[Project:ThreeSixFive] Day [III].

It's been a fairly quiet day today. Having said that, not much drawing got done...

Today's entries:

Finally! Frost and ice are here! I thought I'd have seen them long before now, but I'm not going to complain about spending Christmas Day and New Year's Day in a T-shirt.

Another spaceship. This one was on my first day of the project, but I drew it again in photoshop and had a mess around. I don't even know where to start with what I'm going to do differently next time. Sometimes it's encouraging to know that the inly way is up...

What is nice is knowing that the SugarBowl is on right now and the fact that I've been drawing for an hour or so doesn't mean that I've missed the whole game.

I'm going to let the dog out and get a snack.

Peace.

[Project:ThreeSixFive] Day [II].

I didn't put much thought into how I was going to write the title of the project. I figured brackets and a colon with no spaces would be cool, right? Right? And everyone loves Roman numerals. I was VII in primary school.

Maybe I'll go super arty and end up with [P:CCCLXV:CCLXXIV] or something...

For today;

We sorted the house out and packed all the decorations away. It was a long day! Here's the tree outside the house. It is only now I realise the lights are all around the porch and the garage...

And more spaceships! The next step will be to mess around with some of these in photoshop and see where they go.

That's all for today. I'm off out to hang out with my wifey and some friends. Have a great day.

Peace.

[Project:ThreeSixFive] introduction, hopes and dreams.

I caught the tail-end of a friend's project on Facebook a couple of months ago. I liked it. He posted a photo a day for the whole year. That's it. I loved the simplicity of the project - do one thing every day of the year. Simple but at the same time, pretty hard to stick to!

I'm going to try and do the same thing. But I'm also going to try and post a drawing a day, too.

Because I like a challenge.

The challenges that I can see I'm going to face at the moment are travel-related - I'm scared of having a hard time finding an internet connection as we travel around. But I'm not too worried - I'll deal with that when I get to it.

Here are my rules.

1. The photo posted must have been taken on the day it is posted. No reserve photos.

2. The drawing posted must have been drawn on the day it is posted. No reserve doodles.

3. My limit for being cheeky and combining the photo and the drawing as a double post (counting as the photo itself and the drawing) is 5% of the project. Rounding up. That's 19. No more.

4. I can use any camera I can get my hands on. Whether it belongs to me or someone else - if it's a photo that I've taken, it counts. Sometimes that'll be the only way I can post it here.

5. My deadline is midnight of whatever timezone I am in.

6. Should circumstances dictate that I am late home of an evening, I shall post the photo before I go to sleep on that day. This should not be that often.

7. Ultimately, I'm not going to worry about it. I'm just going to do my best.

I'm looking forward to trying to sum up a day with a photo. I'll be keeping track of the number of photos I take altogether, what a lot of them are of, etc. and I'll post that at the end of the project.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I'll find it a challenge!

To open:

This was taken as we were going over a little lake on our way home from town this evening.

Some spaceship doodles. I'm not that good with vehicles, so this looks about the right time to learn.

Some favourites from the sheet o' doodles:

It was just a bit of fun messing round with shapes and things, but at the same time I'm really happy with them!

I got "Lift Off" by Scott Robertson yesterday. A lovely late Christmas/on time New Year present! From what I've read so far it's amazing. I'll be wearing it out this year, no doubt.

Until next time...

Peace.

Toad in the hole.

This was a nice little start to a project that's been talked about between myself and a friend for a while. A long while.

Here's an idea sheet for the uniform of the characters in the story. I'm still getting used to using the same figure and putting different clothes on. It's basic, but I usually just draw in pen, so it's been fun having a template.

Then I drew a couple of body types for the character I was wanting to push. I cheated for the body type - I grabbed some images and flew over them quickly for the shape. I don't do this for final projects or things I'll use professionally because it's pretty lame, but for a rough idea of shape, I don't much care.

And then the final character! Still pretty rough and not in my usual style, but the idea of the project is that it will help me find another style and a more comfortable and quicker way of working in photoshop. I spent about 4 hours on this today, so it's not the worst start, time-wise. I tried to keep my colour range low - helped a whole lot by the Kuler extension in photoshop.

The guy is called Toad. He is an artist and an excellent outdoorsman. He can hunt and track anything and is one of the best chefs in the land. He carved his spear from the rib of a Megalisk and the knife he wields is shaped from the tooth of an Octobear.

There are a few things that I'll come back to with this guy, but after four hours of sitting in front of a computer screen, I need a break.

I'm going to watch some TV with my wifey.

Peace.

Exciting things.

Well, Christmas is nearly here. It's been a fun year.

I can confidently say that I have been blessed enough to make more this year with my art than ever before! My prayer is that I can claim that again this time next year!

My wifey and I just got back from being with her best friend. She gave birth today to a lovely little girl - the same day as my best friend's birthday, too! Since getting home, I've managed to finish a draft of a design that I was asked to do and I'm going to start making a doll now.

I'm pretty excited about Christmas this year. It's my first Christmas in America, so it's going to be fun seeing what new traditions I'll be involved in. At the moment, my wifey and I share our family quirks and manage to have ourselves a four-day Christmas. It's great!

I prepared a scavenger hunt for her for Boxing Day. I know we'll have it free to ourselves because it's not a thing over here. I'll post what I did after the day - I don't want to spill it all here and have her read it. That would be a waste of a day! But I can say that it was a challenge for me to think up and a joy to do.

This might be the first Christmas that I know what I'm getting. I think the grammar there was right...

I ordered a few camera lenses, so I'm going to have a lot of fun playing with them. My mother-in-law gave me her Canon Rebel about a week and a half ago, so I'm ecstatic!

I also got my hands on Final Cut Studio, so I can't wait to get that installed. With the shopping and the wrapping and projects that I'm working on and dealing with both my bank card 'breaking' and lovely issues with my Green Card, I haven't had much down time. Hopefully that'll roll around about this time next week.

For now, the above is a picture of me in a dream I had a couple of weeks ago. It was a pretty cool dream. I described it and drew it for my wifey the morning after. It was a lovely example of how our brains differ!

Apparently, the two hemispheres of my manbrain are slightly farther apart than her ladybrain. The same is true for most other men and women. This means that us men have the ability to picture what an object is like from any angle without having to physically pick it up and turn it round. Or at least we have a much better idea. On the other brain, it's easier for women to express themselves emotionally and make quicker emotional connections - because more of their synapses are intact; they haven't been broken from the larger gap between brain sides.

In summary;

I drew my first-person dream as a bird's eye view and she didn't know how I could do that.

I'm tired. That was far too much writing for this time of night. It wasn't even us that had a baby.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate it.

Peace.

All for one.

It's always fun to re-imagine characters. Here are the Three Musketeers. I still have D'Artagnan to draw. And maybe spell right.

It's nice to be drawing for myself a little bit again. I've just finished a few weeks working construction and it was leaving me too tired to draw much, so now that that's over for a while, I'm drawing a few things for some friends and otherwise getting back into drawing and making things for me (and my beautiful wifey for Christmas). That's a wonderful thing about being a creative type. I can make gifts! What I save in money, I spend in time, but it's more than worth it. To be able to pour into a creation and see it loved is so fulfilling!

I've had my camera out recently. Nothing much to show for it, but it's nice to give it a spin. I took the photos off and formatted the card so I can start anew. Some of the photos were from two years ago, so it was time to start over!

In other good news, we have a card reader and a scanner here, so I'll be able to get better pictures of my doodles instead of tiny, blurry, grainy images.

What else?

'tis the season!

I love Christmas. It's not been the same for a few years - this year, my wifey and I are staying with her parents, so it's going to be an All-American Christmas, with all of their traditions and things. I'm looking forward to it. Last year, it was an All-English affair, with my wifey and I staying with my folks for a few days. Before that, it was our first and only Christmas as an engaged couple and going back further still, we weren't even dating! So it's changed up a lot over the last four years or so. Which is amazing. Combining our traditions, my wifey and I have a 5-day Christmas, so we love it all the more!

To me, Christmas is all about the presents. I've said it before, but it was on Facebook and now I can't find it. I thought I'd already blogged about it, so I'll do that and update this post with the link. Basically, Jesus is a year-round thing for me. The only different thing about Christmas is that we get presents.

Anyway, that's my update today. I'm going to draw some more and maybe shower. Who knows?

Thanks for reading. I appreciate it.

Peace.

So long, 24.

It's been an amazing year. I've been to Amsterdam, Germany and Iceland this year, as well as moved to the States for a while. I am so blessed.

It's my birthday tomorrow and I had the day off today, so I looked up a load more reference pictures, draw and doodled a whole lot, read my Bible and prayed. Then my wifey's family all came over - 3 Grannys and a Papa. My father-in-law and I had a joint party (his birthday was on Monday), so we had a great mexican pizza lasagna thing followed by an enourmous cake with our combined age in candles. 73. It was ridiculous. There was more fire than cake at one point.

Presents were opened and a piñata was decimated (my first). My wifey got me this little bad boy.

Yea. That's the Bear Grylls Ultimate knife by Gerber. It's incredible. All I'm doing at the moment is pulling it out and putting it back in the sheath, but come tomorrow (and/or the weekend after), it'll be helping me fish. Whether that's just cutting line or skinning and gutting the things, I don't know yet.

It is a fixed blade knife, so it's ideal for heavier work than the folding blade knives, the bottom half of the blade is serrated which will give me a nice start when I'm cutting things up, leaving the top of the blade good for skinning and slicing. There's a notch on the back of the blade which I can use in combination with the small flint stick slotted in the sheath to get some sparks for a fire. Then there's the sharpening plate on the back of the sheath and instructions for land to air signals and a pocket-sized 'priorities of survival' leaflet. On the lanyard is an emergency whistle and the bottom of the knife handle is steel so I can smash things as well as cut things. Finally, there are two small holes on the handle nearer the blade so I can fasten the knife to a stick and have a makeshift spear if the need should arise.

It's amazing.

I also got a nice lot of fishing gear and another present coming tomorrow - on my real birthday. It's been a break in tradition for me, as I normally wait to open things (I still have the presents from my parents sitting on my shelf. They've been there for three weeks), so my excitement is lasting legitimately for two days! Three if you count whatever happens at church on Sunday.

I just wanted to stop by and say goodbye as a 24-year-old manboy. I'll be back to say hi as a 25-year-old manboy soon enough.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate your time, I truly do.

Peace.