I haven’t posted anything in a little while because there’s been so much going on here. I’ll give you a little summary of what’s been happening.

First off, I’ve been waking up every morning at 7 am to a deafening banging and my whole house shaking. Our house has had a makeover; a new roof and new vinyl siding. It looks really nice now, but there were some moments where I thought the entire place would fall apart at the seams due to the banging and shaking.

To make things even more insane, we’ve had guests coming out the wazoo. My brother Erik and his wife Anna stayed here from a while, and as a result I was relocated to the guest bedroom while they commandeered my room (don’t ask, that’s just how my family works). Then we had guests from Milwaukee stay here, filling the place up even more. With regular visits from my grandfather and my mom’s friends, the house was like a zoo… very crowded and very hot (thankfully no poop was being flung around).

As far as art goes, I’ve been drawing less than normal while relocated to the guest room, but I did quite a bit of work before the insanity arrived that I just never managed to post on the site, so I will be uploading that soon. Soon I’ll be starting work on two d20 projects: a book for Dog Soul Publishing and a campaign setting for Emerald Press. That’s a great relief because it means I’ll finally have some money, even if it’s not a whole lot.

I’ve also been spending time working on the game area in the basement. We’ve build a nice looking game table (although not quite the ultimate game table), set up a couch and tv area, and got some minis ready for painting. D&D is a lot more fun with the new table and minis, and now we can play Warhammer too.

I’ve been playing around with Google Earth and set up xplanet to give me a near-real-time satellite image of Earth and space as a desktop background. It’s really fun to watch the sunlight revolve around the planet, the weather on the globe, and the planets and moon revolve around. It’s fun to be a nerd.

And of course, the biggest and most important news: soon I’ll be going to Vancouver! On Auguest 9th I’m leaving to visit Frances for almost a whole month. I’m really excited. I haven’t seen her since the end of school, and this will be the longest time we’ve seen eachother outside of Japan. So I’m really happy about that.

I kind of feel bad for not writing more, cause I’ve had a lot of moments where I really had something funny to post and either wasn’t able to get online or didn’t feel like writing at the time. That’s the curse of writing I guess; when you have something to say you can’t write, and when you can write you don’t have anything to say. Anyway, I had better stop writing now. I ate Chinese food last night and I’m starting to feel “Confucious’ Revenge,” if you know what I mean…

Here’s another marker sketch. This one was going along great until I got to the face. The markers bled too much and made her look a bit trollish… but that’s the risk you take with markers unfortunately. There’s no fixing mistakes. It’s just a sketch anyway, so it doesn’t need to be gorgeous. If I ever turn it into something, I promse she will be much prettier.

This is a character from a D&D game I run (like some of the other marker sketches I’ve done recently). He’s a real nasty guy; ex-gladiator, legionnaire, and oppressive ruler over a small kingdom in the farthest reaches of the Empire of Helios. Those antlers on his shoulders are the same ones on the staff of the Celtic lady I posted earlier; she was the leader of a small political resistance, and he had her executed.

Just some proof that I’m still around and still working on things.

The first one is Ariana Trelawny, the last in a line of woodland royalty, leader of a resistance group fighting back the omnipresent Empire of Helios. The other one is just sort of my take on an Aztec-like dinosaur knight.

Does this happen to you? It happens to me a lot. I normally don’t need all that much sleep, so it happens mainly when I sleep too much or loo late the day before. And then at night my brain goes into overdrive and all I want to do is think or work or run.

It’s kind of fun as long as I’m not unable to sleep because of something depressing. And today that’s not the case, so I don’t mind it (except for the fact that I’ll be tired as hell tomorrow). It’s mostly happy memories of Ringling keeping me up. What a rotten time to be nostalgic again, eh?

So to spend some of this energy, I’ve worked a bit on my portfolio. I’m trying to get some more work up there without cluttering it up too much. Also, once I get some more marker sketches done I’d like to put a section for them up there.

This is not the time to go running… so I’d better find something else to do. ^_^” Goodnight…

Edit: A short while after writing this, I suspect the source of this extra energy was a tall glass of Newman’s Own limeade I had around midnight. I feel a pretty hard sugar crash coming soon. Dang you, Newman! Why must your oh-so-delicious limeade play with my body so?

Well I have been sketching and doodling some fantasy stuff again (despite my 4-year hiatus from fantasy stuff at Ringling), especially because lack of fantasy stuff is the biggest problem I face with the publishers I’ve shown my portfolio to.

I’m still getting used to markers, and color markers are a whole new can of worms beyond the 5 gray ones I brought with me to Japan.

The only one with an actual story is the 2nd one; he’s an image from my D&D game, overlooking a valley to the north of an imperial citadel.

Having graduated, and being unemployed, I get lots of time to think about what I’m doing.

Recently I’ve been thinking back to high school, when it came time to apply to colleges and I had no idea what I wanted to do… so I only applied to 3 schools, and I applied for art because I just didn’t want to make the wrong decision with a subject to study. I also didn’t want to go to school in NJ.

At Ringling I always kind of felt “outside” of the groups, because everyone seemed so dedicated to their work that I wasn’t sure if I could be as devoted as they were. Eventually I finally felt like maybe I had the talent to do art professionally, but even then I didn’t know exactly what particular field of art I wanted to do. And I still don’t. Around that time my parents had told me it was the last chance I had to change schools and majors, because restarting school would take too much money.

So I stuck with art, and learned to be happy with it. Until I went to Japan. I had been interested in Japan for a while, and in going there I such a great time that upon returning I realized I had found something I truly loved doing. And travelling had caused me to grow so quickly, and opened up a whole new world of ideas for me to explore. To make up for the new doubt, I worked extra hard my senior year, and I really began to feel confident I could be an artist.

So now here I am, drawing and painting, looking for work, and enjoying what I do. I’m not really sure if I enjoy it as much as I should, but I do enjoy it, so I’m not unhappy. Sometimes, though, I wonder if I’d be happier in some other line of work… with a completely different type of education. I’m afraid that even though I’m happy for now, some day I might regret not taking certain steps at this point in my life.

I think as long as I’m true to my feelings, in the future I won’t regret having followed my heart.