Speeding Back to Action

Back again.  I'm not sure I'm going to write detailed reasons for post delays any more, as mostly they just boil down to "Because Life."  Time just tends to get away from me sometimes.  Anyway, I said a few days, and it's been seven, or at least it will be seven if I manage to finish this post on the same day I start it, which was not the case with my latest speedpaint. This is a speedpaint post by the way, if the title didn't give it away.  It starts badly but gets better, so stick with it if you're going to look below.

Ready?  Then I'll begin.

A Collection of Pleasingly Structured Lies (№ 2)

I had meant to do a speedpaint tonight. This would allow me to write a blog post about it tomorrow, which would be good, since my artistic progression is probably the main reason people read my blog (Actually, that's not true - I get more views from people who want to know about my book covers, Red Faction or how to trace a picture of Mickey Mouse - but I'll take what I can get).

Anyway, I didn't do the speedpaint. I had read an article on io9 earlier today that inspired me to write some fiction instead. I'll link the article at the end of this post so as not to spoil the story that follows, assuming you actually want to read it.

Despite this having happened a few times recently my writing fiction is not generally a common occurrence, so it might be months or years before I'm inspired to write any more. Either way, you are free to ignore my random writings, and I assure you I will get a speedpaint done, and an art based post up in the next few days.

I wrote this pretty rapidly over a couple of hours, and it's now gone two in the morning, so I hope you'll forgive a few grammatical and spelling errors. If it transpires that anyone other than my wife actually bothers reading it I'll clean it up a bit (she's a good proofreader - well, she's good at most things, so that's no surprise).

OK, I'll cut to the chase and get on with it.

Painting Class: A Head of a Time

And another post, coming in just under the wire for the month. And this may not be the last (don't hold your breath though). I have to be honest, this month has seen my art more or less go hang. I'm working on things at work, that while fun also leave me feeling drained of mojo at the end of the day (so there is lots of art, just not the sort of stuff I can share on here). Add to that a little mini-crunch this week and a bad, if short lived, head cold and I have very little sketching done, and very small number of speedpaints. I did finish another painting class at the start of the month though, and that's what I'm posting today (yeah, the title's a bit of a giveaway). If you want to see the previous painting posts then hit the tag at the bottom there and you'll be set.

Right, off we go.

Sketching for May/June '13

I've not been terribly good at keeping up on the blogging of late have I (and long term followers will know this is nothing particularly new)? To be honest I've not been terribly great at keeping up on the art either. That's not to say I'm not doing any, but a good chunk of it is for work, so you'll either never get to see it or you won't for a few years. The work stuff is a big learning curve right now, and as a result it's having a knock on to the art-as-hobby area. In all honesty this last week I might have gotten back on the horse properly, but Saints Row IV was out and I was too busy playing to actually draw anything (I did work on it of course, but even so there were plenty of surprises in there I'd somehow missed during development, and I had a blast). Plus it's right in the middle of allergy season, and I hate drawing when everything is slightly blurred from the results.

So yes, the art and the blog have not been my priority of late (there have been other things going on too, but I won't bore you with them), but now SR4 is done and dusted and there's less pure knowledge being assimilated at work I should be getting back to it. But not this week - I have a deadline of sorts this week.

Anyway! Sketching.

A Pirate's Life

Yeah, I missed a couple of weekends and haven't sorted out the sketching from two months ago yet, but I was busy. I'm here now, and ready to show one of the things I've been busy with. It's the first really finished digital piece I think I've done since November, and it took a while. I have some other stuff coming up I'll briefly mention first though.
I was working on a cover for Book 4 of Phil's TARDIS Eruditorum series, but we've both agreed it would be better suited for book 5, so I need to come up with other ideas, while still working on the #5 cover (it's a reasonably big job). I've also got this months sketches to scan in, and then I have to decide if it's a separate post from the previous two months or not (probably not, I didn't do all that much), and another speedpaint post is almost ready (I just want to do one more speedpaint for it).
Saints Row IV is out next month (probably this month by the time I post this, which means I should probably do a post about my work on the previous one before it's irrelevant. Beyond that I'm almost done with another painting class, so I'll be posting the results of that too. Remember the last one and set expectations accordingly. But now, on with this post...

A Collection of Pleasingly Structured Lies (№ 1)

I have depressingly little to report. I have started several pieces, but most of them are some way off from being something I can show. I scanned two months worth of sketches, but have yet to arrange them into something I can display (and if you're a regular reader you'll know that's a pretty major undertaking, which is why I decided to do it less often, but now I realise that just means I have more to do when I get around to it). I haven't done any new speed paints (though I'm hoping to do one today), but I have done some speed sculpts. Digital sculpts you understand, if it was real sculpting materials I would just be showing off a blob of Playdough.
I also started a new painting class with Paula McCarty, so there may be something to show there in a few weeks. Other than that? Not much. Nothing to show anyway. But I don't want to leave you hanging, so since I can post pretty much whatever I want on here you're going to get a little fiction.

I don't write. I am not a writer. I am a story teller though, as I suppose many people with kids are. At bedtime my son insists I tell him a "Story from your mind," whereby he picks two random things (invariably robots and something, or, when that is banned for being overused, a cat and a refrigerator), and I have to tell a story about them. I have yet to write any of these down, although some of them may be worthy of me doing so.
I had to write this down though it wasn't a story for my son, it was a story for me. I had an incomplete dream (I rarely remember dreams), and decided I had to know how it would have ended, so I wrote it down and completed it. I'll leave you to it, and hope you enjoy it, as my tale telling is rarely something I draw attention to.

Until the next time - fiction!

Slow; It's the New Speed!

Okay, okay, I'll post some of that art stuff this blog is supposedly here for. Today it's speedpaints (sort of) as you may have gathered from the title. A while back I said I would post these speedpaint updates every four paints or so, but this time there's a couple more. I've also said that speedpaints generally take less than an hour and a half... Not so here, for reasons I'll explain with each paint. I'm cutting my preamble short this time (though there will be general update info at the bottom), so let's go look at 'art'!

A Musing 5b: It's Just an Illusion (Part 2)

Let's talk some more about optical illusions.  If you missed the first part of this series (and this may be the last part, unless I think of something else worth saying) you can catch up here.  That's not required reading to understand this part, but it may be of interest.  So, illusions! Fascinating things.  In the previous part I discussed how illusions help us understand art.  This time I'll be looking at how they can also make the artist's life hell by lying about what we're seeing when we are trying to reproduce it.  This issue doesn't effect all artists - some people just have the natural power to overcome at least some of these illusions, and for others you can either learn tricks to get past them, or use "mechanical" means to do the same.  That is not what this post is about though.  I'm not going to go into every optical illusion that causes problems, just a small number of prevalent ones or I'd be here all week.

Interlude: Thoughts on the Blog's Future

So I've been debating with myself for some time over certain aspects of the Blog (there's probably a dirty pun there if you look hard enough). Every post so far has some images, and those images are either exclusively by me, or reference for something done by me, and this was fully intentional.  This has its advantages; after all, this is an art blog, but also some disadvantages.  For one, it means that I can only post about subjects I have images for, rather than any old thing, and for another it means I can only post as often as I have work to show.  Sometimes though I want to talk about other things, sometimes art related, sometimes just random things that I want to vent about.  Sometimes I want to write something that may require images that I didn't take, or paint, or use as reference.

I think this post is only the third time I've written written a post with no image content, although this one at least has an icon, the others didn't.  Interested in what I have to say rather than show?  Carry on then dedicated follower (you mad crazy fool).

The Three Year (and One Month) Retrospective

As I mentioned last time, I did have quite a lot planned for the blog's third birthday.  I had images of all the major stuff I've done laid out for comparison, a sketch from each month since the blog began laid out in a time line and a few things more.  You don't get any of that.  Firstly the drive with those images on died, including the original scans from the sketchbooks, but that was OK since I had all of them uploaded.

Unfortunately on the day I went to get the uploaded images Flickr (where I uploaded the first years worth of images for reasons I've now forgotten) changed how things are linked so those early images also appear to have gone.  I have lower res versions on facebook still, but you can imagine I was a bit fed up with the whole thing by this point.  Oh, and my sketchbook fell apart, which really capped my lethargy for the whole thing.

Over the next few months I'll slowly transfer the images from facebook (those I also placed there) back over to the blog so there's still a record of the first year of progress.  No point having a blog about progression if the first year is a blank after all.  So after all that I've cobbled together two images for discussion below.