Self

I’ve noticed that a lot of folks who seem to do the most remark­able things (like Rein­hold Mess­ner for exam­ple, the first per­son to climb all 14 of the world’s peaks taller than 8000m) were actu­ally just try­ing to under­stand their own lim­its and themselves.

Inspir­ing as hell, Christ, I get tinglies just look­ing at this:

Some new arts…

Hey dudes and dudettes, been try­ing to really ham­mer down on that large piece, I finally feel that is is close! So damn close! It has really sur­prised me how long it takes to do an A0 ren­der­ing in pen­cil and char­coal, holy hell it is time con­sum­ing, but is com­ing out nicely!

Yes­ter­day night, I wanted to take a break and did this as a 1/2 hour break and recorded a sketch and fin­ished with this:

If you’d like to check out the video process from start to fin­ish, see it here at youtube:

Today, I went to sketch­group and did a sketch of a demon’s head, it was fun:

Any­way, I look for­ward to get­ting some decent time to do some per­sonal work after this week hope­fully, I need long stretches of time to do any decent art dammit! I don’t want to keep just doing sketches! I want to do some­thing nice and polished!

Hope you’re all keep­ing well in Inter­nets land.

D-man

Be happy, smile!

Some­thing I read a lot about these days is that a lot of artists hate their work. Why? I LOVE my work, warts, prob­lems and all, just as I would love my chil­dren, warts, prob­lems and all.

Life is too short to stress out over such things, you will die early if you stress out like this! So smile and be happy =)

Life update =)

I’m not earn­ing a hell of a lot of money as I am spend­ing a lot of time on a per­sonal com­mis­sion that is time con­sum­ing but very impor­tant to my client, so I want to do a very good job on it as I know it means so much to him. I’m treat­ing it as a fan­tas­tic oppor­tu­nity to also prac­tice my char­coal and graphite which I have not had a chance to use for a while. I’m hope­fully going to fin­ish this off by this week.

I am also going to be doing a cou­ple of indie title box art pieces this week and I’ve also started to reg­u­larly teach a few peo­ple pri­vately which is lovely fun. All great peo­ple of all dif­fer­ent ages all want­ing to learn art, it’s really enjoy­able. I am look­ing for­ward to doing more per­sonal art work in the com­ing weeks as well as hav­ing the time to solicit more per­sonal and com­mer­cial jobs heh.

I’ve become really inter­ested in delv­ing into my cul­tural back­ground as of late see­ing as I have never done that before, so I have pur­chased some books on Chi­nese and Japan­ese art and I am tear­ing into it so that it informs my work a lit­tle bit more. Also, I have become a lit­tle more inter­ested in Bud­dhist teach­ings and mediation.

Sketch­group has been going really well, we’re hav­ing new peo­ple join all the time, seen new faces just about every week, been pretty awe­some, recently had some new dudes turn up, they’re great artists and great peo­ple too, I have a feel­ing that they will become good mates.

General Concept Art Advice

Being in a priv­i­leged posi­tion of being able to help guide other peo­ple in var­i­ous ways is a hum­bling experience.

When some­one of their own free will comes to me with a ques­tion that will poten­tially shape a large part of their life or help them to choose a path to travel, I con­sider it a real honor. So I do my best to give them an authen­tic point of view that is my own, as opposed to a luke­warm limp wristed polit­i­cally cor­rect answer. It may grate some peo­ple, but I am unapolo­getic about it.

That isn’t to say I tell them they have to do any­thing I talk about — that they must do this or else they will fall into a pit of acid and go to hell. That’s not what I’m about.

Read more

Wonderful little presentation.

I came across this lit­tle video on a speech deliv­ered by Eliz­a­beth Gilbert, best sell­ing author of Eat, Pray, Love this morn­ing while I was lying, warm and snug­gled in my bed.

I had just woken up after another crazy late night work­ing till 5am — which I love by the way, so I’m not com­plain­ing, and I was check­ing out my emails and any new inter­est­ing Face­book updates so I guess I kinda dis­cov­ered it by acci­dent since I don’t really pay too much atten­tion to peo­ple post­ing vids.

Most likely it is because I have grap­pled with such issues in the past, regard­ing cre­ativ­ity blocks that I really enjoyed lis­ten­ing to this alter­na­tive method of deal­ing with suc­cess and failures.

It’s sim­i­lar to some of the sen­ti­ments and ways of think­ing laid out in The Artist’s Way, but deliv­ered with some good natured humour, warmth and emo­tion that is dif­fi­cult to get from the writ­ten word.

Hope you enjoy it and if you wish to dis­cuss it or com­ment about it, please feel free to use the com­ment sec­tion below.

Stay chilled.

D-Man