The Realm

Ok just finished this. I made lots of art this year but mostly traditional.



January: RipTalon, the captain from Triangulum Resistance.
February: Captain Ahab in Gregory Peck style. Or Lincoln style.
March: One of this year's commission pieces. A jeep wrangler. I also drew a bunch of vehicle doors. People ask for the weirdest things.
April: An uncolored drawing of Henrietta the Rhode Island Red hen I used to have.
May: A drawing from my Bible Journaling I made when rebels tried to over throw Moses. God opened up the earth and they were swallowed up tents and all.
Numbers 16:32 And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods.
June: A pic of Solan looking at his watch. I don't think he's ever been late for anything.
July: Empress Bullet from Triangulum Resistance.
August: Phage the budgie surprised.
September: Sorath with Planets.
October: Gord talking about defeating Fear. These last four are a series for a solitaire video game.
November: Scary Fear enjoying a beautiful Fall day.
December: Scary Fear as this year's Christmas cards. Hopes and Fears.
Bonus: The first drawing of last year. The cover of this year's Bullet journal. I modified his phrase to say "What powers will you give me this year?" Looking back on this now that's an amazing question I can now answer. This year was great. I made tons of art. Some of it didn't make the cut into this review. I got more commissions this year. And I made some actual physical art too like a mailbox, tail lights and a custom budgie hat. I'm sure I'm forgetting other accomplishments. This year was just packed. Kinda sorry to see it go. Hard to imagine a better year but I'm hoping for that and hope 2020 will be even better. We are the ones that make our time great or now. So be awesome.

And that reminds me. I've been wanting to share this video since Christmas but keep forgetting. Politically the year has been awesome too. Our nation has prospered. The economy is great. We're exporting oil and are the leader in oil for the whole world. We have helped out Israel which is a guaranteed blessing for us. The turkey pardon this year was funny. Always enjoy those. And Melania (sorry I spelled it wrong I know) Trump made the white house into a winter wonderland for Christmas. It is like a palace right now and a lovely mix of Christmas and Patriotic. Two things I love. Having the Trumps in power has been like having a good King and Queen for our nation. I hope they win the next election in the new year. They have our vote for sure. Anyway check out this lovely video. Oh and the song is funny but also nice at the same time. They took Trump's voice when he said these words in speeches and ran it through auto tune so it sounds like he's singing the song.


https://www.youtube.com/embed/Bin_7V0X7mc
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I'm thrilled that we got our HP printer to work finally. The new cartridges for the Epson didn't work. It read that it had full ink but printed blank pages. I did all the tests on it and not sure what would fix it other than a pro taking it apart and putting it back together. I hate that I have to keep it around because it's an awesome scanner. The HP has a crap scanner I can't use for my art, but it prints well. So after getting ink all over us and ending up with rainbow hands we now have a lovely printer again and yesterday I ran some gorgeous prints off of it.



Look how nice these are.



Here's a close up the Staples Print. These were terrible. The color was nice but it's all grainy and blurry. Also it has red and blue lines through it. They told me the paper was glossy. That's not glossy at all. I'm glad I didn't have to pay for these but I don't want to even give them away or display them. What a waste. They have fancy expensive printers and my cheap $50 one once it works has way better quality.



The contrast is better on the Staples one on the left but I'm willing to trade that off for these high gloss, in focus, sharp and vibrant prints. I have to remember to lighten everything then when I print my stuff but these are display worthy and gift worthy. Unfortunately my computer is in the red on memory. I'm getting scratch disk errors and can't open photoshop. So I'm backing up videos which I think may be the culprits taking up the room on my C drive. I SO need a new computer. I just hate that I'll be forced to have windows 10 if I do that. Ever since I got the GoPros it's amazing how much space videos take up. I've already filled an external drive that I think was 1 TB with just redundant back ups. I've got one left and who knows if it won't be full after this transfer. I hate backing stuff up. I'm just waiting for it to clean so I can open photoshop.

I finished October for the Bullet Journal. YAY I'm so happy about that. I need to start working on November right away and try to finish it. Seems it takes me two weeks to finish a month. I might be able to do this one faster since now I kind of know what layouts I like and what to do. I still dont' feel fully confident since I am new to Bullet Journaling. I'll post pics soon of the new journal pages since I won't be making a video on it until the end of the month.

( Journal Pics )
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So much has been going on the last few days for me. I'm very excited about learning a new art form. So this all started before Peregrine came over to visit me. I don't know the exact date but I knew I wanted to get her a new Bible. I had gotten her one last year but it wasn't the best one. I began to do an Amazon search and discovered there were Bible Journals. When I was growing up Bibles were not every exciting. As far as the looks go. The message is wonderful of course but it doesn't help kids when you have a huge book, with tiny font and bland covers that are black or brown. I had a brown one growing up that I never liked much. But now I find out there are colorful Bibles out there that encourage you to write and color in them about whatever the Lord speaks to you. As an artist I was thrilled about this. I had only seen the floral version of My Creative Bible which is the one I got for my friend since she's an artist too. It comes in a lovely box and has so many cute birds and fancy text to color. I'm not into flowers though. Too girly for me. BUT then I found there were variant covers and there was a turquoise one. Perfect. I ordered one for myself not long after I placed her order. It came in a few days ago. It's a King James Version which is my fave translation.

I ordered some colored pencils because I knew that those are the safest since Bible pages are so thin. I didn't want inks or paint to bleed through. After doing some research I decided to order a box of 48 Prismacolored pencils.



They are supposed to blend well, be soft and are professional artist quality. I also got the Crayola twistables 30 pack because I was impatiently awaiting for the prismacolors to arrive. They are not in the box because I have put them into a cup. It was very hard getting those in and out of the box so into a cup they went. I'm still learning how to use the prismacolors. Another thing I liked about them is that they look like paint and not like pencils. Though I have not mastered how to get that look yet. I have always hated crayons and colored pencils for leaving that white grainy area when you color on paper. That looks so unprofessional to me. I have never liked most traditional art. Digital art is my true calling and was so glad when it became available to the public in the 90s. So I am a bit frustrated that I haven't quite figured this whole traditional art thing out yet. But I know I haven't been at it long. Less than a week. I didn't master digital art right away. I've been doing it for two decades now. But yeah I wish my skills were parallel in both fields. I'm always that frustrated when I start anything new though. I'll keep at it and will improve. So I don't know yet if I want to invest in the full 150 set. They are expensive. I've already run into the problem of no greys. The next set up is the 72 and it has some greys. Using black lightly does not work. I need greys. If I can get to the level I want to be and master blending and shading then I definitely want to get the full set. My aunt is an artist. Perhaps she can help me when I go visit her.

Ok so back to the story. I have been watching lots of tutorials on Bible Journaling and am watching this one lady on youtube that does amazing things. She even water colors her pages and they don't get bleed through. I'm not brave enough for that. I hated water color as a kid too. Traditional art was just never my thing. But anyway, I learned about a thing called Tip In. You get this see through paper called Vellum and draw on it then insert it in as extra pages. It looks very pretty and books still close like they are part of the pages. Here's one I made.



Too big and I'm not a fan of how pale it turned out. I did like adding the glitter pen. I didn't permanently glue it in yet. So then I decided to do what I am good at and color it in photoshop.



Beautiful! And I test printed it on Vellum. It looked good but the paint streaks. That's ok. I found out there's a specific kind I can get for printing. So I will be doing that from now on for these. I can't wait to print my first one. Also perhaps these will turn out better if I use my prismacolors. I did the other one with Crayolas. One thing that's hard for me is I don't have lots of strength and I see people really pressing their pencils in. Sigh, yet another thing I have never liked much.

( More journaling pics )
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New drawing. Just a quick and simple drawing of Fear in time for the end of last month.



I did a very basic shading job, easy background and just didn't go all out on him. Just wanted to get something that looked nice and woudln't take me two days or more to complete.

Now it is June 1st. It's been two straight weeks of rain. At least now it's summer and the official start of Hurricane season, but the weather got a head start on the rain. Well with this project out of the way perhaps I'll get back to working on the driver side door again. That's so close to being finished. Darn it, I see I forgot to make his right wing messy. I draw his wings pristine so I have to remember to mess both up. It's something I have a hard time with haha.

Chris got a new bluray player the other day. We picked one up and didn't notice it was a used one. It had no remote, so we went back and exchanged it and finally got a new one. It looks very nice. It's an LJ and I like that it's basic. The reason it looks so good and was cheap is because it's just a player. It doesn't have netflix, youtube or any of that unnecessary stuff. It's annoying all electronics seem to come with these things whether you want them or not. TV's already do this so no need for more stuff when that and your tablets and other things do it too. A player should play disks only, so yeah we like this. Maybe I'll get one for myself since I've never liked the Sony one I have. I also ordered a bunch of colored HDMI cables. Can't wait to get those in. They'll come in different colors so we'll know what goes to what system.
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Most people when they dream of Fear have a very bad night. Not me. This was excellent. Here are some doodles of my fave scenes from that dream. Wings are not anatomically correct because these are just doodles so I won't forget these scenes. Though I love some of these so much that it's tempting to flesh them out properly and color them.



1. This is when I first saw Chris up on the pole. I got very excited. Flew up half way then started to struggle in the dream with gaining altitude. I became lucid and pushed through this problem and made it to the top.

2. At the top of the pole and Chris and I are very happy to see each other. I rushed him in a hug and knocked him off the pole.

3. A close up of the hug. Had to not draw two of their wings or you wouldn't be able to see anything.

4. Over head view shows better what's going on as we rotate and slowly float down over the parking lot.
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