the Holiday week.

The holidays blew by fast this year - don’t they always. I was working most of the Christmas week as well as the week after, so that made it go be even faster. Spending time with the family was great, and just some fun down time is really where it is at.

My downtime consisted of buying a couple books at Borders and reading up on them. One of my birthday resolutions in Novemeber was to build my art skills a lot more. I thought of no better way to do this than subscribe to ImagineFX and pick up a copy of The Essential Blender. (pic from Amazon)

I have gotten through about 50 pages as of today and I am very impressed as to what it can do (especially being FREE). I am hoping it can help with my scene construction and composition when I work on my art skills. I will post anything that I use for it. Maybe something I can stick it on my portfolio site as well. I took some modeling and animation classes in college, so hopefully I can pick it up pretty quick.

If you haven’t heard of ImagineFX, you should take a look. It gears itself toward illustrators/concept artists and gives a load of instruction when creating monsters/scenes/artwork. It interviews some great artists and gives advice on improving your skills. The workshops are good, but it would be unbelievable if the workshops were done more with video. After reading through one magazine and trying some of the techniques out, I can already see an improvement.

One of the hardest parts I am struggling with right now is color palettes. There are so many colors!! How do you choose. There are some neat sites like colorbe.com that I have seen to give an idea, but it is soo hard!!

I have spent the last two weeks toying with colors and painting different ways. Cool recedes and warm pops out, but there is so much to it than that. It must just take practice.Working a little on a website on my free time. It is a woodworking site, so competitive analysis isn’t working well for design ideas. Hopefully finish that in a little over a week. Man, I wish IE6 could support PNG files. that would make my life a little easier. Maybe next year! :)

Other than that, hanging out with my brother and watching him play “Left for Dead”.