leanne

We are very very close to punching the "go" button on the home upgrades for selling the house.

I now have to pack the ENTIRE. HOUSE. .... Really fast. Yeeg. There really isn't any other word for it. Yeeg.

I managed to put together all of my kosode except for the collar and the hem tonight.

Just might get everything done on time! (:

Mark and I watched thirteen episodes of Baccano! over the past three days.

We're going to stop there. Episode 13 neatly wraps everything up that needs wrapping up. There are three more episodes, but they were direct-to-DVD releases, and a perusal of Wikipedia indicates that none of it is must-see, just extra end-tying-up.

I suspect that folks who have seen it already are going "you liked Baccano!? But it's hideously and often grotesquely violent." It is. It is not, however, gratuitously violent; every piece is plot-related, and that's the important part for me. (It is worth noting that immediately before watching the first episode of Baccano!, I watched seven minutes of the first episode of Angel Beats and turned it off for gratuitous violence.)

Baccano! -- immortal alchemists from the 18th century are living in the 1930s as gangsters. The story is told from multiple perspectives and out of order. It's kind of like watching a LARP being told on TV. It's lusciously beautiful; the artists paid attention to detail. And the story is very well-written.

I will admit to being delighted with Firo, who is, as the introduction says, "main-character-ish" (though I'll note that you don't even see him for a good third of the episodes). But the cast is huge, interesting, and hugely varied, and I'm glad they put the effort of naming most of the important people in the intro sequence, because the first few episodes are pretty confusing as you're trying to figure out who everyone is.

In short: I recommend it, with the caveat that it definitely *deserves* the MA rating on Netflix.

Rant at Apple: dude, guys, I love my RSS feeds in my email. Why doesn't the mail app on the iPad do that?

Rant at the iPad app developers: dude, guys, seriously, I do NOT want to give Google any more of my information. Don't *any* of you host a synchronization service?

In the past two months, things that have been broken:

* the PS3
* the XBox
* my body
* my house
* and now my car

Can I be done now?

... who is OK with temporarily boarding my fishies. Thank goodness. Now to work out the logistics. I have questions up on the loach forum to try to get that all squared away ...

Back from Idyllwild. Fabulous vacation. Longer post later, when I get the pictures off my phone.

OK. So.

With the insane amount of work I've been doing over the past three months, and the fact that I've been doing it at my kitchen table as opposed to on any sort of ergonomic setup, I have managed to give myself nerve damage in my left hand. No, this is not my drawing hand, this is my lean-on-and-use-the-keyboard hand. The problem, as far as I can tell, is primarily that lean-on part. Neya has done a terrific job of getting rid of the worst of the problem through massage, but it's not totally gone, and probably won't be unless I can get myself some serious rest and an updated work area.

The updated work area is in the works, but will not be available for at least a week, and probably more like two.

The rest ... that's a whole different issue. ): I basically have a comic buffer up until the 9th of September. I'm at a con from the 9th-11th. And I'm hoping the BMAG guys contract with me for more work, because I enjoyed what I was doing a *lot*, and getting paid is good.

I want to do some prints for the con, because I'm two tables over from Little Vampires, which makes selling the mini-monster bookmarks a bit problematic, though I'll still be bringing them anyway. I probably won't get to do the prints given the problems with the hand.

Outside the con, I have no way of handling Saijiki Stories and the video game work at the same time, and especially not with the injury, dammit. They basically both chew up the same block of time. I only have 25 more strips to go for Springside (23 if you count the ones I'm trying to finish this week without messing up my shoulder/hand further).

Basically, if I get more work from BMAG, there's a good chance that Saijiki Stories will go on an irregular schedule until the work is done. (See also: getting paid is good, destroying one's arm is bad.) I *hate* that, but I only have so much time in the day, and I don't want to end up with an unusable left hand.

I'm so frustrated that I can't do everything I want to do.

Wanted to give a shout-out to mindways for reminding me of the value of practice. I dug out my Spirited Away storybook today, and realized that while I'm not yet a Ghibli-level artist, I can see the influences in my work and I've got some ideas of the way to get there from here -- and some of those ideas are not too hard.

Some of that is baldface practice via copying. I am likely to do that. There may at some point be art to give away -- I wouldn't feel comfortable selling straight copies.

Kinda wish I had the art book instead of the story book, not because of the art (though that'd be nice), but because the Japanese in the story book is in large type and is easy to read and I am very, very tempted to spend time trying to understand it. My life, as it turns out, does not run in ever-widening circles. It runs in ever-expanding webs.

I do have the Kiki's Delivery Service and Howl's Moving Castle artbooks. But Spirited Away is still my favorite.

Also, I realized ... Mala has a lot in common with Chihiro.

Just a short one. I've been at ComicCon for the past two days. I've done four portfolio reviews and I'm grateful that the first one was with Disney, with a lovely woman named Dawn who was very kind to a total newbie. (She was kind enough to tell me that I was building my own brand and definitely had my own style, and that I wouldn't be a good fit at Disney -- which I knew -- but offered to email me links to other people who had done similar things. Awesome. <3)

The overall assessment I got is "your chibis are adorable, and you have a unique style." I'm hoping that "unique style" is not code for "your art sucks". {: But at least people like the chibis -- in fact, many people seem to like the chibis. The folks over at Stone Arch Books would have rather seen my comic in the chibi style. *shrugs helplessly* Umm. Yeah. I got a good critique from the folks at LEGO as well, though they didn't ask me to do more work, and I did meet some people who they did ask for pieces.

I think, if I want to, that I can probably construct a portfolio that will get me a job at LEGO. If I want one. I will need to spend time on it. And do some 3D work. They're looking for video game/animation artists as well as comic book artists.

I'm also pondering the idea of doing Magellanus Jones as a chibi comic instead of where I was originally going with it, given that that seems to be the style folks like. (Much as I love Aliens Built My Hot Rod, it's absolutely *not* a chibi comic; it's a shonen comic, and I sadly don't have the skillz.)

For those of you who haven't heard, I got a gig with Beyond Madness and Genius doing backgrounds for Point of Descent. I have eight to bang out in just over a month. I think I can do it, but I really really need the rest of the concept art as soon as Tim can get it to me. I'm super-excited about this. (:

I spent some time in a 3D digital art panel yesterday, which was really good, but makes me want to get copies of Poser (which I'm likely to get soon), Vue, and Maya. Gleep. (Poser and Vue are rationally priced, but Maya ...) The panel talked a lot about using 3D art as the "underpainting" for your art, and it was really really good. I haven't done 3D in a while, but it's great fun for the most part, and it'd give me some more tools for doing video game art. Which honestly, I'm very excited about all over. (:

So anyway, that's where I'm at. I'll probably post something like this to the blog on the website at some point. I'm still sort of reassessing what to do, but first things first: eight backgrounds for BMAG, stat. (;