*****
Intro
*****

Hey dudes and dudettes, it's been a crazy and tiring couple of weeks, but I'm doin' alright. I was working with my brother on finishing the site mock-up designs, which actually took a bit more time than we'd expected, but we finished pretty close to on-time with our schedule anyways, so it's cool.

Last week I came down with a pretty bad cold, which sucked, heh. I never got health insurance after I quit working last year, and I should, considering I can afford it. I'm just kind of absent-minded when it comes to getting around to it, and (hysterically) I only remember whenever I get sick. But anyways, a sore throat and several rolling fevers later, it's all died down to a cough and a runny nose, which I'm pretty glad for. I've had the flu before and it was a terrible experience in comparison, so I'm glad this turned out to be just a cold.

So! I'm feeling better, and ready to kick ass! Hoo-wa!!

**************
Weekly Lowdown
**************

Recently I've started rewatching One Piece while I'm working, and it's a really great series. When I first started watching it, it was pretty cheesy, and the storytelling was really grating in the first couple of episodes. So much so, actually, that I totally stopped watching the series after episode 3 or 4. Man, whatta' mistake!!

Later on a couple friends of mine said I should keep going with it since it gets better, so I figured what the hey, I'd keep going and watch some more episodes. Sure enough, by the 10th episode I was starting to really dig the story, which btw was getting surprisingly much more structured and dramatic. And wouldn't you know it, it just kept getting better and better and better, and never stopped getting better. Right now I'm around episode 2-hundred something, and I've still got 200- some more to go to catch up with the simulcast they got going right now, and I'll definitely push myself to watch the rest of it one of these days. You know, One Piece has a little bit of something for everyone, and even though it comes across kind of cheesy and childish at first, it just slowly grows into this awe-inspiring, tear-jerking (yeah, I've cried watching it, it's that good!), kick-ass, "sky's the limit" adventure.

So I started off disliking it, and now I totally love it. If you haven't watched it or only seen a little bit, you should definitely consider givng it a go, I highly recommend it! You might get a lot more out of it than you'd think, heh.

****************
Artsy Wanderings
****************

So, I came to this realization recently, namely that up until recently I've never really had the patience to finalize my work. I've spent so much time learning how to sketch properly that I've sorta' completely missed out on developing the skills for taking my work all the way to 11. This is especially true when I'm working on Mechanic Shinobi, where a lot of times I'm working on a panel that took a few minutes to sketch, and then I get to the inking/toning stage and BAM! I'm wandering and experimenting for hours to make my way through the finalization process, trying to get that perfect look I can be satisfied with. I guess I always took for granted that I would someday get to that finalization stuff "later on", and, of course, now that I'm at that "later on" stage I'm just face-palming and laughing as I figure out how to get things done right.

So it's been a lot of aggravating lessons, but lessons learned all the same More importantly, I've got some new pics up in the gallery, heh! A couple of sketches and a new painting. For the video game project I've been working on I've had the chance to put to practice my background painting skills, which has been most excellent for figuring out lots of cool stuff about painting without outlines. I look forward to painting a lot more stuff in the future, it's actually pretty fun!

*************************
Ciao and Vid of the Week!
*************************

Can you tell? I'm not the kind of guy that gets down-hearted easily. I'm pretty optimistic about almost everything. I've a good number of reasons for why that came to be, and maybe I'll get around to explaining them here someday. Until then! [link]