Since I embraced the practice of daily warm-up sketches, the chief obstacle to frequent posting has become absence of free time. Those precious increments of time previously set aside for posting have been usurped by the invading hordes of artistic improvement - Dethroning their literary cousin with a swift and cunningly deployed coup d’état.

Here are the products of their rebellion:

And then I go on for three or four paragraphs, dispensing high grade bullshit - triple-distilled from fermented folderol and pretense. cheers.

- SF

I will now submit unto you an age old cliché in the world of art blogs: the Utopian promise of more frequent updates based on a newly adopted practice of daily warm-up sketches. I’m fully aware that only the most strong-minded Jedi-artist even come close to to keeping such a promise, but i think there might be some kind of a lesson to be learned from trying - even if that lesson is to stand strong in the face of utter failure.

Here are the corner pieces of my undoing:

While canvasing the archives i noticed that my post have gradually turned into tangled sci-fi/fantasy allegories. Even though I’ve been painfully topical in every post (as is often the case with blogs) I’m not sure how much of it comes through - I hope at least some of it.

Even before I knew what “lifehacking” was I was prone to creating loosely codified paradigms to manage my time and resources. I’m the kind of person that would benefit greatly from having a sarcastic automaton butler or an artificial intelligence to survey my actions and gather my thought into holographic storage for quick reference. If I create a list or schedule of some sort, chances are I’m going to loose the goddamn thing. I have a ton of notebooks sitting on my shelf, packed to the brim with bullshit. If i wanted to find something in there I’d need a pack of search dogs, a team of spelunkers and, just in case, a medic on stand-by. I tell you this to emphasize a point: when i say that Todoist has made my life easier, I’m not kidding.

Right now, I have to get back to work, but i am trusting you, the Internet to slam down on any discrepancies in my quest to increase my posting rate.

- SF

After a month of slumber Arcadia has rissen from hibernation, licking its mottled fur and stumbling out of the earthen burrow constructed in December.

Here’s yesterdays warm up, and some superfluous commentary:

This past month I’ve been so tied up at work that the idea of paving the driveway to my blog has been the last thing on my mind. During a visit to a neighboring human settlement i was spotted by the resident master race and marked for collection. I have now been assimilated into the their fold of creatives and hooked up to the machine. I lay, submerged in a cocktail of nutriments and preservatives, with needles and tubes piercing my body at odd angles. I am but one of several glands in the body that is the machine, excreting creativity as harvesting-drones scurry by to collect the brimming containers my fellow glands have filled during the night.

I wash my hands of the words that tumble out of my mind and onto this blog - most of them anyway. The fact is that this is the good kind of pain. It’s like breaking bones to regrow them. Hopefully stronger. I suspect that they are reshaping my mind into a more capable, consistent processing unit. One that is not riddled with borderline disorders.

I’ve been held up by a rigorous series of trails, most of which were by fire and some of which featured brimstone - even the occasional patch of sulfur. Sitting atop their lofty pillars, the local deities judged my every move, watching me with ashen faces while jotting grimly in huge tomes resting on their laps. The gauntlet will be closing tightly over the next weeks, funneling into my inauguration into the hive mind. I steel myself, and I leave you this message - just in case.

- SF

Time to break it up a little. This morsel is the byproduct of a late hour caffeine binge and the resultant chemically induced insomnia:

I’m becoming increasingly partial to Sketchbook Pro as my go-to tool for idea creation. Many times I’ll start in Sketchbook Pro, print it out, and then continue on paper - eventually scanning it and moving over to Photoshop. I believe this would be referred to as “work-flow dynamics” in a professional venue, a scenario in which I would currently be undergoing extensive modification to my “production pipeline” (this should not be misconstrued as a euphemism for genital surgery.) I prefer the term “switching shit up” as I believe it  accurately communicates the quality of most of my work in it’s early stages.

I like to think that most artists follow roughly the same path, evolving from the “introverted fabulist”, taking the turn to either the “shunned madman”, mumbling through his beard about vivid visions of the end times from the filthy gutter; or the “mad shaman”, spewing forth nonsensical prophesies to the sound of enthusiastic “uhms” and “ohs” - a slight but significant distinction.

It is my belief that if you need to make images you are, like me, intrinsically broken, and should start hoarding food for when you are inevitably recognized as a useless part of the grand machinery. Hell, I think we should band together and start making fallout shelters right now, that is to say, i think we should talk about it, and then do nothing. We need to start channeling our self-loathing into something worthless if we are going to avoid getting in front of this thing. we’ll basically sit on our asses and whine about shit not being totally awesome all the time. Yes, I’m going to start championing this, and I’m going to call it “the futility non-initiative.” Sign up, or don’t, nobody cares.

- SF