And so another journey through oil paint and turpentine yields a questionably memorable illustration.  As you may not recall, when I started this painting I did not, for once, plan out each trivial detail before I started slapping paint all over the place.  I tried to just let the painting develop as the ideas came floating [Continue Reading...]

Well the tree has a friend now, though some guy in a top hat is sitting on her.  Bit of a strange person too, who felt the need to get fully dressed including coat and top hat but figured no one would notice a complete lack of footwear. But the painting is still coming along, [Continue Reading...]

Several years back I was regularly sending my artwork off to SciFi / Fantasy conventions all over the country, submitting them to be included in the art show at each event.  I had optimistic hopes of selling at least a few of my paintings, more realistic hopes of selling one, and some part of me [Continue Reading...]

The latest painting project continues, slowly but steadily, and has produced something of a finished image within the larger scope of this still rather undefined idea.  A tree: Not too bad.  Looks like a healthy tree, though I will stop short of calling it a happy tree.  I am not sure I know how it [Continue Reading...]

Over these past few years I had drifted away from my old favorite pastime, traditional painting, in favor of digital techniques that offered up a workflow which allows for more freedom of experimentation and oops-I-screwed-up-fixing-ness (English Fail).  I can work on one image, breaking out each of the key components into different layers as I [Continue Reading...]

I have often heard people say you should do what you love for a living, if you can.  The satisfaction of spending your days toiling in the discipline that you feel is more fun and pleasure than work and stress will far outweigh any financial benefits you might have to give up to fully pursue [Continue Reading...]

For the last couple of years I have been focusing my efforts on learning to develop games, first via Flash and Actionscript and more recently using Microsoft’s XNA game development SDK.  Thus far I have completed one exceptionally unoriginal flash game, a link for which is provided on the left via the Z Fighter Alpha [Continue Reading...]

I was actually pretty happy with the old site design overall.  Really, it wasn’t so bad.  I certainly had not planned on completely overhauling both the look of it and the way in which the content was organized.  When I started thinking of ways to “improve” the site I was just going to tweak the [Continue Reading...]

So I made a flash game.  Some people have actually played it and it is theoretically possible some might even have enjoyed it, though it has sadly not launched a tremendously exciting new career for me in the game producing industry nor propelled me into glorious super stardom among the members game playing community.  It [Continue Reading...]

Updated 5-23-10: Never set your goals very high.  It just makes the inevitable disappointment feel that much worse.  The view from halfway up the mountain isn’t as grand as it is from the peak, but it’s still pretty damn nice to look at and the odds of slipping and irrevocably mangling your spine as you [Continue Reading...]

As I work through the final stages of my first flash game I am aware that I have not yet figured out what I am actually going to call it.  The .fla is called “Lame-Side-Scroller_1.1b”, which is appropriate but would not lend itself well to any sort of effective web marketing campaign.  Or would it? [Continue Reading...]

Somewhere on this blog I made something that might have been taken to be a promise to deliver a game of some variety or another.  Well, I hope this will not set a precedence whereby I will be expected to actually deliver on all of my promises, but I may just delivery on that one.  [Continue Reading...]

I am the first to admit I start far too many projects and finish entirely too few, and then write about them anyway.  I offer a service here, one that teaches young peoples not to be like me.  The most recent (or at least the most often written about) project of mine is this little [Continue Reading...]

Enemies are typically trying to kill you because that is their business.  You shouldn’t be upset with them for just doing their job, though I understand if you do not admire them for doing it particularly well.  We all have to do our thing and they are doing their’s when they are blasting the hell [Continue Reading...]

Games are not generally fond of reality.  For good reason I say, for reality is such a bother, a frustration, and it’s fiendishly difficult to program correctly.  And I am not only referring to that class I very nearly failed (twice) in college that has a lot to do with some old Englishman going on [Continue Reading...]

This was the original design I put together for use in my upcoming (hopefully) Flash game, but I pretty much knew from the start this was not going to stick.  It was intentionally humorous, and really was just a placeholder to use as I worked on the game mechanics.  The game is a classic side [Continue Reading...]

Another week another project.  This will be the second flash game I’ve attempted to make, though there is some hope that eventually something will come out of one of these endeavors.  The first one was actually coming along fairly well, but it was Dark Purple UFO themed and I had not put it together very [Continue Reading...]

I am not a person of generally strong opinions but perhaps you are.  It is possible you are the sort who clicks about the wonderfully wasted web and drops comments, suggestions, and not so well thought out criticisms on just about anything you know very little about but are enthusiastically willing to get better acquainted with. [Continue Reading...]

And this would be, a funny cat wearing glasses: Sometimes these designs they just come to me and I am powerless to resist turning them into images to put on shirts, coffee mugs and other dubiously fine gifts.

Well post number three went up on the DPU site, and this one looks a bit different than the first two.  I’ve changed up the art style  and for once the change seems to have made an improvement.  The artwork feels just a bit more stylized and perhaps energetic, especially the image of Edrik (on [Continue Reading...]

It occured to me one night recently and I don’t want to talk about it, but it did give me this idea.  I have always loved the notion of creating my own video game but I was never infatuated with the actual work and frustration of actually making my own video game.  When I purchased [Continue Reading...]

Content to provide, and so I have.  Dark Purple UFOs is alive, and if you were to go there right this very next several hours you will find that indeed provided content is available and colorful.  It still needs work overall, and perhaps a couple of different kinds of content in addition to the story [Continue Reading...]

Some progress, hopefully of the sustainable variety, has taken place over at my darkpurpleufos.com site.  Some serious tweaking to the blog front end, which is not quite complete but this is likely 80% done.  I need to add a sidebar link for a contact page and a link to this blog.  Plus there are a [Continue Reading...]

I will be subscribing to at least one, perhaps multiple freelance type sites to try and get myself some Illustration work.  This time is for real, I think, as I seem far more motivated than usual to try and get a professional illustration business going.  No reason not to try as I certainly feel I [Continue Reading...]

If you feel inspired by the title of this post please get the hell off my digital patch of dead petunias. I was referring only to my future by way of my contributions to this blog. To wit, I have decided that I shall go mad, though in a more patient and thoughtful manner than [Continue Reading...]

It seems the promise of a new world labelled only as Dark Purple UFOs has stayed with me more persistently than I might have imagined it would.  Though I seem to aimlessly wander around my mental laboratory, looking for new elemental substances to throw together in the hopes of concocting something original but never giving [Continue Reading...]

Given my ever declining state of intelligence, awareness and general drool controlling abilities I figured I would alter the header and footer of the site to better reflect my neat, orderly and entirely not rational point of view.  It actually took a few attempts to get it right, but the wonderful advantage of running a [Continue Reading...]

Why successfully complete one project when you can fail to make progress on half a dozen bad ideas that should never have left the concept phase let alone had real time and monopoly money thrown at them? I wrote a novel once, a couple years ago and knew immediately it was crap.  I’m not much [Continue Reading...]

So today was my last day at what I may now refer to as my old job.  What you may find interesting is not very much on this site except for perhaps the following depictions of office life gone awry, or nutty, or weird.  Perhaps you can identify with the general outlook and attitudes of [Continue Reading...]

What, it’s not like I’m bound by law or contract or vague feelings of responsibility to consistently update this blog.  I just ramble here, you just come here and we all just pretty much ignore this place.  See we’re all in sync here, so no worries. However, there might be a few weary Internet wanderers [Continue Reading...]

Well, this was intended to be my first flash movie, but somewhere along the way I decided it just wasn’t going to quite be up to my not terribly high standards.  Still, there is enough to it to warrant wasting your time with a blog post for it: (Note: Has sound, and  if after pressing [Continue Reading...]

Remember that last post when I resolutely refused to end any given sentence because I just wanted to keep right on going with every thought without interupting it with any annoying and unnecessary pauses that simply delay the inevitable delivery of the point of the sentence which is never actually worth waiting for regardless of [Continue Reading...]

The subject of this post does not refer to me personally, as I am not certain I have ever experienced a moment of pure serenity and I am probably not by all possible definitions of the term altogether clean.  This new bit of artwork however, is: Click on the image to go to that page [Continue Reading...]

My pipe dream of a themed content driven site is becoming the center of almost all of my creative efforts lately, and probably will be for a while.  Working on a Flash movie for the site has been my primary focus so far, but on the side I have been toying with other ideas for [Continue Reading...]

Well my endless hours of tinkering and cursing has yielded plenty of frustration and knowledge, and a very short clip to share.  It isn’t much – at all – but rather just a quick peek at how my dismally inadequate animation skills are coming along. );"> [Continue Reading...]

I’ve been playing around with my not-quite-shiny new (though perfectly legitimate – don’t give me that look Adobe!) copy of Creative Suite CS3 Web Premium.  I still have a whole lot to learn though it has not taken long at all to make quite an impression on what I might be able to do with [Continue Reading...]

Here’s a lovely Red Dragon design. Red wings (minus the Stanley Cup), red scales and big yellow teeth with knight bits and pieces stuck between them. Good old classic fantasy goodness. This is actually an acrylic painting that I completed back in November of ’06, and I did have it up in my gallery here [Continue Reading...]

Well, there is this other website I have.  Yes, at some point I didn’t think this one was big enough to hold all of the refuse floating out of my imagination on an hourly basis.  I needed to break ground on a new landfill for foul ideas and I called it DarkPurpleUFOs.com.  Wait, don’t go [Continue Reading...]

Well, the sketch in my last entry is already toast.  I lost interest in that as a project right about the time I published it.  I don’t think it’s a terrible idea, or a hideously misconceived concept – it’s not like most of my ideas, I really did feel that one wasn’t too awful.  It [Continue Reading...]

Perhaps this is what I had intended to do with this site.  Here is a rough sketch that recently began to form inside my mind.   Clearly I should have left it there to starve and shrivel and fade away.  Just like my poor pet Llama.  Just kidding. Please don’t starve any Llamas. It isn’t even [Continue Reading...]

Early on in my life – well, my teen years, anyway – I reached a certain point and made a choice to pursue a technical career instead of a creative one.  At the time it made sense, though at that time a lot of very stupid and reckless ideas made perfect sense.  Somehow I was [Continue Reading...]

I could make “welcome” the first word of this first post, but it would really not be all that appropriate.  I’m not sure that you are, so, I cannot say with authority that you are indeed welcome here.  Although, since you are here the least I can do is provide you with some stupefyingly dull [Continue Reading...]