It's time I actually added a journal to my site! Sorry for anyone hoping for something interesting, this journal is just going to be some general blather about myself and painting.

First, I'm very grateful to ^ArtisticAunJuli and =bolsterstone for the DD. Whoa! That weekend was an incredible rush. I wanted to write a journal entry immediately (probably comprised entirely of equal parts squee and gratitude) but spent time answering comments instead

I'm completely untrained as an artist (nobody is surprised at this, right?), and drawing and painting is purely a hobby, but I am interested in improving my skills, and I'm happy to receive advice or critique. Advanced Critique is enabled on some of my comments, but please, feel free to suggest or point out flaws – particularly those I can fix. There are often things I could improve but I get so focussed I don't even notice them until someone points them out! I might not actually fix them (older pieces are just going to stay as evidence that I've improved ) but I'm grateful for all comments. OTOH, if you want to say hi, and not offer crit, that is always appreciated, too.

I've had a tablet for a year now, and it's great. For years I've used pencil and gouache, but CG painting is giving me more freedom to explore and improve. Gouache portraits – at least, the way I usually do them – take a lot of preplanning, and are not very forgiving of mistakes. Using Painter X with the tablet lets me correct mistakes easily, and play around with the design, as I work. I use the tablet and Painter in a very similar manner to a traditional art style, - just with Layers (for ease of design rearrangement) Ctrl-Z and the occassional colour tweaking and brightness/contrast fiddling.

I paint Fanart, mostly for live-action SF shows, and it was surprising to find so much controversy here on DA to the thought of fanart. I'm an amateur, but I don't think there is an intrinsic flaw in the concept of fanart that prevents it from ever being decent. It is the skill of the artist and their message that determines how good art is (with all suitable disclaimers about personal taste and the difficulty in being subjective about art).

Sometimes I just draw portraits because I like the subject. Sometimes I enjoy the more challenging aspects of Fanart. For my Steampunk Atlantis painting, the challenge was not only to do a Steampunk (ish) picture, but to translate 4 specific characters into a Steampunk AU version of their universe, to capture likenesses, to perhaps say something about how I see these characters, and hopefully to tell a little story. Fanart is a way to interact with the fannish community, which is part of the fun, for me.

Clubs