I now have an art Tumblr and an art board on Pinterest! Nothing you haven't seen already here, but I'm trying to get my stuff out there in more places where it can be shared and circulate on its own.

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I'm going to start livestreaming about twenty minutes after this journal is posted. I'll be painting a big ol' monster illustration. Join me!

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I'm now officially accepting commissions from the Deviantart community. Read this for more info: [link]

Also, I've started an inspiration tumblr. It's focused more on animals and the natural world and less on art, and is populated both by reblogged posts and my own discoveries on Google and Wikipedia. Check it out! [link]

Hey, guys! I'm scarce around here as ever, but I thought I'd share some exciting recent developments.

Firstly, as of Friday evening last, I'm living in San Diego. For the first time in my life, I am not living with either of my parents. It's still a trip to realize that. Major live steps, yo. I'm renting an apartment with three other TAD students, and we're all deep in the heart of things here in University Heights. The San Diego pod is going to be up and running soon, headed by Ron Lemen, who, if you don't know, is like the Greek ideal of what an art instructor should be. It'll be an exciting time! Now my other roommates need to hurry up and get here, so I'm not lonely. The San Diego pod hasn't been officially announced yet--heck, I don't think it's even been officially drywalled yet!--so don't tell them I told you about it.

(By the way, if any of you are in San Diego, drop me a note! It'd be great to meet some more of my online art network in person.)

Secondly, I think I'm finally on the cusp of making a full living from illustration. I'm poised to get close to $1500 from freelance commissions next month, which is more than I'm used to! I'm going to keep pushing and hopefully get leads on good clients from my new roommates. I recently finished a series of seven full illustrations that will be covers for some PDF releases, as well as three more Shadow Fey [link] characters, for Open Design (the company that publishes Kobold Quarterly). In addition to that, I've been doing some illustrations for several months now for another client publishing a Christian-themed role playing game. I'm agnostic, but the work is fun and the money is decent! And recently, I got contacted (through this very site, of all places) by Moon Design Publications [link] , and am now doing a quite fun series of illustrations for them as well! Things are looking up, and I'm excited about the future!

I...think that's it! See you guys around.

To whoever gave me a premium subscription! Much appreciated! Sorry it took me this long to notice!

At 8 o'clock pm, pacific time. Google the time difference! I'll be working on a creature concept design.

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Hey, all. I'm going to be giving a fairly short "report of interest" in class in a few weeks, on a subject of my choosing. The subject I've chosen is Paleoart. So, I'm asking for you to contribute some names, in case there are some important ones that I've forgotten.
So far, I have listed, in no particular order:

Charles R Knight, Rudolph F. Zallinger, Gregory S. Paul, Julius Csotonyi, Luis V. Rey, Douglas Henderson, John Sibbick, Wayne Barlowe, James Gurney, Sammy Hall, and our own Nemo Ramjet.

I'll probably also include some of the first dinosaur reconstructions, with the lizard-Rhinoceros iguanadon and such. I also plan to use Sammy Hall and Nemo to segue into how paleoart can influence imaginative creature design, at the end.

So, any others I should add to that list? And also, is there any high-quality online gallery of Douglas Henderson's work, at all? He's probably my favorite, but I've had little luck finding good examples of his stuff online.

Hey, guys! I just wanted to thank for featuring this old Mermaid painting of mine [link] as a Daily Deviation! A big thanks also, to the enormous amount of people who faved and commented on it and added me to their watch list as a result of it being featured. I post only occasionally these days, but I hope you enjoy the new work that I do!

Pacific time, that is. Or, six hours after this journal was posted. So, no logging in two hours early and yelling at me this time!

I'll probably be painting some sort of environment.

Here's the link: [link]

Hey, people! I am most likely going to be doing some livestreaming again this weekend. The link to my channel is below. I'll broadcast from roughly 8pm pacific time until some undefined point in the middle of the night, either Saturday or Sunday night, or possibly both. I'll most likely be doing some creature design sketches, or perhaps an environment painting, depending on what the will of the people is.

So, leave a comment on this journal entry if you're interested, and let me know what you'd like to see me do. I'll reply to each comment with more precise details of when I'm actually going to do this.


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So I'm going to livestream for another four hours or so later tonight. I'll start broadcasting roughly 2 hours and 40 minutes after this journal is posted.

Here's the link: [link]

Again, install an adblock if you don't want to watch a thirty second ad every fifteen minutes, and get skype if you want to voice chat with me!

Here's the link to my channel: [link]

I will be broadcasting tomorrow night from around 8 pm to midnight or 1 am, pacific time. I will be working on one of my school projects, and discussing such topics as composition, shape design, rendering, color, creature design, and any other odd topic that comes up. Something new about this session is that I'll be speaking on a microphone, though I imagine much of the time I'll be quiet and letting the background music do its thing.

If you plan to watch, I highly recommend installing some sort of ad-block, because the Livestream site interrupts broadcasting with advertisements about every 15-20 minutes. Also, if you want to voice chat with me during the broadcast, I'll be on skype. I'll provide my contact info during the stream.

Hope to see you there!

Hey, all! It's me, being my usual busy, procrastinating self. I was waiting until I updated all my galleries and my Flickr account before writing this journal, so I'd have some fun links to share with you. Well, it's been just over a month since I got home, and my days are as crammed as ever. However, starting today, I am going to be making more of an effort to be active on DA again. I'm replying to a backlog of comments that's about five months old (how's that for procrastination?), and I'll be posting some images and goodies here soon.

But, without further adieu, Texas! For those that don't know, for pretty much the whole month of January, I was in Austin, Texas for a workshop run by my school, The Art Department.org (TAD). It was an incredible experience, and it made me realize a few things. First, I want to be around other motivated artists, all the time. I want to be immersed in the language and lifestyle. Second, I am emotionally (if not financially) ready to be away from home. Third, I really, really like sushi and margaritas, though not necessarily at the same time, and to be fair, I knew this about myself already before going to Texas. These things may or may not lead to a fairly major change in my lifestyle and location in the coming months; I may head down to Southern California to attend the TAD pods opening in San Diego or Orange County, for example. Anything of that sort depends on a magical quadrupling of my monthly income, though.

But anyway, I took the train over to Texas. It is not a great train ride, especially compared to the trip between California and Washington. West Texas is an incredibly vast, incredibly monotonous, incredibly empty place; I've never had a stronger sense of just how big the Earth is until I went through West Texas. Austin, however, was a great town to be in. Big enough to have a strong culture and impressive high rise architecture downtown, but not overwhelmingly huge, like other big cities can be. The pod--my school's studio space--was mere blocks away from all kinds of great restaurants, and just one block away from 6th street, which had a huge night life scene (not that I'm a big night life guy, but it was exciting). It was very cool to meet my classmates in person. I stayed with while I was there, and on the first day had the great surprise and pleasure of finding out that the gentleman seated to my left was , one of my oldest DA friends. That was pretty cool.

The instructor and guest list was nothing to complain about, either. While I was there, I met, and was taught by: John English [link] , Mark English [link] , Marshall Vandruff [link] , George Pratt [link] , Brent Watkinson [link] , Jon Foster [link] , Anita Kunz [link] , Ron Lemen [link] , Vanessa Lemen [link] , Sammy Hall [link] , Francis Vallejo [link] , John Mueller [link] , and many others. Yes, I'm name dropping.

I haven't done much in the way of updating my various galleries yet, but in the meantime, the last page of my ConceptArt.org sketchbook [link] has all the sketches I did during the trip, and a lot more. Hope you enjoy looking through it!

Also, as of Monday, I completed another large freelance job along the lines of Courts of the Shadow Fey (and holy shit, in another month it will have been a year since I got commissioned for that job!). In late April or May I'll be able to show you the work I did for that. In other work-related news, I'm also currently doing some card and terrain illustrations for an online indie game company, which a fellow student of mine is working for and told me about. It's just an experience and portfolio-building job currently, but with luck it will turn out to be a profitable venture.

That's it for now. I miss you guys!

I'm going to have a journal entry about my Texas art workshop experience soon (I'm waiting until I have some art updates and Flickr photos to link you to). In the meantime, I'd like to ask you all about commissions. DeviantArt commissions. If you do commissions, how much do you charge? How many requests do you get? How much do you spend on a commission? If you commission other DAers for work, how much are you willing to spend? What do you think a reasonable price for a commission is? Would you be interested in commissioning me do draw something for you?

And anything else that I didn't ask, but you think I need to know, please tell me.
I'd also be interested in hearing your views on DA's print service, both from a buying and a selling standpoint.

If you're wondering about my sudden interest, suffice it to say that I'm strongly considering making a major change later this year that will cause my monthly expenditures to multiply a few times over, and I'm searching for new and different sources of income. I'll be more specific in another journal entry in the near future!

The title to this journal entry works best if you sing it in the Gilligan's Island tune.

Anywho, hi again, DeviantArt. I've been viewing people's art and faving things as always, and posting a few things here and there, but my comments and replies are still pretty scarce. I've been pretty busy, as I'm sure many of you have been as well. So, the first thing I'm going to say in this journal is that that isn't going to change in the immediate future, I'm sorry to say. I do have a few pieces of fun news, though.

Firstly, I've gotten another large freelance job, similar to Courts of the Shadow Fey. I won't talk about the subject matter too specifically, but I will say that it's really fun, and right up my alley. I estimate that I'll be able to post that batch of stuff sometime in March.

Secondly, tomorrow I am stepping onto a train, and on Sunday morning I will step off that train into the streets of Austin, Texas. There I will be attending an art workshop with many of my fellow TAD students, and will be until the end of the month. Fun fun fun! If any of you are in that area and want to meet up for some sketching, lemme know!

In an effort to keep myself focused and on task, I'm going to be livestreaming the finishing (hopefully) of this year's Rylee's Adventure for the next number of hours. I'm doing this because painting to an audience keeps me on task, and I've been very scattered and unfocused the past few days. So, if you're not scrambling to finish Christmas stuff yourself, join me for a while!

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Hey, all! So, it's Christmastime once again, and that means, of course, that it is time to paint another Rylee's Adventure [link] . I've decided to do most of the actual rendering work on my Livestream channel, since Livestreaming is fun and having an audience really helps to keep me on task. I will do this tonight and tomorrow night, roughly from 8:30 pm to midnight (Pacific Time, GMT-8, you do the math). I won't do it on Friday night, since that's when I meet with some buddies to roll dice and slay monsters and whatnot, but I'll likely resume at the same time on Saturday and several nights next week.

I hope you'll join me! The link to my channel is [link] . Please post any questions here, and feel free to suggest other times if the current times don't work for you. I'll accommodate you if I can.

I've been wanting to post this journal for quite a while, but for some reason simply never did until now. Basically, I just ask you to do what the title says: recommend me some nonfiction.

Good nonfiction. Interesting nonfiction. Well-written nonfiction. Challenging, strange, and controversial nonfiction. In order to become a better science fiction writer, and simply to enjoy a greater knowledge of this fascinating and utterly bizarre universe in which we live, recommend me some nonfiction!

In return, I'll...do something. Recommend a book back to you, critique your art, father a child, make you a grilled cheese sandwich, anything.

Livestreaming today! Working on a digital self portrait. Here's the channel: [link] .
I'll probably be working for an hour, maybe two. Hope to see you there!

So, in my last real journal entry, I made it sound like I was going to start being active here again and resume regularly posting work related to my projects. As you may have noticed, that has not really been the case! I've posted a few things, sure, but I really haven't done anything related to any of my ongoing projects, nor have I made much progress at all on the couple of stories that I've been working on for the past months. There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, I revised a couple of illustrations for my earlier large illustration job, and then did a few more related to that project. But, more recently, my instruction at The Art Department.org [link] has begun! It's been going for a few weeks now, and it is quite intense. I've had a few moments of overwhelmedly asking "What have I gotten myself into??", but on the whole the experience has been extraordinarily positive so far. There's a great sense of immersion, my fellow students are friendly and talented, and the teachers are kind and wise. I went into the program thinking that I was somebody who knew something, yet it became immediately clear that there are unseen and unimagined depths to this great sea called art, and that I have barely begun to snorkel.

With the amount of time I've been putting into my TAD work, I've been spending most of my non-art, non-work time surfing and spending time with family and friends, rather than spending time commenting, replying, and giving critiques on the computer. There are only so many hours in the day. No offense to you all! On the plus side, though my online art gallery life has been suffering, things out in the real world are going pretty well. The surf has been pretty good and consistent, I've been meeting up with an actual local sketch group, and I've been doing some tabletop Pathfinder roleplaying. It's been about a decade since I did any tabletop gaming, and I'm having a great time with that.

In other news, I finally finished "The Mote in God's Eye." It was a good book, but it wasn't until over halfway through that the actual conflict went underway and it truly captured my interest. If anyone else has read this book, I'd be happy to discuss it in the comments. I've started reading "The Silmarillion" again. I started reading this in early high school, but didn't get much farther than the creation of the dwarves; the language Tolkien uses was just too...biblical to make for fun and easy reading. My older and wiser brain is enjoying it this time around, though. I love that there is such a depth of history (and prehistory) to Middle Earth that is barely hinted at in the "Lord of the Rings" novels.

If you've been to the movies recently, you probably have learned a few things. Firstly, Inception is awesome. Second, Inception's soundtrack is awesome. Man, what a movie. I've chatted with one or two of you about my thoughts on plot and storytelling. There are few things I hate more in a story than anticlimax; that's one of the reasons I've quit reading Stephen King. I live for a movie or a book in which the payoff at the end adequately lives up to the action that lead up to it. So, it's high praise for me when I say that the escalation and climax of Inception is one of the most satisfying I've ever seen in film. There was a wonderful sense of depth, of delving ever deeper into the Abyss. Most of the ingredients that I look for in a good story wre present. I loved the pants off of it. Also, the soundtrack, as I've already mentioned, is wonderful. If pure power where incarnated in sound, it would sound something like the soundtrack to Inception.

Toy Story 3 was pretty darn good as well. It was funny, and everyone already knows that it yanked on the old heartstrings at the end, but there wre also moments of surprising drama and intensity. There was one scene that was quite literally scary; I loved it! It's the darkest and probably most profound Pixar film to date.

I visited the lovely miss Rylee [link] recently. She's been talking for a while now, but, for the first time, I can actually understand a large portion of what she's saying. She can say things like "Way we, Rory!" (Play with me, Cory) "Ay, ool hat!" (Hey, cool hat) and "Daddy ol dodo" (Daddy's an old doggy dog). She's imagining and pretending now, too. It's amazing how much she knows and understands!

And, um...I think that's it. Hopefully some of that will interest you. I'll be posting my TAD work, and hopefully some personal stuff, soon.