Daily update, you say?

Ok, so that "a post a day" thing worked out just fuckin' awesome, didn't it? Wow, 3 months have gone by since my last entry. I guess time flyes when you're working your ass off without getting paid overtime. One of my new years resolutions is to cram in at least an hour each day to "hone my crafting skills", so to speak. Well, New Years Resolution, say hi to 90 hours overtime in 2 weeks. Hopefully, things are going to slow down a little now that the project from hell is delivered and done with, and I'll be able to get to some sculptin' again.
Just saying it gives me a strange sense of deja vu. Cant see why.

This past week, a quite lively discussion about overtime and the paying of such at my current gig, plus a bunch of awesome guys from 1Up.com being told to pack their shit and get out of their office as well (more on that coming further down this post), gave me a real wake up call. This industry is so fluxing and fleeting, and with an economy like we are blessed with these days, you cant afford to start slacking off, thinking that your job is always going to be there. One day you might be on top of the world, all is good and the biggest concern you'll have during your workday is what to choose from the vending machine or whether or not you should be allowed to watch porn at work as long as you're on break. Then, the next day, it turns out that the company's financial liquidity has gone to shit and that they won't be able to get the loans they need to keep the company going at its current rate. Then, all of the sudden, you're being escorted out of the office building with nothing but your dick in your hand (or hands as in my case).
You might get a severance, but if you cant get a new job quick enough, even that wont do you much good.
And that, I have come to understand, is why you must always, always, be on your A game. Resting on your laurels will not lead to anything other than some kid living in mom's basement getting the job you sorely need to pay your bills and feed your family/dogs/morbidly obese baby mama, just because you stopped working to improve yourself.


As far as the 1Up.com/EGM magazine story I mentioned, you can get the full story on most gaming forums. The lowdown is that 1Up.com and EGM magazine got sold by Ziff Davis to UGO over the cristmas break. In their initial press release, the helmeted-in-a-wheelchair-retarded CEO of UGO, a cesspool of shallow and uninspiring gaming journalism and whoring oneself out to the highest advertisement bidder, spoke at length about how they were so excited about this acquisition, and that they loved 1Up and knew that the site and the magazine, with its video shows and audio podcasts, were great simply because of its personalities. The next day, 75% of those "amazing personalities" were called in to a meeting room, where they were told to pack their shit and get the fuck out.
Luckily, because of the fans and supporters of their work and of themselves personally helping out and donating some of their hard-earned money, they all got their own projects up and running within the first week. Check them out and support their effort to keep providing us with great content and some of the most entertaining podcasts around, at eat-sleep-game.com, area5.tv and geekbox.net.

Now, to close out this way-too-long post, here is a quick 15min sculpt I did today, and a prime example of how fast your skills go down the fucking tube if you don't keep it up and keep practicing.

Peace and love and good happiness stuff to all.

Scetch of the day

Ok, so I just dicked around for roughly 30 minutes, and this is what I got starting from a sphere. Its amazing how fast you get rusty when you dont do this regularly enough. I think I'm going to try to do a quick 30 min - 1 hour sculpt on a quasi daily basis, and put them up here. The original idea with starting this blog was to have somewhere to display my portfolio pieces, but after a lot of thought (totally like 3 minutes) I think I'm actually going to keep this blog more casual. That way I can both keep the updates more regular as well as not having to censor what I say in case I have to direct a future employer or something over here.
I have an empty domain laying around somewhere, so as soon as I get the time to re-learn Dreamweaver, I'll put up a fancier display solution there.

Peace

El Slowpoko

Ok, so its been a while. I've got no excuse. No wait, I actually do this time! So, the aforementioned gig I spent way to much time trying to land went the way of the dodo when the company in question hit a rough patch. I then decided to accept the offer I got from a company I freelanced for over the summer, and thats where I've basically been living for the past 3 weeks. Thats the charm of arriving on the day of a deadline for a project that needs at least another week of work.

I'm not going to divulge the name of the company, so I get to complain about my job on this blog without getting sacked in the process. What I can say, is that they do a lot of work for the offshore oil industry, like real-time 3D simulations and fancypants techy stuff like that. Me and this other guy on the other hand, do 3D video projects, like illustrational videos for getting a customers investors interested enough in a project to whip out their sacks (no, of money, you freakin pervert).

The projects havent been too mindblowingly exciting this far, but at the moment I'm working on a music video. That involves animation (fun) and a lot of tracking (please shoot me).

The good news is that you'll never get to see that video, as one of the lead singer chicks had a clause in her contract that it would never end up on the interwebs. Yeah, good luck with that one. We all know the unviersal rule of shit you dont want anyone to ever see; its going on youtube next to Paris' private adult excersize tapes.

So I havent had the time to really do any sculpts the past weeks, but if time and workload allows it, I'll be throwing some stuff on here some time this week. No promises though. Its not like you're paying for this shit.

The Final Brodeo

As many other artists, I would not be able to endure endless hours in front of this screen without any form of different stimulus. My drug of choice is podcasts, and mainly video game podcasts as they're often inhabited by the most outspoken and outright funny guys to listen to.

Last week, the head honcho at my favorite one, GFW Radio (also known by us initiates as the Brodeo) Jeff Green, decided to leave his position as editor in chief of the PC part at 1Up.com, to head over to EA's Sims team. I was really caught off guard at how that affected me, but I guess after some 46 year old jewish guy keeps talking in your ear over several years, you kind of start appreciating them as a part of your every day environment, and as your friends in a kind of creepy fanboy type of way. Good luck to you Jeff, I kissed your ass enough in your farewell 1up blog entry so you know how I feel *sniffle*

Well, at least we still had Shawn and the rest of the guys. But it turned out the closing of GFW Magazine had affected more than its EOC, as yet another one of its brilliant writers was about to turn his carreer in a new and different direction.

Yesterday morning greeted me with what was labeled as the final episode of the Brodeo. This epic 3 hour edition of GFW radio revealed that Shawn Elliot, the Brodeo's beloved vice president so to speak, was also resigning from 1Up to go work with Ken Levine (the brains behind BioShock) as an associate producer at 2K Boston. The Brodeo then rolled up its blankets, put put the bonfire, saddled the horses and rode off into the sunset.

So I guess what I wanted to say was; thanks for the great company over the last couple of years, for all the laughs and awful stories. You really brightened up many a long day and night of working towards some deadline, and all us listeners really appreciated all the work you guys put in doing the podcast every week. Good luck to you as well, Shawn, we're all sad to see you go but also hell'a excited to see what your amazingly creative, analytical and thourough brain will manage to brew up over there at 2K. You have definately earned the opportunity given to you, and there is no doubt in my mind that you'll go on to do great things.

Hopefully, the emptiness left by the Brodeo will be filled with something new from the remaining trio, I know we would all love to hear more "what the hell"s from Ryan, Chuff Love from Anthony and disgusting Star Wars lore from Dr. Max Chill.

Now, its time to pour out a 40 to the all the good times with the Brodeo (in a cup, of course, no sense in wasting perfectly good, and above all damn expensive, liqueur) and hope that we'll keep seing you guys around every now and then. And who knows, maybe I'll come to work as an artist for you guys some day. Then we can be best friends. Forever.

An' we out

Scetch September 18th

Ok, so as both a way to regularize my practice sessions and to actually get a more frequent inflow of shit to this blog of mine, I'm going to start doing daily (sorta daily at least) sculpting scetches and put them on here. As you can tell from the date of my last entry, I'm like the worlds worst blogger, but then again, I've been really busy lately with uninteresting work and haven had a lot of time to really do any sculpts. Besides, I'm not going to end up as some stupid ass twitterer that needs to tell everyone what he had for dinner.

This one is about a 2 hour thing I did, its nothing great but I wanted to start practice doing sculpts without reference material or detailed base meshes, so as to start imprinting the human form and proportions on my brain.

Plus, a good friend of mine just told me that he checks in on the blog on a regular basis, so I guess I've got to start adding some new stuff for him to check out. That puts my current amount of followers at 1. Yey!

 

Something old

Just figured I'd throw this one up as well, a quick piece I made for my reel this spring.

Peace

Yarr! I be a space pirate!

Ahoy, mateys! Just thought I'd post my submission for the 3D Total SSC07. The theme was Pirates - Past, present, future. Time limit was 5 hours. I had a bunch of ideas for this one, but as I sit working on the model, what do you know, I just spent most of the time available just dicking around. So I just did a real rough dagger and stuck it in there to at least get something that fit the theme. I'll update you (meaning myself as no one actually reads this) on the results of the compo. A couple of the entries really blew my socks off, so there are some talented guys hanging around over there at threedy. One of which made the material (same as I used last ssc), Mr. Ralf Stumpf, so thanks for that.

Peace