Umm, hi

So... I'm just waiting around I guess. Applied to Netdevil for the position of Concept Artist. It'd be exciting to get but I'm worried about the timing of things. Cause I'm sort of waiting on permission to show the images I did for Legends of Norrath. I'd really love to have that professional work in my portfolio so Netdevil will be all excited to hire me. So I'm kind of in an uncomfortable position of feeling that I'm in stasis while the world moves on. But I'm managing to distract myself I suppose. I started started a sketchbook thread in conceptart.org. It'll just be a secondary place to post work as I do them besides posting them here. Its mostly to reach out to the community, but also I'm hoping to get mentored by one of the more experienced artists. Theres like an hour study of a boxer in the topic for now so its not even worth linking to as of now.

I'm also hosting a project on Gamingw, a community for game-creation hobbyists where I moderate the graphical arts section. I'm doing a 'Face of GW' project where I collect portraits of members and then run them through a morphing program to create a face made up of the averages of all the images. Had a lot of fun last year and I hope to get some higher quality images this year around.

Also! November 1st is conceptart.org's international self-portrait day! Just a reminder to any readers of this blog. The premise is that on November 1st, everyone needs to do a self-portrait and post it on that day. Heres a link in case you want a look-see, they also have links for the topics of previous years: http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=139827

I suppose I'll throw up a sketch for a character I'm playing around with. Its an anthromorphic giant crocodile! Just trying to figure out his shape. Just a fun D&D character, I really wanted to push his ridiculous strength but trying to keep him crocodile (though I actually think he's an alligator... but the monster manual probably wouldn't care to make a difference).

Panaromic Art and John Lennon's B-Day

So, just to keep up with my blog, i decided to post a bit about what I've been doing. As a hobby, I like to work on game projects, whether its working with software like RPGmaker XP or using a modding program like Warcraft III World Editor. Something I've been interested in doing is, in a RPGmaker project, to do a panaromic background with multiple layers that scroll around at different rates to imitate a scrolling camera. Mountains far away stay fairly static in place while objects up close move much more. I'll post some of the progress I've had with that. I'm up to four layers right now, with the last layer still in a stage of progress, but the shapes are there and its useful to see how dense it'll look once all the layers are in place. I haven't decided whether I'd go beyond four layers. If I do go for a fifth layer it would be more for random doodads than a wrap-around treatment of generic landscape. But here are the layers as I have them:


So yeah, I'm pretty excited to see it once it gets into the program and all the layers start moving independently of each other. It should be noted that all of the layers "wrap" so I'm able to repeat them indefinitely. I think its extremely helpful that they would be scrolling at different rates since the shapes should combine in ways to make it less obvious that they repeat. Of course, the layer that has the highest probability of being noticed as repeating is the highest layer. So what I may end up doing is doubling the width of it and fill it in with more shapes so repeating it would be delayed.

I'm also looking forward to this Thursday, I hope to attend the Imagine Peace Paint-In in downtown Denver. Its a large event inviting local artists and local bands to paint and play (respectively) in Civic Park. I haven't quite figured out the logistics of carrying canvas, palette, painting supplies, and easel downtown but I should be able to manage. Hopefully I'll find my friends already down there and they can look after my stuff if multiple trips to my car are necessary.

Ooh, and something else exciting is that SOE is planning on releasing their new Legends of Norrath online card game set, Ethernauts, later this week. As soon as they do so, I should be able to get permission to post the work I've done for the set here and on my site. So look forward to that!