Achieving Focus

My awesome son has started school here in our new hometown and is doing great.  This has allowed me to better organize my days.  While he's at school, I do my day job as a freelance writer.  I actually have a long term writing gig with a great company.  Technically, I'm still a freelancer, but it's a full time job in itself.  I also changed my Elance subscription so that, for awhile, I'll be applying only to art jobs there.  I think this will be a good way to get more experience as a working artist, and to add experience to my CV and résumé.

Anyway, so it's writing day job while my son's at school, some job hunting, both for freelance art jobs and a day job as a 3D modeler while he's home and playing around the house, a walk and/or trip to the park with my son, and dinner, and putting him to bed, then art practice after he goes to sleep, then going to bed myself.

Drawing really is a fundamental skill for many types of art.  Obviously, illustrators have to be able to draw.  Painters also need this skill for the basis of their work.  As a 3D modeler and digital sculptor, the better I can draw, the better I understand the forms of things.  Also, being able to draw clean strokes helps tremendously when sculpting in a program like Zbrush.  On top of all that, I've started seeing modeler jobs that require good illustration skills.

I posted a bunch of eyeballs that I sketched weeks ago.  I'll post drawings now and then as little snippets of my improvement.

Onto another topic, you know how people keep to do lists?  I do that often to keep track of all the things I need to get done.  But I also get ideas for art projects, or blog entries.  It seems silly to write these down in separate places.  I mean, how many notebooks does one guy need to carry?  Plus, I might want to sketch some doodles.  I do have a sketch book for when I want to sit down and really practice drawing, but I don't need to lug that around with me, either.  Writing, you know, can be like an extension of the mind, a way to make sure tasks and ideas aren't forgotten.  Is there a name for a notebook where one writes down all of those things?  I'm thinking, "Brain Dump Book."

What I Need is a Rare, Ukrainian, Vermilion Unicorn

I was up last night later than I should have been, and then I stayed up even later, because I discovered what might possibly be the funniest YouTube channel.  It's called Bad Lip Reading.  You may have to see it to get it, but imagine watching a movie with the sound turned off and trying to read the actors' lips.  You might read something completely different from what they're actually saying.

Since I studied syncing lips to audio in one of my graduate animation classes at Academy of Art University, I'm well aware that the actual movement of our jaws and lips when we speak reveals only a portion of the sounds we're making.  Similar sounds often look alike.  The mouth doesn't move separately for each letter.  I'm simplifying, but it's really the art of studying how the mouth actually moves so that speech looks real.

What Bad Lip Reading does is, it takes those lip movements and adds wrong words that actually fit.

Here's what they did with Twilight:

Even better, they also take music videos and create completely new, different songs that fit with the videos.  "Russian Unicorn" is based on the video for Michael Bublé's "Haven't Met You Yet."  Not only is it hilarious, it's also an excellent pop tune.

If there's a point to this blog post, it's that I love this sort of totally out of the box creativity.  And that "Russian Unicorn" is an awesome tune!

Big Move to Southern California

Big moves are tough!  My son and I just moved from Santa Cruz, California to Orange, California.  I love it here!  Though I'm not generally a warm weather person, it's been pretty comfortable.  Packing the truck, and then driving down were the hardest things.  It took 11 hours to get here last Friday.  Eleven!

Now, we live near Disneyland, which equals awesome.  I can also look for jobs in games and film, and employers will know that I live nearby!  The last few days have involved getting to know the town a bit and settling in, but I'll start putting my résumé and cv out there soon.

Back to work!  I have some articles to write today before evening plans.

And yes, this is about as personal as this blog gets!

Once I've got a daily routine going, I'll have more artwork up, and possibly videos.

I know, "Big moves are tough!" is about the most obvious statement ever.

Keep Up With Drawing!

I've done lots of modeling and texturing since graduating from AAU, but I haven't done enough drawing.  I've been plenty busy, but I do wish I'd taken more time for this.

So, I'm going to try to practice my drawing at least a few times a week, if not every day.

And today, I decided to draw some eyeballs.  I quickly realized though that I wasn't drawing circles as easily as I used to!  I've gotten rusty.  So, I did this circle sketch page (this is a good exercise anyway), and turned some into eyes.

This blog is partly about the realities of being a working artist, and sometimes that means you get rusty in one area or another.

Web Site Improvements

I've done a lot of updating on my new site already!  Here are some details:

• Added a link to my deviantArt page, and one to my main YouTube channel, at the very bottom of every page.
• Added a Facebook "like" button at the bottom left.
• Made my name in the upper left corner link to the bio page.
• Consolidated the links on the top bar by adding some as subsections to others.
• digital sketching is now under modeling
• The videos and reviews blog is now under blog
• A new page has been added, cultural terminology project, under drawing

The cultural terminology project was one I did for an AAU class in Fall, 2009.  It's truly a gallery unto itself.

Wix is making it really easy to tweak and improve my site, so keep an eye on it for more additions and changes.

Welcome to the New JonFesmire.Com!

Well, this has been a good diversion!  Important, too.

Today, I'm actually writing a number of articles for my main freelance job.  So, why am I writing in my blog? Oddly enough, the change of pace should make it easier to get back to the articles.  I can write freely here, without having to do any research.  I can just say what's on my mind.

It was unbelievably easy to switch my domain hosting over from GoDaddy to Wix.  (Fast, too! The Wix site said it could take up to 72 hours, and it was moved over within minutes.) I'm still a GoDaddy customer.  They're my domain registrar, so I'll be paying them about $24 per year for my domain, http://jonfesmire.com/, and to keep my private registration info private.  But Wix, wow.  I wrote a lot of HTML in the 90s, when I was working in the dot coms.  Those were good years.  Anyway, now, I just want to work on my site with visual elements, similar to creating a PowerPoint file.  Wix lets me do that.  Wordpress was all right, but it's obvious when you're on a Wordpress site.  Here, I can arrange the visual and text elements however I please.  It's very right brained.

Here's a plan I thought up while I was writing the last paragraph.

Blogger, which I'm using now, allows users to create lots of blogs.  I decided that "Ramblings of an Art Geek," which I created a few years ago, would make a nice personal blog title.  However, there are other blogs I'd like to write.  For instance, I used to review book for SF Site.  You can still find my reviews, and reviews by others about my books, there.  It's well worth a visit.

Where was I?  Oh yeah.  I've been reading a lot of great fiction since early last year.  I had a long period there where I read mostly nonfiction and read hardly any novels at all.  Then, I read "The Haunted Vagina" by Carlton Mellick, and all that changed.  I've read a ton of his books, but I've also been zipping through a lot of other novels.  If I'm not reading a great novel, I feel like I'm missing something.  So, I thought it would be fun to do a book review blog.  SF Site would probably welcome me back, and I'd get free books to boot, but I want to do this on my own time, with books I really want to read.  I've got quite a backlog of books I'd like to review, actually.

You know how, now and then, I do tutorial videos?  They're not the greatest, but when I figure out a technique in Maya or Zbrush, I like to share it with others.  Time permitting, I may create a tutorials blog.

Plus, I should link my old blogs, for the sake of completeness and history.  The Wix editor makes it really, really easy to include all that.

Like I said in my last entry, back to work!  These articles are definitely not going to write themselves.

New Site

You may have noticed a huge change in the look of my site.  Wordpress has been fun, but lacks the ability to make serious design changes.  I wanted to be able to customize my site without knowing too much HTML, and Wordpress is rather restrictive.

Who else has been seeing all those Wix ads on Facebook?  I've been getting a lot of them.  Since I enjoy working on websites, I decided to give it a try.  Well, I liked what I saw, and got to work on a new design.

At the moment, I'm still working on getting my domain name switched over.  So, if you happen to read this blog on Blogger, you'll get the news before everyone else.

Back to work!