Annibal

So, it's been what, three years since my last journal? I'm horrible.

In that time, I moved to Los Angeles and am pursuing my career, hopefully to wind up writing for and creating childrens and young adult television shows along the lines of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Korra, and Dreamwork's Dragons.

I have been doing lots of drawings and paintings in traditional mediums that I will try to get uploaded sometime soon, and will be finishing a bunch of digital works I've got going on. I also have a graphic novel I am drafting that will be a short, standalone story no more than about 100 pages, if that.

Plus my novels and screenplays and working.

Life is good!

I hope everyone round these parts is fantastic. More coming soon.

I have uploaded 9/15 drawings that have been promised before any more photography! I have actually thought this is great for me to do despite the time in between updates because it's making me more critical of my photography. Just because I take 1k pics doesn't mean I have to upload or even edit 50 of them!

More to come. I have 2 more from like drawings to complete, and after that I want to start uploading cover design ideas I have for the novels I am working on, which I'm not sure if I want to try to get them fo' reals published or try self publishing them and advertising the hell out of them myself on places like FanFiction.net or whatever. It would be cool to be actually published. We'll see, we'll see!

I'm currently participating in NaNoWriMo 2011, and have already completed 50k words, but I want to FINISH this freakin' novel and I'm only about halfway through. But I'm really excited about this novel, more than the other two I have going. It's about a 15yo boy named Andrew and a 17 yo girl named Jerry. Andrew is murdered and accidentally resuscitated in Jerry's body, which, turns out, is a crime in the Afterlife. So he's arrested, and it all goes downhill from there. It's a supernatural escapade through the afterworld, a nation called Duat which is ruled by a spirit named Auf. The Afterworld is inhabited by the spirits and ghosts of the dead, as well as creatures we could probably recognize, called devas, and other beings from mythologies. It's very fun to write.

Sorry I never respond to comments. It's part of the weird ingrained oddities of me, that have included my avoidance of the phrase "You're welcome" when I am thanked (which results in me saying "Thank YOU" in response, which honestly is weird. So I'm changing that), and how I am working on doing normal things like actually ever responding to emails and DOING all the artwork I've said I'd do for people. Urgh?

Also, there's SOOOO much personal stuff going on in my life right now that I can't talk about, it's getting to the point where I can feel all my stress building like a volcano of anxiety in m heart that might explode one of these days like a previously sleepy island in the Ring of Fire that will blot out the sun for days and make the world a full degree colder.

Yup.

I have just uploaded 3 of my promised 15 new drawings (to be uploaded before uploading any more photography)!

Just getting back into the swing of photoshop. They have much room for improvement, but I like them, and I enjoyed working on them. I'm hoping to do at least three a week, but I also have a number of paintings to do, plus work, plus everything else, so who knows when I'll get another chance to just draw and color all day.

We will see.

And that last part isn't even sarcasm! I am going to go through my gallery and put many deviations in storage: anything I feel is really outdated and not indicative of my current ability and that doesn't have other merit (in my opinion), and anything that has no favs. I just don't want an overwhelming number of deviations (overwhelming for me, that is). So there will be reorganizing. How this effects you is that if you want a full quality file of one of them just throw me a note or email and I will try to send you the file, if I can. While I would LOVE for people to buy actual prints of my work, I very much understand the desire to just have files of pictures. I have many of them, myself. Yup!

In other news, I uploaded about 16 photos from last October onto the site, all taken in Wisconsin or Chicago. In the next couple days I will also add my Yellowstone photography. I am very proud of those photos. I feel as though, to date, those are my best. They aren't terribly special, but they are the first group of photos that I just feel really good about! I hope you like them as well!

After that, I plan to not upload ANY photography until I have uploaded at least fifteen drawings/digital paintings.

C ya!

So I am back from Namibia and Zambia--and rearing to go back. That was just my kind of place. Gorgeous land, generally amazing people, and the atmosphere is just really positive to me. You know how that it, right? Like, the vibe, the life of the place. Besides the discomforts of just a new place with things I'm not used to, the vibe of the areas I visited I just really enjoyed--Swakopmund in particular, and in specific just the area and the dunes (there are some troubling race relations there and colonial holdovers in thinking that are puzzling and off-putting).

Anyway, I'd go back in a heartbeat.

One of the strangest things having to do with my trip, to me, happened last night at my work. A boy I'd never spoken to who was also an employee seemed really, really displeased that I went to Africa. I couldn't tell if it was a disdain for Africa or disdain that someone would travel there "for fun" (which I could agree with to an extent--there's a kind of weird relationship between privileged white tourists and countries that are exploited and populated with peoples who are marginalized globally and live in less "progress"--rural areas in Zambia lack electricity and whatnot). But I'm not sure WHY this boy was so negative about it. It seemed to lean towards the disdain for Africa side, though, and he grilled me on whether I had family there or blahblahblah. Other coworkers, while showing ignorance about Africa as a whole, were very positive about it and eager to learn more about it--and I was able to at least turn one boy's opinion of Namibia and Zambia around. He thought it would be too scary, too violent, too hot, too dangerous to go. But was very willing to get rid of those opinions right away.

I wish schools in the US taught more about global geography, history, and current events. It's just sad how little people know about the continent of Africa, and even moreso how little they know about individual countries and groups of people there.

Anyway. I know I'm still fairly ignorant of much of Africa, and I am eager to get rid of that lack of knowledge. I want to plan another trip to southern Africa sometime soon--I need to go to Malawi and Botswana, and see more of Namibia and Zambia. I saw just enough this time to know I want to see more and learn more.

More on Africa later when I post some photographs.

In other news, I have decided to embrace the ecclecticity of my many loves in art and keep just this one DevArt page. I am going to try to keep a ratio of 10:1 photographs to drawings, so that means I need to get my rear in gear and draw more and upload more--well, mostly I need to color more, because I have about a hundred and fifty pieces of lineart to color. Woops!

Well, I've got two albums to post, of photographs, one a short one of photos taken from a trip to Wisconsin and Chicago in October 2010 and another of my roadtrip to Yellowstone NP in September 2010.

So, lots of stuff coming soon!

<3

Thanks to the awesome peeps who commented wishing me a great trip. It was! Love you guys!