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

Dear blog…

Dear blog,

The old rusty inef­fi­cient coil heater that my ex girl­friend gave me before she moved out is turned on, click­ing and clack­ing mak­ing me feel warm and fuzzy.

Out­side my wall sized win­dow, it is a chilly dark Mel­burn­ian night, I can hear some night birds chirp­ing as the world turns over.

I just fin­ished my dinner. All things con­sid­ered, I feel pretty darned con­tent with my life and the writ­ing side of my brain wants me to bang out a blog post. See where it goes. Cool wit you?

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My Friend…

I just arrived home from catch­ing up with a close friend of mine who lives on the other side of Aus­tralia. Because of his loca­tion, we don’t get to hang out much but when we do it’s like we see and work with each other every day.

We both joke around, talk­ing the most juve­nile stuff known to man, our sex­ual exploits, our embar­rass­ing stories…sometimes it’s dif­fi­cult to talk through the laugh­ter. I have lit­er­ally had to stop laugh­ing at some of his sto­ries, not because they weren’t funny, but because my jaw mus­cles, belly and cheeks were aching.

In the next breath we have dis­cussed at length, to uncon­scionable hours of the morn­ing things like courage, integrity, the exis­tence of God, broth­er­hood, male pride, intesti­nal for­ti­tude and what it is like to hear a man scream­ing, know­ing that he is about to die and how it feels, being the cause of it.

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Inspiration on this Day…

Part of the cre­ative process is to be inspired, and I wanted to just spout a few ran­dom mus­ings about it here.

It cer­tainly is not nec­es­sar­ily before you begin an image, but def­i­nitely some­where along the pro­ces­sional line you need to become inspired when you’re work­ing in order to even come close to pro­duc­ing an inspired image that will speak to others.

How likely you are to cre­ate an inspi­ra­tional or mov­ing image when you have no emo­tional con­nec­tion to your own work, I leave that to you to deduce.

Inspi­ra­tion is not nec­es­sar­ily some­thing that relies com­pletely on exter­nal fac­tors — the choice to look at work, words and engage in expe­ri­ences that will ignite the flames needed to begin an inspired work is com­pletely within the realms of your own action.

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What teaching means to me…

I’ve always enjoyed my job. I mean heck, who wouldn’t enjoy sit­ting down and draw­ing stuff all day long? Well, peo­ple who can’t draw I sup­pose! Har har!

But that isn’t the boat I sit in and it still feels like a dream some­times to be able to lead a rel­a­tively stress free exis­tence doing what I love and get­ting paid for it.

One thing that has both­ered me in the past though, has been that despite my job being enjoy­able, I’ve always had this feel­ing that I wasn’t really con­tribut­ing a hel­luva a lot to soci­ety. I damn near quit a cou­ple of times because of this and went as far as jump­ing feet first into civic servi­tude with a gov­ern­ment agency. Thank God for small mercies.

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Thank you lovely readers =)

Hey guys, just wanted to send out a quick thank you, I’ve been get­ting quite a bit of feed­back and pri­vate mes­sages and replies to top­ics giv­ing me lovely feedback.

I just wanted to let you all know that since start­ing my reg­u­lar blog post­ings a week or so ago, and read­ing all these great emails and mes­sages has really taken me by sur­prise. I’ve actu­ally started a cou­ple of half-assed blogs before, and never got­ten the response I have had and I just wanted to let you all know that your read­ing is really appreciated.

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Lest We Forget…

Even though I was not born here in Aus­tralia, I moved here when I was very young and to be quite hon­est Aus­tralia is the only place I will ever call home. I love it here, for all it’s short­com­ings, when you step back we cer­tainly are a lucky coun­try and I feel blessed that I live here.

I love it’s peo­ple, it’s multi-cultural aspect, I love the sense of humour, I love the free­doms that we enjoy and many coun­tries only dream about, I love that we are not a nation char­ac­ter­ized by greed and I love the peace that we enjoy.

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So…why “Stylus Monkey”?!

Behind every name, there has to be a good story right? Wrong! I chose this name because those pesky peo­ple who reg­is­ter ONE THOUSAND NAMES A DAY in the hope of sell­ing one of them off at some future point for a humon­gous profit had not already reg­is­tered Sty­lus Mon­key. There, end of story.

Just kid­ding =)

You know the old say­ings where you can “train a mon­key” to do some­thing? You can train a mon­key to bang on a type writer. You can train a mon­key to blow holes in walls. You can train a mon­key to do that job. You can train a mon­key to…DRAW!?

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Stylus Monkey Design website launches!

My cre­ative career has cer­tainly been a wild ride over the last few years and this site has cer­tainly been a long time in com­ing, but I finally decided to take the plunge and to shell out for a pro­fes­sional web­site rather than piggy back­ing off free online portfolios…which never work quite how you’d like them to.

A ques­tion I guess you’d ask is why now rather than a cou­ple of years ago?

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