energy. 4hrs of travel, 3 days a week is pretty rough on the creative juices. I think what I'll be doing is taking it easy those nights and then work on the other ones.

It's not all bad- there's an hour train ride in there that I have my laptop for, so I've finally been in the position to start writing some stuff down.

So the image you see to the left is the last piece of concept art I think I can safely show... Coincidentally it's also the first one I did. Since I was rushing, I was still trying to work out a style at the same time. It looks a little bland compared to the other ones I did. I briefly considered making a few little changes before I put it up here, but why bother really?

The website is still coming along, but its stalled at the moment since I have more extracurricular work to do at the moment. I've got to finish that first, which I did a fair amount of tonight, so hopefully I might be able to get a little headway done for the website by the time this long weekend is over. The art is mostly done, I just need to begin breaking it up and then putting it back together.

This has been the most interesting post EVER.

All I wanna do is make phonetic gun noises x3.

And so, we come to the end of another weekend of broken promises and lack-of-working.

That's not to say I didn't get anything done, its just that there were a lot of unforeseen distractions and forgotten obligations. What I have got, I am so very proud of. Not only that, but I've only got one more piece of finished concept art left (or do I? *DRAMATIC TURN and STARE*), so I'll have to start showing off something soon. I'm definitely going to have to look at getting this site finished as soon as possible.

On another note, I had my first day of working from home today. It wasn't all I was expecting. Hopefully things will run smoother when we have the office set up properly. Similarly, I have my first day in the new office tomorrow. I'm not looking forward to the 2 hrs (possible) travel time, but I am almost excited to be working somewhere new. Plus I'm also glad I've got an hour train trip with nothing to do but stuff on my laptop. I've still got a bunch load of stuff to do from that and this trip is tailor made for it.

As for today's picture, this is a boy train. He was supposed to look kind of eager and ready, but I've had some people describe him to me as an angry Asian train. These people are racists.

Baby did a baaad baaad thing.

Well... Today was a lot busier than I was expecting, and fraught with danger at every turn, so I'm only just getting around to posting properly here.

So this is another piece of concept art for that thing I did that time. Once again, I cant really give too much away about it, aside that a) it's a game and b) they are trains. Draw your conclusions from that. Even better: write how you think those two facts come together and what details I'm omitting. Bonus points if you force me into replying with "No comment."

In relation to this, I remembered another lesson I learned from this: Don't count your chickens until they hatch. I think I got a little too excited that I'd "made it" when in reality I hadn't made anything yet.

In a similar vein, I saw this list of advice everyone should know when they are 18. I can't remember where exactly, it was some right-wing newspapers website, so some of the advice was probably thinly veiled racism and bigotry. I did know some of them pieces of advice, but one that struck me, and that I'll now recreate with heavy paraphrasing, is: Don't mistake being active with being productive.

It kinda struck a chord with me, since that's what I've being doing. I keep off putting off projects because I don't have enough faith in my skills to complete them to a state I'd be happy with, so Instead I keep either starting new ones or just doing random things and then I don't really end up with that much to show.

I think I've got enough ideas that I can safely burn through some and maybe not focus too much on making them as perfect as I envision in my head. Even if I'm not happy with theme, I can always go back and remake them again as something else later down the track I guess. It's so common to see people revisit (and sometimes never leave :S) the same basic themes they started with in pretty much all of the creative arts so I don't think there's a massive amount of shame in doing that if I feel the need.

So the current plan's going to remain a secret for the moment, but mainly because I'm trying to sort out exactly what I want to focus on. Well that's not totally true, I'm going to properly finish off my site and tart up this blog first, but after that it's all a-mystery.

A life of grime.

So... The reason my pic from last night was mildly prophetic is because today I was told they were going with another artists designs for the game I was asked to concept. I was a little heartbroken... but I think I'm over it now. This is a man blog after all. Single tear. That's it.

The bonus I guess, is that I can post the stuff I've done here and it can act like a buffer while I do other stuff.

I'm not particular pissed because I still think my stuff looks ok, and there was very little direction for me to go off of. Also, that whole 48 hours to define a style thing kinda sucked. And in the end, I lost out to an actuall trained artist who's been using his/her tablet for more than 2 months.

Meanwhile, it's all good to be idealistic about it, but its worthless if I haven't learned anything from it. Due to total lack of criticism (or feedback at all really), this is what I'm taking:

-Concept/basic designs doesn't need to be that detailed/clean/big (although that was me mainly sticking with what I know due to time restraints)
-Force people into dialog about what they want.
-I'm sure I learnt something about style... I'm just not sure what. I mean, I based mine on an example that was given to me, but I don't think it was as cartoony as they wanted. I think I'm going to have to try mimicing some other peoples styles.

I dunno... I'm sure there's more, but I'm a little tired. I've got a few others to put up, but I think i should probably leave out anything gameplay specific since I dont want to get into trouble.

Oh, massive ups to 26, catch my favourite song of thiers "A new beginning" in the season finale of the tv series "Life" this week. Maybe I'll have to get around to doing that film clip for you :P