Finished coloring of eyepatch, and have the diffuse layers done on the other thug. i estimate another four hours of work to get him done. i've been struggling with getting Tzalaran and Plixant to the coloring stage though. every line drawing i do of them i just don't like, and end up scrapping. the neutral pose for Tz is him in his cloak, and the folds in the cloak just aren't showing clearly in my mind. Plixant being a female Del-Triel (picture generic Dwarf woman) is causing me problems, but i think i've gotten some reference material that will make her easier. went through the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain last weekend, and i'm hoping that will help to make the rest of my drawings come faster. A friend of my wife's loaned it to me, and it made certain things alot clearer. i was glad that i got a chance to read through it and do some of the exercies, especially after seeing it recommended so much in the forums.

  Got the line drawing of the Warlock done, and shading is started. Finally worked out the kinks with my tablet. ended up having to swap computers. i got 4 ancient Compaq computers for free, and one of them has been really twitchy ever since i swapped the hard drive. installed my tablet driver onto the comp i let my boys use, and it worked fine. haven't had a lick of trouble since i swapped those out last night. Have to purge histories in photoshop quite often when the pen cuts out, but its nowhere near as frustrating now that it doesn't crash. have my father-in-law and his wife coming over for lunch today, so i won't get to work on this most of the day, but i stayed up late last night getting the diffusion layers on the warlock done. hoping to finish the line drawings for both Feznar tonight, and getting the three added to the website. added the warlock already. took me 4 hours to do the line drawing of the Warlock, having the timer from PracticeMaster and each of the 5 characters set up as clients in there is allowing me to keep really accurate track of how much time i'm spending on each stage, which i hope will assist in getting the assignment done in time. well, have some other things i need to update on the site, so i'm going back to work.

  So there is about 2 weeks before the Assignment 3 deadline, and i'm starting to doubt being able to make it. i've been fighting computer issues with te tablet i bought. for some reason it won't stay recognized for longer than 20 minutes, and i've been unable to figure out why. when its working it makes things really nice, and i actually got a decent sketch of the warlock going today. i don't know about being able to finish 20 sketches, 10 sets of image planes, and 10 head models in the time remaining. i'm pleased with how my drawing skills are improving, without this class i'm fairly certain that they never would have improved, but i'm still a bit slow and don't get the lines i need to make things look good yet. well, back to work, and hopefully i can upload my site updates at work tomorrow.

  Finally made the time to finish the concept art videos. Loaded them onto my ipod so that i could watch them while i was anywhere, and was able to watch them straight through over the past 3 days. got 3 of my characters to the outline stage, but i'm struggling to get realistic looking lines. Zak makes it look easy, but i'm not getting those type of results. i'll need to watch some parts of the videos on a larger screen when it comes time for me to start my shading to see what is done with the layer masks, but i got the basic workflow and i think that is what is important.
  i'm going to have to stay up a bit later each night drawing, and clock in for 8 hour days on the weekends in order to meet the Jan. 2nd deadline for assignment 3. i'm going to convert the rest of the videos to put on my ipod tonight, and i've set up PracticeMaster to help me keep track of how much time i'm spending on different aspects of this production. i'm hoping this will help me budget time better, and allow me to get through parts of the Advanced Modeling lessons that i haven't been able to watch. I know that when we get to the production stage i'm going to need that knowledge, so hopefully the timers and calendars will help me be able to do both. putting the adv. modeling stuff on my ipod will help even more though.

  Looking forward to the new content that is coming our way, and i'm hoping that i can make the Dec. 24th deadline for assignment 3. My character sketches so far have been more frustrating that anything, but i'll keep trying. Coming up with 2 concepts for Tzalaran and Plixant is going to be difficult for me. I've had these characters pegged in my head so long that i don't know how well i'll be able to come up with another idea about how they should look. i think the warlock and pair of feznar will be easy enough for me to come up with different concepts, because there are many more feznar toughs in the city and plenty of other warlocks as well. The trio in this scene are little different than others who could be out there in the city, and i'll eventually be able to use these just to fill in crowds if nothing else.

  Got some reference images of bears while i was downloading the additional vids for the goblin concept art. need to completely rethink my origonal design for it, and i'm going to just redo the whole thing. it will be good practice for me, and help prepare me for the 2 Dal-Shiz that i need to do: the warlock and Tzalaran. The are mostly human shaped, where the Feznar are humanoid, but not truely human shaped. Feznar are very tall, hairy beasts with tempers that match their features. although not truely with heads like a bear, i think that most resembles what they would look lke. my initial sketch/pose didn't take into account what they would actually look like and i need to remedy that some.

  Got the first outline of my Feznar mostly done. needs tons of tweaking, and i absolutely hate the head right now. i'm having trouble getting the way i need the snout to meet with the rest of the skull. i like the right ear, but the rest sucks right now. i really need some photos of bears or dogs to look at as a ref, but no internet makes that much more difficult than i'm used to. i'm very interested to see what the new content that will show up in our inboxes is, and i'm starting to dread the concept art assignment deadline. this is definitely not a strength of mine currently, but hopefully with more practice i'll be able to do a decent enough job to allow a real artist to get what i'm thinking across on paper/screen. going to make a list of all the characters and environments i'll need sketches for, and luckily that number will not be very high. 4 characters and a few different areas of Plixant's Tomes. the main floor, stairwell/hallway and her personal library will be it. some sketches of weapons an armor will probably be needed as well, but i find those to be easier than characters and they don't worry me as much. i'm hoping to make some solid progress this weekend, and get somewhere to download whatever goodies we're about to receive.

  Have been able to start using my tablet on a Feznar concept art sketch. i'm fairly comfortable with it now, but i can't say its improved my drawing ability much. i'm going to need to look at some pictures of bears and certain dogs to get a better idea of what the jaw/head should look like in order to be realistic. i've found Zak's presentation and methodology to making concept art to be very helpful, and my oldest son has actually been watching over my shoulder as i watch the videos. we are going to develop a setup so that he can watch the rest of the concept art videos, and i'm goign to show him the free vtms on concept art and image planes from the site as well. he stated some of the things that Zak was saying had been told to him by his art teacher, and that seemed to help peak his interest. i've gotten the Feznar concept to the volume stage, but there are still some things with my proportions that i don't like and will tweak before continuing. i think that scaling them horizontally will help, because i scaled them vertically once the volume was done because i'd completely blown the perspective with my pose phase. i'm going to make a list of all the other concept art pieces that i need for my short, and adjust my schedule now that i understand what the meaning of concept art really is. my sketch of Plixant and the warlock will help give me a start, but they are nowhere near what i need them to be. i've never really drawn much, so this is a new experience for me. the most i had ever drawn before were maps, and a few landscape sketches i made for the AD&D group to show them the mountain fortress and outlying city and wall that they were defending. i did a couple other landscape type sketches to display something like what i envisioned, but this is the first true character type drawing that i've ever done. i'll be really pleased if i can get this to look like what i envision Feznar to look like, and i'll have to say its all because of the method shown in this class.

  Happy Thanksgiving. got to sit around and watch football most of the day, which was nice. i'm waiting for the tablet that i ordered to get here, i'm hoping that it will come tomorrow, but i might be waiting until sat. haven't gotten much progress over the past few days, but i know once i get my tablet all i'll be doing is working with that in my free time. going to start a some sketches of the feznar tonight, because that is the one race very differently proportioned from humans. Dal-Shiz are built closely to the way that humans are, and Del-Triel are very similar to dwarves, so i'll be able to look at other productions and art to get the rough proportion for Plixant. Feznar are tall and skinny, but strong and fast. i've got a written description of all the races in Tillia with all my old D&D stuff, so i've got to get that out before i get into the detailing stage of my concept art sketches, but i'm sure that getting the rough outline for the 2 in the short will take me a while. After watching most of the concept art videos, i'm really excited about getting my tablet and starting to use it. it will take a bit to get used to using from what i've been told, but i think that the effort will be worth it in the end because of the ability to change color schemes faster amongst other things. its also very hard to edit scanned in images that i've drawn and edit them, so i'm hoping that this will allow me easier editing of the imamges that i have scanned in.

  Got my storyboards that are complete and one page of my concept art sketches scanned in at work today. found out that it is a full color scanner, although the color scans take near forever to finish. changed the Story section of the PreProduction page so that infinite scrolling loops aren't an issue, and now i'm brainstorming the best way to approach putting my storyboards on the site. i've not figured out a way to get true thumbnails to work without linking to photobucket or something like that, so i think i might just add a storyboard page that would scroll down the page with text to the left of the images explaining what is going on in that shot. made some changes to the site overall, but i was unable to upload a new copy to my site as of yet. for some reason i wasn't able to connect to the buzz server at work, (my new promotion has attained me internet access, but i'm still a bit paranoid about abusing it because there is always so much to get done in this department) and yesterday Filezilla could connect to the server fine, but today neither the download site nor the website upload were available to me. i noticed in the forum that other people were having trouble as well, so i'll just head to a friends tomorrow and upload my changes as well as download the concept art vids. i'm interested to see if my no tablet having can concieve of a way to not have to scan in the sketches. READ: i'm not so good with my mouse and doing 2d graphics work... not so good with a pencil either, as anyone reading this far would have noticed. ;) its ok though, my wife claimed that she couldn't do better, so thats a little victory in and of itself.
  my goal of all concept art being done is going to be missed, but i'm going to attempt to make a list of everything i need concept sketches for along with finishing storyboards by that deadline. i'm really looking forward to the concept art videos, and tomorrow i'm going to try and get my hands on the concept art vids that our teacher banged out for us to devour. my goal is to get fairly confident with my preproduction stage by the end of November, so that i can focus on determinging what tools i will use. Houdini has really become an appealing choice with the recent news of the $100 non-commercial license option that they are offering. i'm afraid to attempt all my modeling in Houdini, because i know the app frustrates me in the modeling aspect (and yes, the fact of the matter there is that i haven't devoted the time to understand how it works...) I'm hoping that after the changes i make over the last few days and tomorrow clear up all the functionality issues of the site, but i still won't try to get a job in web design, or as a concept artist either. ;)

  Collected all the concept art and storyboards that i have completed at this moment tonight, and finished another storyboard. still have some time to bust out more sketches, but i can't say i find drawing to be fun because its not something that i feel that i have any talent in. i'm doing a bit better though, and i've gotten permission to use the scanner at work because i've not been able to get the one i have working. should have those into a digital format tomorrow and be adding them to the site when i get to a connection that i can upload with. i'm looking to show the map sketches of the city i'd made a while ago, along with the world map, but its taking me lots longer than i expected to get those scanned images back to the quality i had with my colored pencil sketchbook pages. those got misplaced in our move, so rescaning them is out of the question for now. i wish i'd been abe to get them into a color scanner, but i was lucky to get the black and white ones to be honest. i had two notebook sized pages that the city maps were on, but when i pasted the one into the other my laptop can't handle the file, and i have to work with that on my wife's comp, which i hate using. i might end up having to use it more than i would like to, but it looks like i'm going to have to put off my investing in a computer for at least a couple more months. getting it around my birthday would be a good goal at this point i think. i'm looking forward to the concept art vids, i'll find it useful to get a fresh perspective on how to go about it. i'm also looking forward to gettign my script grade, and some critique on it.

  Just got back into town from a cub scouts camping trip with my oldest son's group. because i went along my youngest was allowed to come as well. overall it was a fun weekend, and we couldn't have had better weather for November in Nebraska. changed the link color to something different, and adjusted the production page so that there was a larger area to each side of the scroll window in the hopes of making it easier to navigate through the page. i've been planning to incorporate another group of pages that will contain the novel part of pre-production, going to add that to the to do list for this week. Need to listen to my website critique again, but i think this adresses the major issues with the site. It's not pretty, and i won't try to say it is, but its functional and i can make it pretty as my photoshop skills improve, which they are going to have to for me to pull off my short. Converted the selection of chapter 1 that i'm using into something like what i envision screenplays to be. i think this is much more attainable for me, although it will be a somewhere in the 45 second range i estimate. have the first two storyboards done for this, need to figure out if my scanner will work, or i'm goign to have to find somewhere else to scan them into the computer. Cut the scene to this because i know i'm goign to have trouble with the character modeling and texturing part of this process. my wife liked the script, so i'm interested to see what Zak, and everyone else thinks.

  Made some placeholder graphics until i figure out how to get the backend of how i want my images to show up. i have maps of the city of Karat-Sizan, the area around Plixant's Tomes, and world maps that i've scanned into the computer that i want to link to from my pre-production page, but haven't figured out how to accomplish this yet. working through the advanced modeling stuff today. also doing some sketching of the environment so i can help figure out the decorations and details in the shop. made a to do list of things i need to accomplish, waiting to transfer that into the computer and start being able to transfer that into my calendar page. enough for now. back to work

  Got the main pages set up and centered in the browser while i was at work today. Finished up the table borders and got the headings all set up as well. Set up scroll windows for the large text areas as well. Need to figure out how to get thumbnail images on the pages, but have the full image open in another window. i'm sure it's something fairly simple, but i've had enough trial and error for today. Have sketches of Tzalaran and Plixant, and i'll never get a job as a concept artist, but they are semi usable i think. Need to sketch out Plixant Tomes' main floor, stairwell, and personal library, as well as the feznar and warlock.