I recently got glasses. I've been wearing them since I picked them up to get used to them. So far they've made me sick to my stomach and made it difficult to eat because I kept over shooting my mouth. As clear as everything has become (like what Brad Pitt experienced when he was turned into a vampire in Interview With a Vampire) I've suffered an unforseen unpleasantry. I've been looking at some of my work, particularily the pieces that I've posted and their flaws have developed into glaring, eye sores. Each picture has mistakes that went unoticed to my un-specticled eyes; mistakes that shouldn't have slipped through my fingers. No more I say; a new day has dawned, shining light on a more refined batch of work. Perhaps...

There are a great deal of things wrong with this but for now I'm going to put it away. I'm pretty happy with how the under water actually looks underwater; that took a lot of noodling. By noodling I mean a different word that means experimentation that doesn't make me sound like a grandma.

The piece is a great visualization of a fear I always had swimming up in Algonquin Park. The water's crystal clear but most of the lakes are so deep that when you look down it's just black. Even when I'm swimming in shallow water and something like a leaf or something touches my leg it grosses me out. What happens in Algonquin is there are hundreds of fallen branches and entire trees that have fallen in the water and are just under the surface that you can't always see. So I'd be swimming along and then kick one by accident and flip out because I thought it was fish or weird thing grabbing me. 

One time I was reaching down the side of my bed at night and my finger touched something that I didn't expect to be there and I thought E.T. was reaching up from under my bed. It turns out it was just the support beam.

I took a couple of the sketches from earlier and threw some colour onto them; kind of experimenting for my book. My book, you ask? Yes, I'm writing a graphic novel. Slowly but surely it's being written. I'm not going to tell you what it's about though; you'll have to stay tuned.

I just bought a vestal, new sketch book that I'm vibrating with excitement to corrupt. I needed to make some room next to my computer for my last sketch book so that it could spend its retirement with my other sketch books that have fulfilled their duties. As such I started looking through some of them and found these gems that I believe I did during boring lectures.

I'm a little tea pot...

The comicon wrapped up last weekend and I was there with rings on my fingers and bells on my toes. The week leading up to it was more stressful than was necessary but the con itself was executed with great precision; precision that would make the most learn'ed ninja weep. My thanks goes out to all the fans who showed up to buy prints and just generally be really cool about everything.

Let me also extend my deepest sympathies to all my friends who didn't show up and now have to live with the pagan hex I've cast upon them. It should arrive in the mail in 3-5 business days.

Penny Arcade fan art. I was going to send it to them but they don't have any contact info on their site so I give it to you, the internet.

I did this at work while we were having intense server issues.

After much thought and multiple stare-downs, I've thrown together a new version of Ironman.

Some ubiquitous work.

I'm sick of fighting this.

Here are a couple of creature designs I did for a friends fledgling MMORPG.

I did these last night before UFC 86. I felt sort of pretentious becuase I was there by myself and the more people that showed up to the bar the more selfconscious I got. It was unfounded but I had this feeling like people were going, "Oh la de da, check this guy out: comes to a bar but he can't part with his book of poetry."

Last week sometime I started a Metal Gear piece using that blue painting I posted earlier as the basis for the main image. It's turning out pretty well I think. The reason I bring Metal Gear up is that I just finished the fourth installment of the series. If you've finished the game yourself or know someone who has than you know that when I say "just finished the game" I mean I stopped playing the game a long time ago and had to wait through the 40 or so minutes of talking which just ended.

At first the game was awesome; it was just about everything I had hoped it would be. I had heard before hand that the game had really long cut scenes which was to be expected: the other Metal Gears had big cut-scenes and the Japanese have a tendancy to go a little over board. I assumed I was prepared. In actuality I was about as prepared as a man who had never riden a bike is prepared for the Tour de France. I quickly grew to dread the cut-scenes, dread them to the point where that's all I thought about during the seemingly shrinking amounts of game play.

Almost every scene was a reiteration of something that was said during a previous scene and it would then be explained in every single way possible. And if it wasn't that, it was an unnecessarily drawn out introduction of a boss who I had to fight; an introduction during which I could have unloaded every bullet of every weapon I had, into said boss.  

I wish I could think of a specific example of the verbal diarreha that was Metal Gear 4 but that would be like trying to recall one particular sentence out of the entire history of literture. So instead, I'll make up a scene.  This is a scene where Otacon gives Snake an apple. I'll write it the way that Hideo Kojima (creator/director of Metal Gear) would have written it.

Otacon: Here Snake; take this apple.
Snake: The apple?
Otacon: Yes, Snake; this green apple that's in my hand.
Snake: Take it?
Otacon: Yes.
Snake: Where did you get it?
Otacon: I picked it myself.
Snake: I see.
Otacon: I think it's important for people to get away sometimes, ya know? Just leave their job and take a day off.
Snake: And pick apples?
Otacon: That's just one thing you could do. There are so many!
Snake: Hmmm...
Otacon: What do you do to get away Snake?
Snake...me?
Otacon: Yes you.
Snake: ...
Otacon: Come on Snake; there must be something that interests you?
Snake: I did just buy a potters wheel.

It's at this point that I break down into tears. Oh, and it would all take place during a fire fight. That conversation shouldn't exist in the first place. It should take mere seconds for someone to take out an apple, motion that the apple is being given and have the apple taken. Why would it even be relevant to talk about the history of where the apple came from? The game is full of scenes of useless information, the only real difference between the scene I wrote and the scene that would actually be in the game is that Otacon probably would have started talking about the life cycle of the apple accompanied by visuals that would become a cut-scene within a cut-scene. 

I seriously think that they wanted to make a three part movie of Metal Gear 4 but they didn't have the funding so they just crammed  a trilogy's worth of dialogue into a video game and then remembered that it was video game so they made it possible to move Snake around sometimes between talking.

And all the "professional" game reviewers that gave it 10/10 and claimed it was "superb story telling"" Please. It's now more apparent than ever that while they were playing the game, there were Konami representitives shooting heroin into their scrotums.

Infinity times better. And I did it in a fraction of the time it took me to slowly pass that last stool of work if it can even be compared to something so natural.

I'm so sick of the piece below it makes my esophagus crumple up into the back of my mouth, squeezing years of collected food residue onto my tongue. I needn't tell you how unpleasant that is. The entire process of rendering that thing has been an exercise in futility. I had this great idea, this clear image of what it was suppose to be but with every stroke of colour I seemed to be pushing it further and further from that image. So instead of dragging it down a dusty, gravel road killing it painfully and slowly, which I've been doing all weekend, I've decided to euthanize it. I'm going to stop you before you can even think of a clever slogan, dripping with morality to picket my home with by asking you to put yourselves in my shoes: what would you do when your work screamed for death every second that it lived? Who long would you withstand its cries for mercy? I gave life and so too, shall I taketh away.

Anyway, I started a new one using the same sketch and it's already, like, infinity times better.

The great thing about old sketch books is finding hidden gems.Sometimes you can find them in recently used sketch books just by going back to the beginning. That is the case with this piece that I've been working up over top of the sketch I posted a few days ago.

Yesterday it rained on my way home from work. Unremarkable? Perhaps. The crazy thing is that it was beautiful out: blue sky full of white clouds, sun shining brightly. But there was one dark cloud not even a big cloud kind of small actually, and it was pouring out of it. Not lightly either; I mean steady sheets of rain drenching everything. It was raining out of one, single cloud!

The same whiny-whinerton wanted this posted as well. Now that I look at it more, I don't like it. It was unexpectedly good immediately following its completion but now it's lost something.

Because "someone" was a whiny-whinerton, I'm posting this.

???

I have norwalk or something; whatever you call it when you wake in the middle of night uncontrolably vomiting. So I'm updating like a crazy person. Because I have nothing better to do or rather there's a small set of things that I can do with the amount of energy I have.

I did this for a friend of mine a few months back. If you're wondering why you don't have something like this it's because your beans are too hot. His beans are cool cool.

I told someone that I would post this. I suppose it's a good example of how far removed a piece can get from the original sketch. I drew it at work one day when I was bored. By bored I mean I should have been paying invoices but no one was around to tell me otherwise.

This painting I did a while back. It's unremarkable by itself; I just like the figure. I'm going to do several version of different faces to go it.

I pulled this old one out today. I like it but it started going in a direction that wasn't pleasing me which is why I stopped working on it. I'm afraid to pick it up again because I might just end up pissed at it and then dump it back into the recesses of my computer with long forgotten files and school work. And it really doesn't belong down there. Some of that school work is soooo bad. Like worse than experimental crap.

This is the aforementioned piece that I've been struggling with the last little while. I've decided that unless I get a decent quote on printing, I won't be printing this one.

Last night was so hot. I don't mean hot like involving a female, apprentice, tattoo artist I mean like the smell of my scrotum was making me sick. And that was directly after I had a shower. I was of the mind that sleeping would be impossible because it was so tropical in my room but I managed to pass out. Luckily I was on my bed at the time. There are too many sharp corners in here; so many that if I did pass out from whatever I'd probably be found the next day impaled on my desk. My room is a death trap for children.

I thought I would weather the heat by working on some stuff but I was sweating so profusely that the palm of my hand was leaving a huge wet spot on the paper. It was only a preliminary drawing but still, ew. Temperature aside, I managed to finish another digital piece that I'm borderline happy with. It looks cool but it didn't turn out anywhere near what I intended. I rolled with it, I guess.

I'm disappointed though not remotely surprised that that alien video was comletely fake. Not just fake but a rip off of an earlier, equally shitty alien video. It's sort of sad though I can relate on some level that people were willing to put common sense aside and believe that yes, that blurry, awkward shape peering through that window was indeed an extraterrestrial. Like, let's think about this: a race of humoid beings who have the technology to travel across unimaginable distances come to Earth and resort to amateur voyeurism? Really? Seriously guy-who-made-that-video-and-tried-to-pass-it-off-is-authentic? I would have a better time believing that a crop circle shaped like a penis was real than that nonesense.

It's really a poignant reflection of the desperation of society.  There are people so in need of answers or something that's sympathetic to what they believe, that they would throw away logic to reassure themselves. It's not like that if it were real, they could say "Okay, there: it's real and they do exist. Now the government has to de-classify all its UFO and alien files." And the government would say, "Okay, you're right. Here you go." I think there's a thought (realisation to some) that beings from beyond this world are the only things to save us; that mankind is doomed without them. Or maybe it's that they want the answers to life that we can't seem to figure out yet and aliens are just the cure for societal A.D.D. Or maybe some people are really interested in being probed but are too afraid to buy a dildo. Whatever the reason, if they do show up, I hope they have super absorbant space clothes for scrotal perspiration.

Finished the Batman piece and the Ironman piece. I'm still up in the air about whether I'll post them or not. Either way they won't be going up this instant since each of them takes so long to open in photoshop and I don't feel like playing that waiting game with that sloth of a program.

On an unrelated note, I was watching some MMA tonight and I caught a match with Kimbo Slice vs some guy. Anyway, Kimbo punched the guy in the side of the head and made the guys ear explode! Like, it fucking popped in a pusy, bloody explosion and flopped around his head like a semi-deflated, purple balloon. He's going to have to wear an eye patch. An eye patch for his ear.

This is the first of what will hopefully be a regularily updated blog. Probably not. It's mostly just a haphazardly thrown together thing that I can put on my business card instead of a realy, big-boy website.At the end of August, specifically the 22nd, 23rd and 24th, myself and three of my home-slices (Darryl Graham, Andrew Patterson and Carson Wong) will be at the Toronto Fan Exbo dispensing our work and generally making the place way more cool.

I had wanted to start and finish a new piece this weekend but I just got way too lazy. But who knows; I have the rest of tonight and Monday to lay down some phat work.