Monday, November 20th 2006 - 12:42PM :

General goings on:

Reading a few other people’s Blogs and Live Journals the other day. I gotta admit I find it pretty fascinating finding out how everyone leads their lives or what goes on in their heads!
I’d be interested to know if anyone had read this blog all the way through from the first post until this one.

Then I thought.. Hmm, perhaps I should post something in the OM blog? Well, as far as my life goes, things are busier than ever. I’m still freelancing (doing a few illustration and web designs jobs at the moment). Also been doing another part time job since August (doing more web design stuff at the office). It’s all front end photoshop, html and css design, so at least I don’t have to worry about php, java and the rest of it (at least not at the moment) At the end of the day, I’m an artist/designer so the less I get to look at lines of code the better! On top of that, I’m in my final year of uni/college. In all honesty, I don’t know if I’d say I’ve learned a massive amount of new stuff, but it’s been a good opportunity to experiment with what I know and has taught me a few indirect lessons like what it takes to make a living out of art working or designing and how to get on with people better (socially).

Every so often I think about Organic Metal:

Since working at my new office job, I’ve gotten a lot better with CSS. Before I just knew how to change font types with it. So I wouldn’t mind re-working the majority of OM’s html and CSS content! I doubt I’d ever get around to it and the site works, so I ask myself, would it be worth re-working it just so the code looks cleaner and it runs a little faster?

I’ve been wanting to re-draw the OM character on the left to something new. Something more representative of me, Organic Metal, or my preferences. Originally this character was a bit of fan art I gave to Duncan Law-Green for his Britanime website, so it feels a bit weird having her on every page of OM.. When designing OM I just used that image as a place holder until I drew something better that would fit in the gap.. but in the end, anything else I tried fitting in that space didn’t look as nice! Another thing is, I had a cool Devianart Member offer to supply me with new vocals for the navigation links, so it would be good to re-do the character AND get the new vocals in the Flash navigation all at once.

When will these updates happen? Probably not until next year! As I say, got so much work to do, that I’ll be kept slaving away until Xmas most likely. Then my plan is to have a break. Maybe go back to playing Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (best PC game I know!!) for a few weeks solid

Comments: 2

Thursday, November 16th 2006 - 06:47PM :

Tablet Time

This was a mock-up CD cover I was asked to create for the Album “Diva” by Opera singer Maria Callas. I’m not particularly a fan of Opera and tried to just use this as a reason to experiment with Photoshop.

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Tuesday, October 10th 2006 - 03:36PM :

Sci- Fi Cowgirl

I was thinking about drawing a sexy sci-fi cowgirl bounty hunter character. I wasn’t sure what kinda outfit to give for her upper half, so left her naked This initial rough idea never got developed into final design. Maybe I simply felt the whole idea was too childish, or just got bored? I can’t remember

BTW, It's my Birthday today- Hoorah!

[Apologies to those offended by breasts etc]

She’d use her lasso to catch bad guys!

Comments: 0

Friday, June 16th 2006 - 12:44PM :

Thoughts on older work

Looking through the gallery on OM and thinking there's some older stuff or pieces which I might take down. Instead of deleting them all completely, I may just add them to the blog so they don't get lost for eternity.
Also thinking most of the graphic design stuff in the gallery sucks a bit! 'The Experiment' piece I still kinda like, but stuff like that old Sony poster thing is just amateurish and crappy- could make it look so much better if I re-did it now. Generally I reckon I need to do some decent graphic design stuff to put in the gallery. I'm not primarily a graphic artist, but I’m a fan of design and it'd be good to show I can do it to any prospective clients and such.

Until then, I have 3 freelance projects to deal with. Might have had one of them completed by now if 'We love Katamari' didn’t come out recently and I hadn't just bought 'Guitar Hero' on PS2! Ahhh.. Gaming eases the pain

Comments: 0

Tuesday, June 13th 2006 - 06:12PM :

Update with new stuff?

A few years back I used to wonder why people never updated their web sites. Frequent updates usually means more chance of reeling in more visitors, and the more visitors the better…
It’s pretty clear I’ve become one of these people that don’t update enough >_<

In a way I’m sorry to disappoint anyone who’s been following Organic Metal’s progress over the years. It would suck if I had the site up and running this long and only managing to clock up a few thousand hits. Instead, I've had hundreds of thousands and the support is really appreciated
...Although, at the same time I can’t say I’m sorry for not updating! Whenever I read other artist’s pages they’re forever apologizing for not drawing more and stuff, but they don’t need to. Not for me at least. I've realized Web sites are like puppies (not just for xmas) and require commitment, but unlike puppies they don’t really love you back or slobber all over your furniture so it’s a lot easier to neglect them if there are more important things going on in life.

So yeh.. Offline work and social stuff have taken over, so to be honest, there’s little chance to draw new stuff or update the site with anything new on a regular basis. I’ve also developed a kinda love hate relationship with my art which doesn’t help the situation! I love coming up with ideas for new art and seeing the final result, but the process of drawing, inking and CGing is sooo boring for me right now! >_< I suppose it wouldn’t be so bad if I were quicker at it, but I’m a perfectionist developing a smooth clean style which is a lot harder to master and a lot more time consuming than something rough, sketchy or paintery looking. I recently timed myself on a simple character design commission and it worked out something like this:

Style Research time: 40m
Sketch time: 5h35m [3 initial sketches, 2 mods, scanning, Minimum clean up time]
Ink or Neaten time: 3h40m [Lightboxed, neatened, scanning, Medium clean up time]
Flatting time : 1h15m
CG time: 5h15m
- That’s like a total time of 16 hours just for one character. More often than not my character designs take double that at least! That's a little shocking and I guess knowing it’ll take more time than I’m prepared to put into it really puts me off wanting to do anything new unless I’m getting paid for it. I’d be interested to know how long other people are spending on their character design CGs or artwork in general..?
Will consider working on getting quicker or something to take the tedium out of drawing. I could post more rough work in this here blog if there was a demand for it..?

Comments: 1

Monday, May 1st 2006 - 09:21PM :

Draw Like You Mean It!

I’ve been playing Texas Hold 'Em Poker for a few years now and was excited to be asked to work on several t-shit designs for poker playing client "Play Like you Mean It" (PLMI). It involved 'aggressive' style poker themed slogans with associated illustrations. Colour pallet was limited to just several colours, which made things a little more challenging but it was all good fun.

4 of the poker shirt designs.

Comments: 0

Saturday, March 11th 2006 - 09:03PM :

Cybernetik

I’ve been working on a project designing a mascot, logo, business card and website for Cybernetik – a games console repair shop. It’s great to work on projects like this where I get to utilize all my areas of expertise- graphic design, illustration and web. Even better when the customer wants to use a manga cyberpunk theme throughout the designs- I know I can’t expect cool jobs like this to come my way too often in the future! The client was really pleased with the end results too with was great ^_^

Initial cyborg character sketches to be used as the mascot.


Sample business card. Initially I delivered 3 samples- this was a refined version of the 3rd sample supplied

Comments: 0

Monday, February 20th 2006 - 08:12PM :

Small update

Probably not worth mentioning on the updates page, but I added a few Q&As to the Q&A page. I wouldn’t mind getting stuck into more personal art projects at the moment. Commissions, college work and Tales Of Symphonia are taking priority for now
At some point this year I wanted to update to girl on the front page to something a little different. Perhaps a little more mature, but still sexy and cool looking. I wonder if people would prefer a more realistic character or to keep with the big anime eyes?
A little oekaki from a few weeks back:

Perhaps the ninja girl had just defeated her opponent?

Comments: 0

Tuesday, January 3rd 2006 - 01:02AM :

2005 is officially over

2005 was an ok year. Sorry to those who have been asking for more updates over the last year! Only got 3 major artworks done but they were all pretty cool. Especially Kawa. Three good works is probably better than producing a dozen half-arsed attempts so it’s all good… Managed to complete several smallish commissions which I’ve not posted on OM and it’s probably not worth putting them up any time in the future. Mainly stand alone character designs and a series of poker theme t-shirt designs.

Also managed to throw together a quick (for my standard at least) Xmas card design which I sent to about 80 of my online pals:

Comments: 0

Wednesday, December 7th 2005 - 09:52PM :

Holidays are coming

Need to start my annual Christmas card design some time soon and should aim to send it mid-December, but for some reason these xmas cards always seem to take ages

In the meantime I’ve been trying out Illustrator and InDesign. Makes me wanna try more graphic stuff and less illustration or maybe think about merging the two?

Quick design completed in Illustrator 10

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