As the year draws to a close and with potentially no new artwork from me until early in the next year, I quickly threw this up to send the year off.

2011 has undoubtedly been my most productive year yet. I tried to show my various attempts at dipping my toes in different styles rather than showing my progress in handling a single method.

September was the hardest month to pick. Some of my best work from the year can be found there.

You can find the template for this meme (done by DustBunnyThumper of deviantART) here.

Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year to everyone!

Long after it was suggested to me by a number of people (a number that must’ve tripled after the HBO series came out), I finally started to read George Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels. I’m currently on the third book, “A Song of Storms,” and I’m greatly enjoying the ride so far. I’ve watched the TV series as well but I made sure to do so only after reading that first book that the show is based on. I thought the TV series was great too, despite suffering from some of the downfalls inherent to adapting an 800+ page monster of a novel into less than a dozen hour-long episodes but I digress. There is one scene in particular though, the one that closes the second episode, that completely amazed me in its execution.

Here’s a brief recap of the events that lead up to that moment. Bran Stark, a 7 year old boy and son of Eddard (or Ned), is thrown off a tower after seeing something he shouldn’t have. He survives but goes into a coma and an assassin is sent to finish him off by, presumably, the people that caused him to fall in the first place. Now, each of the Stark children has a direwolf, a large wolf-like creature, with them and Bran’s direwolf, who at that point had no name, rips out the would-be assassin’s throat before he carries out his mission, saving Bran. Bran eventually wakes up and that’s the part that I want to talk about.

In the book, chapters are told from the perspectives of major characters in the series. When Bran wakes, it’s his perspective we’re seeing it happen from and the chapter starts with a dream he’s having while in his coma. In the dream, there is talk of Bran’s higher purpose in the series and of the coming winter. It’s worth stressing that winter at this point in the book has been established not only as being extremely dangerous because of its fierceness but also as a more ominous and foreboding time. Winter is coming are, appropriately, the ominous words of House Stark. So when Bran finally wakes towards the end of the chapter, the first thing he sees is the serving woman who is tending to him and then, once she runs off to spread the news of Bran’s waking, he sees his direwolf next to him and pets him. When his brother Robb enters the room, the very first thing Bran says is: “His name is Summer.”

The name’s significance is clear in that it’s the polar opposite of the severe winters that people dread in the series but this is also, considering Summer saved Bran’s life, a touching moment that strenghtens the connection that the Stark direwolfs have with the respective owners. Just before this, in the chapter prior, Ned Stark had been forced by the King to kill his daughter Sansa’s direwolf, Lady, and later, after hearing that Bran was saved by Summer, he reflects on the importance of his children’s direwolfs and fears the repercussions that his killing of Lady might bring to his daughter.

In the TV series however, these two moments are weaved together into a single scene where the lack of dialogue and the subtlety of the conveyed visual information create what is, arguably, the single greatest moment in the show. In it, the setting jumps back and forth between Bran lying on his bed in his home at Winterfell to Ned in the Kingsroad as he goes to kill his daughter’s direwolf. We see Ned somberly approaching the pup, petting her and then pulling the dagger to end it. We then cut back to Bran at Winterfell and pan across his bed, from bottom to top, and see Summer perhaps a little distraught but laying protectively on top to his master. We go back to Ned with an off-camera Lady and his sorrow is palpable as he pulls the knife and we hear the wolf shriek for one last time. And then Bran wakes.

With no dialogue, pitch perfect music and brilliant direction, this scene conveys in less than a minute and half the importance of the direwolfs and the folly that Ned Stark is causing by ridding their children of one. Bran wakes just as Ned kills Lady and the way the scene is directed cements the importance of Summer and reminds the viewer of the fact that Bran would be dead without him. This strengthens the idea that, in killing Lady, Ned may have unknowingly sealed his daughter’s fate for the worse. This type of quick jump cuts between settings that are miles apart would be extremely difficult to achieve clearly in prose so this scene plays to the strengths of television as a visual medium and quickly and succintly presents information and ideas that do, in fact, take a bit longer to express in the novel.

There are other examples where I feel the book is stronger than the HBO series and yes, generally speaking, I enjoyed reading “A Game of Thrones” more than I enjoyed watching it. This particular scene however, is a perfect example of how to adapt something to another medium instead of merely translating it and is a testament to how well crafted this show is.

It turns out that my lovely site was asking for log-in information to be able to comment. This was only pointed out to me recently but I did think it was odd that, even for my humble website, I hadn’t received a single comment in well over a month. I don’t know how or why this happened (maybe during an update?) but the solution was as easy as ticking off a checkbox and now we’re good to go.

Bottom line: you may now comment away!

And if you do find anything odd or something that isn’t working right here, do let  me know via e-mail or the (now fixed) comments. I do know that the 404 and search results page need to be worked on soon.

(My thanks to Eric Drooker for that awesome header image.)

I’ve been off the grid for a month now due to personal reasons but I’m slowly trying to get a modicum of normalcy back in my life and, of course, to start posting some more drawings and stuff.

Stay tuned!

I can’t count the number of times that I’ve been suggested or asked to do something tattoo related but the drawing above marks the first, fully completed work that I’ve done in the medium. I didn’t do the actual tattoo nor was the idea mine but I did create the finished artwork that the tattoo artist ultimately used.

When my friend asked me to take this crude Photoshop image he’d created and turn it into an actual tattoo design, I tried and tried to take the basic elements of it and rework it into something that I thought would be a stronger design. After many failed attempts at this, I just went ahead and did exactly what he wanted and it turns out it actually looked pretty good.

So what’s the lesson learned here?

Just do what the client says.

I’ve taken on some commissions over the past few months so I thought I’d make it official by throwing some information out there that’ll hopefully make the process a little easier on both ends.

Check out the details here.

…the book can finally be closed.

It’s not nearly the end, but it’s a welcome sigh of relief nonetheless.

When I first created a draft for it, the intention behind this post was to briefly discuss each of the Dune books and my feelings towards them individually. I was in the midst of Heretics of Dune at the time (the 5th book in the series) and I felt it only fitting to write something about this fantastic series that consumed such a big chunk of my thoughts for the last six months or so. Now that I’ve finished reading Chapterhouse: Dune, the last Frank Herbert written book in the series, I feel that there’s another matter I want to discuss entirely.

Let’s be clear here, I loved every single one of the Dune books. Some I prefer more than others (Dune Messiah is still my favorite) and there are a couple that have pacing issues and suffer from Frank Herbert getting perhaps a bit too self-indulgent with his writing but, as a whole, the Dune series is absolutely brilliant and unlike anything I had read prior to it. I became aware early in my Dune journey of the fact that Frank Herbert never got to write the 7th book in the series, the last and purported conclusion to the series, and that frightened me. Even worse, I read that Chapterhouse finished with a cliffhanger and this lead to me, after devouring one book after the other before it, to actually hold off on reading it for quite a bit. I didn’t want it to finish! After I finally read it, I confirmed these things for myself, not only that there isn’t even a hint of a conclusion in sight, but I learned of the existence of a larger, unknown threat to the world inside Dune that is introduced towards the end of book. I will never, ever learn what Frank Herbert planned to do with all these dangling threads and plot lines. A masterpiece left unfinished.

Frank Herbert = Genius

I also became aware early on of the fact that some 15+ years after Chapterhouse was published, Frank’s son, Brian Herbert, had found a page and a half outline and some notes of Dune 7 written by his father before his passing. Brian, along with Kevin J. Anderson, wrote two books out of these findings, Hunters of Dune and Sandworms of Dune, which were meant to conclude the saga of Dune. Brian Herbert had also previously written a bunch of prequels to Dune and it seemed like most agreed they were OK but not great. People were much harsher towards the two books that supposedly mark the finale of the series. Needless ties to the prequels (which Frank Herbert had absolutely nothing to do with), characters and events not in the spirit of Frank Herbert’s original novels and plain bad writing are just a few of the knocks against them. Some people argue that the supposed outline doesn’t even exist and that it’s all just a big cash cow for Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. During my reading of the various titles, I constantly questioned whether I needed to read these titles or not and, for the majority of the time, my answer was that I didn’t. I so wanted to know how the series ended but I didn’t want my memory of it tarnished if these books wound up being as bad as people said. I didn’t need another Star Wars in my life. What to do then?

Well, I read about five preview pages of Hunters on Amazon and, after quickly deeming the quality of the writing to be nowhere near Frank Herbert’s, I chugged along to Wikipedia and reluctantly read summaries of both of the books that are now officially Dune 7. My verdict? It’s indeed not in the spirit of what Frank Herbert had written. The terms “ultraspice” and “Ultimate Kwisatz Haderach” raised the first red flags. If what little I read is anything to go by, Brian Herbert’s books read like fan fiction and, at this point, that’s all it’ll ever be in my eyes. I don’t really fault Brian for it, living up to Frank Herbert must be a daunting task, but I almost feel he shouldn’t have even tried. I think I would’ve been much more inclined to read the writings of “Frank Herbert’s son” if he had created his own original stuff instead of leeching off his father’s work. Hunters and Sandworms officially mark the end of the saga of Dune. Unofficially (a.k.a. for me personally) Dune is unconcluded and will forever remain so.

This led me right back to square one: where to now? For a while there, I almost regretted ever reading the series. What was the point of reading all of it if I would never know how it ended? But then, isn’t it always about the journey and never the destination? I’m only so frustrated because I loved the series so much, so why in the hell would I want to give that up? I might have been starting to obsess over this and I decided to put a halt to it before it started to seriously erode my mind. My journey of Dune was a fantastic one and I realize now that the lack of a real conclusion should never tarnish that. I feel that I’d also be trivializing Frank Herbert’s death by looking at it simply in terms of “he didn’t finish Dune” when, in reality, the tragedy behind his passing lies in the loss of a hugely gifted and fertile mind and not in the things that he left unfinished because of the powers that be.

So I’ve gotten over the fact that Dune will never have a conclusion. If anything, it’s going to be a lot of fun to discuss what Frank Herbert had planned for Dune 7 with other Dune fanatics (and I have a few theories about that myself). I put off reading Chapterhouse for so long because I didn’t want the series to finish and, in a way, I ultimately got my wish. This is funny to me almost, that because the story of Dune has no ending, that Dune itself will never end and shall forever remain an open book in my mind.

I realize that this is an unusually introspective post for me but hey, Dune is serious business. I’m gonna go back to making pictures of Mario punching Slimes now.

Today, I found what is possibly the best and most eloquently written piece on the hotly debated topic of “video games as art” via Roger Ebert’s Twitter (uploaded to the Chicago Sun-Times by Ebert himself) which, given his uncharacteristically close-minded initial response to the subject, gives me hope in the old man just yet.

From the skill barrier entry problem to how video games differ from, say, board games and the “$$$ over artistic value” mentality of publishers among many others, there’s virtually nothing in the Michael Mirasol-written article that I disagree with and pretty much no stone is left unturned.

His bit on “narratology vs. ludology” holds something that I’ve been trying to express for quite a while now and which, naturally, individuals much smarter than I have discussed many, many years prior to me even knowing what the word ludology meant (which, incidentally, happened today, when I first read the article).

But yeah, please take a few minutes of your time to read it:

Why video games are indeed Art

But don’t take my word for it, go and check it out!