Streaming my art live here.

I'll be sketching for an indetermined amount of time this morning. It's currently 6:30 EST. If you'd like to watch me draw and paint live, stop on by :-) I'll be doing mostly dragons, as I have a ton of work to do for the next how to draw book.

I finally finished the darned background on the mermaid dragon image :-) It still leaves something to be desired, but I'm calling this one done.


A random dragon spot illustration I inked and colored up last night. The original sketch for this was about a year old, so the legs and feet are a little bit simplistic (something I've been trying to correct this last year). Eb says it looks like a toucan! :-) I agree, haha.

The two video workshops Impact made are complete! I went down to shoot these three months ago: They work fast, haha! They are approx an hour long each. I thought I'd share some of the online previews with you. If you like these videos, you can view the entire version on Artist's Network TV. (They also have videos by lots and lots of different artists on different mediums, subjects, and the like. It's very cool!) Both videos are HD and can be paused or replayed as much as you like, so they're a bit different than my ustreams, which are simply me as I work, not me teaching different techniques.

The first video is about digital art techniques in Adobe Photoshop. The preview concentrates on a couple different tools you can use to ink. The workshop in its entireity has around a dozen different tools, techniques, and tricks.


The second workshop is about drawing dragons. It's a pencil workshop and in it I go over materials and different ways to approach drawing dragon heads, design elements, wings, Dolosus, and finally a short time-lapse segment that sorta brings it all together. The preview is the time-lapse segment. The rest of the video does have voiceover and instruction, haha.

(on a side note, I'm sad about the time-lapse dragon. I was trying to draw quickly and made so many mistakes, haha. Luckily time-lapse dragon was just a final little thing after all the tutorials themselves.)

I will begin streaming in a half hour or so here. Working on monster kisses background + lighting.



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I'm offering 1/2 - 1/3 price dragon commissions.

( A new piece of art + HUGE explanation on what these commissions are and what they entail inside. )

Commission Slots

Dragon Head Shot: $15 (Full! Thank you!)
1. Miranda: Complete!
Clean drawing. Approved.
Final Artwork. Approved.
2. Toxicneon: Complete!
Clean drawing. Approved.
Final Artwork. Approved.

Dragon Full Body: $30 (Full! Thank you!)
1. Zenedai: Complete!
Rough drawing. Pose approved.
Clean drawing. Drawing approved.
Finished Artwork. Approved.
2. Lady of Dragons: Complete!
Clean drawing. Redo in progress.
Redo of drawing + Inking. Approved.
Finished Artwork.

Dragon Expressions 8-10: $60 (Full! Thank you!)
1. Anya: Payment received, thank you! Sketching.
Description/Design Talkies.
Even More Description/Design Talkies.
Further Description/Design Talkies.
Expressionless Dragon Head + Color Test.

Daylight savings got me, so I'll be streaming at 2:15PM EST today instead of 1.

Ustream is a site that allows me to stream my desktop to you so you can watch me "live" (there's a 15 second delay from the time I actually make movements, haha) and ask Photoshop questions. You can tell if I'm streaming if the little graphic above says "Online". I'm pretty good about swapping it in and out. If it says "Offline" chances are good that I'm offline. Go figure.

I recently got an external hard drive. They are very affordable! I got a 640GB HD for $110. My entire laptop has 100GB, only 60 of which I am using!

I was able to partition it into two sizable chunks. One I use for time machine, to create a snapshot of my entire computer several times a day. This means that if my computer ever fries, I can completely restore it once its been repaired, programs, preferences, and all! The other half of the hard drive I use for media storage and files I don't want sitting around on my computer. I have a lot of art on my hard drive, sometimes saved multiple times in multiple formats. It will be nice to store some of this away and clean my computer up real nice.

I feel very reassured, and grateful that I no longer have to do weekly DVD backups!

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I realized something today that I hope to remedy. I no longer work with my personal website, NeonDragonArt.com, on a frequent basis. I've fallen into the lure of LJ and Deviantart. It is much easier to update these sites then it is to update my own webpage. Despite this neglect, my website gets more traffic then all my offsite galleries combined.

Though it's not as easy to update, I need to make efforts to make NeonDragonArt.com my main site focus. Here's my plan.

1. All these art updates I type into livejournal? They... should really be typed to my updates section as well.

2. Though it may seem counter-productive to "maintaining my personal website", I need to update and maintain all my offsite galleries with greater care. Here's the deal. I used to join a lot of offsite galleries and offer a small, current sampling of my art. Each piece of art would link back to my website (in a small, tasteful manner), and I would have my site linked off my main page in the gallery there. They were ways to get my art out to a greater audience, but never a complete gallery or a replacement for my website. If people liked what they saw, there was incentive to visit my site to see more.

I need to go visit and recover all these off-site galleries. They have a ton of outdated artwork on them. I need to work to making sure each gallery has less then 50 pieces of art in it, and that it's 50 of my best pieces. I need to make sure my url is prominate.

The galleries I must maintain and update are:

ArtAttack
Artspots
ArtWanted
Deviantart
Elfwood
Epilogue
Facebook
FurAffinity
Gaia Online
SheezyArt

Can anyone recommend other sites that I should open a gallery with?

3. I need to create additional "site only" content. The tutorials and comics are good for this. I do not post them elsewhere. What I need to do is get some more tutorials excerpted from DragonArt and DragonArt fantasy characters. I was given permission by Impact to do so, but aside from the mermaid fins, I just havn't gotten around to it!

4. NeonDragonArt.com forums are a mess. Mind you, they don't look it. In fact, they're very nice thanks to a small but close knit user base and a team of dedicated wonderful moderators. The problem lies with me and with the forums themselves.

NDA forums use PHPBB 2. This version of PHPBB is several years outdated. I have never upgraded, because I feared to upset people with a forum move that would require them to reregister and lose all their posts. This way of thinking is silly, because the "problem" will only get worse, as more users and posts are added every day. NDA must upgrade to PHPBB3 and here is why: Every day 40-70 bots register on the forums because the security on PHPBB2 is poor. To counteract this, I handle all registrations myself, but it sometimes takes me weeks or even months to get through them. By this time, many of the actual people-people who have registered have lost interest and do not post, as when they registered, they wanted to post THEN. To have people be able to activate their own registrations, I must make the upgrade.

Upgrading will also fix the broken signature problem on our forums as well as allow users to upload their own avatars. This will be a welcome change indeed!

5. I need to update the NDA store and remove items we no longer carry and add in the new items that we do! I also need to work with Ed to get the gallery crosslinked with the store. Basically, it would be nice if you could go through the gallery and if you look at a picture called "Green Dragon", you could then scroll down and in small text under the description, see all the products green dragon is available on and add then to your cart if you so desire. This will be MUCH more intuitive then the strange system we currently have. NDA might get one order a week. I feel it could do triple this with regular updates, better product photography, and a better order form. The products we carry are really quite nice! I think they should be doing better :-/

6. This is low on my priority list, but something that needs to be done. NeonDragonArt.com's menu is currently geared for 800x600 rez. No one uses this rez anymore. I want to widen the layout to 1024x768. This would give me a lot more real estate on the site to play with. I don't want to change the site colors or much of the site code. Just fix a few key graphics and code to do this.

7. I want to remove Project Butterfly from the Comics menu of my site. I will not be creating a new comic anytime soon, and it's mean to put a teaser for something that may not happen for several years yet.

8. I want to take care of updating the links section with all the link exchange requests I've received. Perhaps I should also take the time to initiate some of my own requests for exchanges with other sites. I havn't asked for a link exchange in 5 years :-/

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Here's the dragon head I drew on ustream today. He's for the book. I think tonight I'm going to work on the horn units that this spot illustration is supposed to accompany. (yes, this sort of post is something I should now be making efforts to put in my updates section. I need to catch NDA up first and get into the swing of things. Ahhhhhh.)

Here's the final image from the last few ustreams.


I will be doing another ustream at 1:00PM EST today. Stop on by if you'd like to watch me draw!

A WIP closeup of the Tidecaller dragon from ustream today.


I'm a bit worried about the piece overall. I needed to draw the full body for book purposes, but when you take into account the small size that this will be printed at, the fact that I havn't added in all the crazy chaos pattern, shading & light is not yet in place, and that I'm adding in a background... it's going to get so busy. It may be a cluttered mess, which is a shame. I really do like the drawing on this.

Some of the things I made while on ustream.

So for a while now I've been tossing around the number "600 illustrations" for my next how-to-draw dragons book. This was in fact a number I plucked out of the air based on how full of art each page was in comparison to the first DragonArt, which had 350 illustrations. I estimated that this book was almost double the first one.

Today I went through my detailed outline and added up all the art required using a calculator.

The total was nearly 1000 illustrations.

Now, this is great. But it suddenly makes the "HUGE AMOUNT OF WORK" I've completed thus far not even a third of what I need. I need to bump up my DragonArt output to 100 illustrations a month if I'm to meet my deadline.

This deadline is completely doable, but it will mean that I have to bump up the time I spend arting a day to a full 8 hours 5 days a week, with minimal interruptions. Normally when I work I'm happily chatting on AIM and refreshing my favorite sites surfing for updates, and I definately have not been working 40 hour weeks on the book. In retrospect, even with Flight Rising and DragonArt plodding along, I've been rather lazy.

I cannot wait to finish. I feel so proud of this book so far. With the first DragonArt and the fantasy characters I felt good about the work I did, but not proud. This book coming up is my baby, and I'm not letting a single piece of half-hearted art into the mix.

So 200,000 are without power. I'm one of them. There's power 1/4 mile down the road, and power 1/4 mile up the road, but no power where my condo is. It's maddening. I'm at Starbucks at the moment. I thought I'd post what I was able to work on yesterday before power was cut abruptly.

Another head to go with the ear tutorials. This one for the webbed ear:


Edit: Oh no! I'm all out of coffee and I don't want to buy any more >.>; I think I'll just sit here and pretend to drink my empty cup...

Another dragon head, this time to compliment the elongated ears in the ear tutorial. I tried to make this as different looking as possible from the tuffed ears in my previous post.