dubiouslog

My deepest thanks to you all for the wonderful comments I’m receiving about Spark Needle. It’s beautiful to know that my work is making someone happier.

I also found out that the fanlisting for Mewtwo died, so…I can’t believe that I’m getting to apply for it. I’ll be waiting here with all of my fingers crossed. If I get it, however, I won’t make a shrine out of it - I thought about it for a while, and I don’t think I can add something worthy to the beautiful Mewtwo fansites around. I should focus on stuff no one else tackled before. So, the Ai website was shrunk into a more polished fanlisting.

It’s been about five months since that post about my projects and I’m glad to see that some things were done. I’m more or less satisfied with the changes made to the Super Metroid and Fearow fanlistings, Clear Bell has grown into a full Pokémon Crystal tribute, and well, Spark Needle is here. Now I’ll be working on stuff for other people, but let’s see what I should be doing after that:

• REMAKE THE WEASELS FANLISTING ASAP
• Redesign Dark Claws; add new content
• Work on the Angeltower Dex: rewrite the core & upgrade to HGSS, upgrade the styles
• Redesign Advanced Blanket, current layout sucks

These are important, then there are all those minor changes and updates here and there. And of course No Future. Hmm.

For Kuroda_Taiki. Froslass is fun to paint :D
also, rescanned version of the Xivilai from a few posts below. My parents’ scanner sucks, this one matches the colors of the original much more closely.

To do list for this week:

1. At least ten drypoint illustrations for that school project. Remember that book about robots? After much thinking, I ended up changing my theme.  It would have been almost impossible to make a tiny illustrated book fit seamlessly with my huge sci-fi canon, especially since said canon is always developing. So I decided to illustrate “The weasel and Aphrodite”, a tale from Aesop. It’s about a weasel who falls in love with a man, gets turned into a beautiful girl from Aphrodite and almost manages to marry his love…were not for the fact that she’s still a weasel in her mind, so when a mouse runs by during her wedding, she begins to chase the mouse and blows up her cover. More about it later.
2. More illustrations for school, blah blah blah
3. A painting for Cercatesori
4. Two more paintings. Their subjects are VERY bizarre, I won’t tell you what they are to not ruin the surprise. I don’t know if I’ll manage to finish them for this week but hey, I can try.

I had the swine flu and it was underwhelming at its worst, thus proving that the media can really manipulate people down to their very fears. It’s not a revelation, but it’s also not an unfounded lament from a black Myspace. I only have to think about the conversation I had with one of my housemates. When I said I had the flu, she started going on about how I should go to the hospital as soon as possible. Well, I can just imagine the face of the doctors if I told them that I wanted to get hospitalized because of a few lines of fever and a sore throat.

Anyway, let’s get to this entry’s real reason. The other day I was archiving my artworks and, among the other things, I came across a number of forgotten Volkner and Flint sketches. They were either unscanned or left unfinished, but still too adorable to never see the light of the interwebs.

Judging from the looks of it, this must be about a year old. I don’t even recall drawing it, but it melts my heart already. The anatomy makes no sense, but Volkner’s expression is just awwwww.

This one should be from February 2009. I think I couldn’t get Volkner’s face right and gave up in frustration. Now that I look again at this one, they also have no nipples. :o Why was I drawing this, anyway? Looks like an excuse to draw naked man torsoes, but uhhhhhhhhhh it’s not like you wouldn’t expect that from me. 8D

I had big plans for these, but lost interest somewhere during the process. The second one was even on watercolor paper, so figure that. They are still somehow cute.

A PHOENIX WRIGHT/POKÉMON CROSSOVER. WHAT HAVE I DONE. Although I must say that it almost makes sense. I’m sure that Gumshoe and Flint would get along.

I could say that these sketches re-ignited my love for this pairing. Sorry for the awful pun but there was really no way I could avoid it. Do you know if there’s any English speaker out there who has made some decent fan art of them? I am so isolated that I almost feel like I’m the only non-Japanese to care about them :(

In the meanwhile, have some random stuff:

No complicated animations, just a tiny blinking fennec that could kill you with its cuteness.

You just know that I’m becoming obsessed with a character when I start posting meta like this.

On another note, yesterday I finally built up the courage to scan the Myuutsuu no Tanjou booklet. It’s a rather delicate item so I feared to cause damage, but it seems that it went better than expected. The intention was to put it on I AM², but this got me to think about what I really want to do with that website. As much as I love Ai as a character, my real object of interest is the complete Mewtwo saga. So I may turn that shrine into a full tribute to that arc and leave the fanlisting go. Too bad though, I kinda liked the name. Hmm.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what direction I’m taking in my personal development. When I think about it, my mind jumps to when I was nine and I made a drawing about how I saw myself in the future: taller, with boobs, and working as a comic artist. When I was a kid, it was more like a distant thought: “and one day, I’ll be publishing my own comics”. Now this goal is fully in my reach, and all I have to do is keeping those stories running and my technique sharp and sharper. However, when I was nine I had no idea I would have developed a plethora of other interests. I could have never seen myself entering the website-making scene, running Angeltower Page and later Blind Dreaming and studying the web and how it works. I’ve always loved videogames, but I would have never thought of gaming as becoming such an important part of my life. And I just didn’t care about finding someone to share my life with.
I expected my life to be a lot more linear. I could even say that my dream life was a lot less interesting or fulfilling than my current life. I’d like to work as a comic artist, sure, but also as an illustrator, a character designer, a web designer, a writer…Mostly freelancing and flying solo, of course. I might accept some very special group projects, but only if I feel like it.

Now, it comes by itself that if I want to work as a freelancer I’m going to need more exposure, and I think I know what to do in order to obtain it. First of all, I’m needing a proper portfolio and for all my personal websites to look their best. This leads me to the next point: currently, not all of my websites are up to my standards, both in terms of presentation and content. If I am to get in the spotlight I cannot allow my work to be just OK, it must be as close to perfect as possible.

This is the very foundation of a big project of renovation concerning all of my online work; it will span across several years so that I can focus on university work while I keep on with this project. Let’s break it down in steps.

Phase one

All of the phase one steps are not incredibly complex or time-consuming. They don’t need my full attention, so I can multitask between them and school work. This should be a rough guideline of my personal work from now to a year from now.

1. Clear Bell renovation. It didn’t really made much sense to have a fanlisting with two pages of content, so I’m turning this website into a full Pokémon Crystal tribute which also hosts a fanlisting.
   I thought that would make a good starting point for my project for a few reasons. First, there’s no way the new content is ever turning stale and needing to be rewritten, since we’re talking about information for a game from 2001 and thus pretty static at this point. If I will ever have to touch the content again, it’s going to be for only minor revisions. Second, I still like the layout concept, so I’m not needing a complete redesign; all I will be doing is upgrading some minor details. Actually, most of the layout changes are already online, so if you check Clear Bell right now you’ll see what I mean. Third, my tribute will be targeted to retrogamers and nostalgics, but will also serve as a museum for the years to come.
   I’m currently writing the new content. It won’t be long before I put everything online, three weeks in the worst case.
2. Remake the weasels fanlisting from scratch. There’s not a single thing that’s right about that website, from the name to the layout to the overall feel. Even with such a tormented development, there’s no excuse for that mess. Now, I happen to have a drypoint drawing of a weasel for school which should be on print on Monday; if the result is as good as I intended it to be, I will be using it for the layout. The new layout is going to be either white or in neutral tones. Also, I’d like to change the name of the website. I tried to find another one myself but the results were rather unsatisfactory. So I’d like to get some input from you readers. The winner gets a free artwork :B everyone can participate, it doesn’t matter if we don’t really talk that much.
3. Minor layout changes in the Angeltower Dex. Like remaking the Poké Ball and the Great Ball in the respective styles with a proper 3D software or refining the content styling. I should also make a Master Ball style soon or later. Also, I’m going to upgrade everything to HGSS and rewrite parts of the core code.
4. Minor layout changes in the Super Metroid and Fearow fanlistings. I’m not satisfied with some of the content styling in the Super Metroid fanlisting and I don’t quite like the navigation in the Fearow fanlisting, so I’m going to tweak them a bit. Nothing major, though.
5. New layout for Dark Claws. That website has grown a lot over time, and the current layout is way too small and the content way too understyled to convey how big that website actually is. Plus the layout is also quite old (from late 2007 I think), so it was about time anyway. I’m going to keep the current red and grey color scheme, but with another artwork. Content is going to be fully revised and the URL structure changed. For example, sneasel/shrine.php?page=general-information will become sneasel/shrine/?page=general-information, because directories are cooler. Here we’re already talking about plans for stuff I will be working on about a year from now, so I don’t feel like I can already give more details than this.

The phase two steps are still a secret! I will be talking about them in due time. All I can say for now is that they are going to be the beefier part of the renovation project, each taking from several months to a whole year of effort. They will be about Advanced Blanket, Angeltower Page and the portfolio I was talking about before. :D

There’s also a great deal of work for other people I’m currently working on. I’ve been spending the last few months on the redesign of a website which should be ready in November or December, I will be making a whole CMS-based website which should take a good three months of work, and I’ll be probably working on another website too. There’s so much stuff to do, and I’m still without Internet D:

Now, for something different:

I’m writing about my latest Oblivion adventures but it’s getting very long so I wanted to post this before.

First of all, Swampnova is closed because I shouldn’t be writing depressing stuff. Sad people should cheer themselves up, not mope on the Internet. I should know better than that, but these last few months have been nothing but an avalanche of bad decisions on my part.

Speaking of which, at least I’m considerate enough to not put my private life online, else I’d be feeling rather embarrassed now. Long story short, I’m back with VG again. I was wrong on him, he proved it, and I’m grateful to him for being able to forgive me.
Happily ever after, then? I sure hope so.

In the end, this summer went rather differently than planned, and as such I wasn’t able to work on that Pokémon comic, too bad. However, I think I may be remaking Advanced Blanket’s layout as soon as I can; even though the current one is only a few months old and is not that bad as for what concerns usability and presentation, it feels like it’s lacking something, like it doesn’t even begin to convey who I am. This comes as no surprise when I think of the period in which I worked on that layout, but anyway.
I already have some ideas for the redesign. The concept came to me in a flash a few days ago, it has to do with a huge top image…look, I’ll just post a sketch here:

and this may be a thirty-seconds quickie made with the mouse in a Messenger window but it’s really pretty self-explanatory. I think it’s a very powerful image and it also gives a whole new meaning to the site name - Advanced Blanket, is this blanket nothing but our very skin? It’s also a very personal work and as such it can be easily recognized as mine. I think. I don’t know, it came to me in a flash and I was OH MY GOD. OH MY GOD. THIS IS THE BEST IDEA EVER and while the way I pictured it in my head is probably way grander than the actual artwork I’ve yet to make I think the idea itself is just fine.

and another thing yet: I’m considering to open a webdesign blog. There are a lot of things I’ve always wanted to write which I never actually did because I felt like they just didn’t belong on this place, so I thought that maybe it would be better if I started a serious blog which would maybe gain its own userbase instead of boring my four readers to death with uninteresting stuff. What if the world has been deprived of my illuminating ideas because of these restraints? JUST THINK OF IT!
hahahahaha yeah I know, it’s just that I want to write about webdesign, I don’t have any stupid pretenses.

next post will have actual drawings! I promise