Books and birthdays.

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(Thanks to Clairvoire for this fantastic birthday image. xD)


Hey everyone!

Thanks for all the notes, comments, confection icons, incredibly awesome art , and general well-wishery. :]   


Especially considering I, as usual, have been all but completely dead around these parts. Haha, it kills me every time I swing around with a few buckets of art to toss up here on dA, and every time I get a slew of comments of people that seem so happy to see that I am back, and actively submitting work. And I don't mean 'kills me' in the hilarious sense, I mean more, well, I honestly feel bad that I can't BE more active around here. As active as I used to be, anyway. When free time was much more in abundance.

I always gave off the impression I was really busy with day-to-day things, but I think it helps to know what's ACTUALLY up. SO! I think it's time to spill a bit about life! HUNKER DOWN. If any of you have been here since the beginning you may remember my tendency towards long, rambling journals! And hell, I miss making those too!


I think I got into it briefly in a previous journal, but I'm still working as a creative director for an awesome game company in Barcelona. It's a fantastic fit, I have to tell you it's great when a company just.. enjoys the sort of work you create without supervision. In that sense, I mean, I've worked for a few studios in the past, and you have to get used to molding your creative style to what they are looking for in whatever project you get assigned at the time. This means that you don't have as much creative liberty as you'd like. The way you prefer to draw noses or elbows just won't fly, or your personal taste in armor and weapon aesthetic isn't matching what they want. This is just part of the job, and it's something any artist worth their salt needs to be ready for if they want a job in the games industry. You are, after all, there to bring whatever concept is thrown at you to life, and make it look good.

But what I'm getting at here is that these guys.. they basically just cut me loose and let me do whatever. And generally, when I show them what I came up with, they're very pleased with it, and we just roll from there. It's a tremendous thing. It makes you happy to wake up and get to work in the morning. And I'm pretty durn happy where I am right now as a result. It'll be nice when I can actually TALK about the game we've been working on, haha. Toughest part about game industry art is that you can't show a lick of it for like, years at a time. It's rough!

  I'm looking to move yet again. Probably not out of Texas.. I've grown to like this funny 'ol state quite a bit. Sure, it's no Jersey.. but it's all give and take. For every quirky, awesome little thing I miss about Jersey, there's an endearing quality about Texas to make up for it. (That and the living costs here make it a steal to stay.. aha.) But yeah, looking to move into a bigger place. Been feeling a might bit too cramped where I am right now, between me and the two mangy beasts I live with. I mean I have a third mangy beast I'm hoping to move over from Germany in the next year, by then it'll just be necessary! That and I'd really like a work room/study.. place to squeeze in all these art supplies, books, desks.. sure would make things easier.

I'm still working on that poster! For those of you that weren't involved, it is a poster full of characters from people here on dA who helped mikiko-art and I win a comic contest a while back. I haven't forgotten about it. It's up to..  let me check.. seven full pages of nothing but your characters crammed in and mooshed up with one another, that I'm going to stack on top of one another until I have a full poster. I absolutely refuse to chop this thing up.. unless of course dA's page size limits turn it down. But we'll see! It's been killing me to not show previews.. because this is easily, far and away the most characters I've ever drawn in a single 'setting' in my entire life.  What is that tally.. oh yes, it's a little under 600 individual characters. And actually, that brings me to something else I wanted to say..

While I was drawing that poster, I saw a loooot of reference sheets. Of so many wild, incredibly varied characters. Just one after the other. I was marveling at this site on a whole, as an amazing.. AMAZING outlet of creative energy. Honest to god, I was moved. It was just something else. Seeing all these different faces, produced by people from all walks of life.. little bits of themselves put into every last one of them. Every character had a story different than the one before it, and it got me thinking, I mean.. just how much creativity there IS out there. It was a great reminder as to why I do this, why we ALL do this, what we love about it, how great it is that we choose to share it with one another.. and a whole bunch of other mooshy things that I can't put into words at the moment 'cause I only recently woke up. But yeah, eh. It was something. Really something. And I can't wait to slap up that poster.

Now, as for the aforementioned 'books' in the title.. I'm going to be releasing a sketchbook as soon as I'm able. Still doing some fiddling with the printing presses, but on the whole it's pretty much ready to go. Well, for anyone who cared to have a gander. :] It's a compilation of sketches and pencil illustration work for the past.. hell, uh, four years or so, about 90% of which I never put up on dA.  The other 10% are the lined versions of some of the colored images you may have seen. I know that, since I've been putting work up here, I've had a number of people ask me about working with pencils, lining and rough work, even going so far in some cases to say that they enjoy looking at sketchy linework over polished, finished material. I actually tend to agree with that sentiment, as I absolutely love when my favorite artists show their sketches and process. It just has that.. organic, fresh on the paper feel, haha.

But yeah! It's roughly 100 pages or so, featuring characters, concept processes and scrapped ideas from Everafter, Ree, Living in Sin, along with a handful of other 'stories' that never got as much airtime here on the site. Once we get some test copies printed out and make sure it's tweaked to satisfaction, I'll get some example pictures and haul it over here in case anyone is interested. :]

All right, time for me to get going. I think I'm going to make good on an earlier promise to myself to post more 'unfinished' work up here on dA, and start in on that backlog of stuff..

See you guys soon. Still one more bit of news that's not quite ready to come to light yet, but..  getting closer. CLOSER STILL I SAY. Mwahahah.


:heart:
© 2011 - 2024 Endling
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Zeikier's avatar
Man, it's gonna be weird actually seeing that huge-ass poster be a reality. Hopefully your wrist doesn't turn to dust by the end of it!