Computer Paranoia
I think that these last few months have made me irreversibly paranoid. I now maintain 4 external harddrives... One for the Mac as an automatic time machine backup... One for the mac as a backup that's me just dragging files into it as an archive. One for the PC as an automatic (but difficult to access without a "full install" of the entire archive) backup, one for the PC as an easily accessable file archive.

What's horrible is that I'm considering getting a Carbonite subscription to boot... to have my files stored online so if the house burns down I still have them. I suppose I could back everything up on DVDs and send a set of them to my parents. I know it's silly to worry about things that are backed up on multiple machines, but when both your Desktop and your laptop fail on you and the only thing that saved your butt was your external HDs... that's kinda scary. The external HD can fail too! It makes me think that frequent DVD backup may be something I should begin again.

Digital art is great, but so much can go wrong with computers that the thought of losing hours and hours of work is a little scary. (Especially when some of that work is for a 800+ illustration count book that hasn't been sent off yet.) I can't imagine what I'd do if I had lost everything and my deadline was borked.

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Faerie Art Club Promotion
I know a lot of people watch me for the dragons, but one of my favorite things to draw was (and still is) faeries. I thought I'd mention a Livejournal community that I've been a member of for several years now. Faerie_Art_Club is a community where artists can share their faerie/mermaid/nymph artwork with others.

They're really a fabulous group but in recent years the club has had less and less frequent posts to it. I thought I'd give it a bit of linkage just in case there are faery lovers who are watching my LJ who were unaware about this Livejournal community.

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Art Trade
My long overdue half of a sketch trade for Kiliara from two years ago. Haha. Oh boy. My busy schedule is the reason why trades are currently closed. I *DO* love drawing other peoples characters and creatures, so I hope that in the future this changes. But I can't let myself get into the same mess as I did previously. It's utterly unacceptable and very rude to the person you've traded with.

Click for full view.

I'll be streaming LIVE for a couple of hours tonight.

If you miss the stream I should have a couple segments recorded and available on demand in the livestream channel itself :-)

Here's a little something I sketched up this afternoon. There's a unit in the next book on two legged dino/ostritch dragon leg construction and how you need to balance such creatures with a very upright position or a long heavy tail and such. I'd imagine that this guy walks on his wings a little bit when he's idle :-)

Oh yeah, and he's on fire.

My Desktop gave me a scare last night. In fact, I'm not sure that everything's 100% okay. It sorta... wouldn't start windows. For an hour. I ran the windows repair utility a couple of times and for no apparent reason, it finally loaded up. I saved everything I could think of on something that wasn't the auto-backup external harddrive. (I'm still not entirely sure how to use the PC external HD backup. It's not as intuitive as the mac's time machine external auto-backup.)

I wanted to apologize to those that came to my stream last night. I did not intend to cut it short or leave people hanging. The audio troubles have been resolved, but after that happened the computer fried and by the time I got things running again, it was simply too late to stream!

I did put in some more work on my lung knot sketch. He's kinda cute and twisty.

Some sketch stuff that will probably go nowhere, haha. It was fun to take a quick break from the massive amount of dragons I have to draw. These are pretty rough and have lots of anatomy issues. D=

I've been asked to post more of my rougher sketches and things before they get all corrected and sparkly inked up pretty, so here we go.

I'm going to tell you now that there are many drawing issues because I have not done any corrections to it yet. The skull structure needs some referencing, in addition to some symmetry. The hips could use some help, and the back leg placement could also have some greater care put into it. The wings coming at you could also use some TLC. Hahaha. This is basically the second pass of sketching. First pass is a very loose gesture. Second pass is nailing out the details. Third pass is correcting anatomical errors ect. Then inks. It sounds like a lot, but actually all this happens in about an hour, haha. Finally it gets inked and colored after all that mess.



And if you wanted to see the size that I ink at, this is it zoomed into 100%. I should still probably dig up some reference. I made this up >.>; It doesn't look right, haha.

( 4x sketches underneath. These are the sketches for some of the half price dragonart commissions I took a few days ago. Still waiting on approval, so some of these may change when I do the final pieces a touch. Still kinda fun to see in their rough stage. :-) )

The ironic part is that I used more allosaurus reference then raptor... I need to find some good feets ref.

Bargle:

I went to see the midnight showing of Goblet of Fire with the posse. Very spiffy. I would give you a review, but I would undoubtably spoil some minute detail or two that will lessen the enjoyment of the rabid fans that must see it "fresh". (and I wholehartedly concur!) ...Plus there's probably 100+ better reviews flying through my friends list right now. Anyhoo, have a sketch. I love corn snakes. I just hope that Pliskin isn't floating around in the sky right now...

Today I went to a mini-con "test" held by Suncoast. Attendence was small, but it was a pleasent way to spend the afternoon. I doodled since I couldn't do work on my huge color workload. These are just for fun, no critique nessesary.

Recall those dragon design sheets? I really need to draw those critters more often. There were part of a project, but I don't know if I'll ever have time to do it. Anyhoo, remember Issuldra?


I drew her today greeting a newcomer. I dislike how she's sitting, but love her face and top half. I forgot the frill going down here back, but oh well. It was still fun to draw.


This started as an eyeball that grew to a face that grew to a floating girl that grew to a cyborg. Yay for lack of planning!


And then I drew a messy, incorrect Neon Dragon. (for one thing, she can't walk on two limbs, for another, way too much booty!) Speaking of my avatar, Check out this awesome fanart Manamaraya gifted me with!

A mantis anthro shaman. I saw one of the last mantis's of the season earlier on a bike ride, and it got me on a tangent.


The vampire picture... changed quite a bit. I'm reducing head size on the characters when I do the inking: they are a tiny bit too big for the bodies. Ears on the vamp are misplaced as well. Doh! Spawn cape!!! XD


And a little dark elf playing with magic. My roommate and I love the skull crotch guard :-D


A random cool colored image for your enjoyment, since I obviously am incapable of coloring anything decent at the moment.

I wish I had time to draw more, and color less... In news of a less whiney nature, DeviantArt's Search engine is back up; Hell yeah!

Here's a pencil drawing I made over the course of a South Park episode. Very satisfying. I will eventually have to painstakingly ink and color this for the banshee unit... eventually... arghhhhh... all the fun stuff is out of the way!!! *weep* *runs off to do all the pencils on her other work, leaving no art cookies for herself later*