hey there.

again, i missed a lot of events since the last journal update. belated happy new year & happy easter.
i also finally finished work on a term paper for university about pictures and their according mode of consciousness (you dont see pictures as pictures unless you are conscious of them being a picture - if you ever got scared by mistaking a poster or something for real, you know what im talking about ). it weighed in at a whopping 35 pages, including all the academic formalia stuff they make you type.


anyway, why im updating this is to get some feedback from the few people who stumble by and read this:
the issue is PRINTS & COMMISSIONS
in other terms: imagery for sale

im toying with the thought of making prints available. since my digital stuff usually is done at rather medium resolutions, the majority of available stuff will be the scanned drawings. maybe having 1:1 size prints of those things is appealing for some people. the flyer images can be printed in their original size, too, and other than that - i could try working in higher resolutions in the future.

regarding commissions, i thought about ~a5 size pencil sketches. see my sketchbook gallery for a rough guideline.
prices would vary a bit with mileage, but i guess them to be something around EUR 10 for germany, EUR 11/12ish for europe and something around USD 17/EUR 13 for international customers.

right now, im all about trying to get a feel if there even is some interest.


books:
i bought ashley woods worldwar robot illustrated vol. 1 and its great. and cheap.
i also picked up a book called h-point by stuart macey and geoff wardle. its about car design. card design for certain roles, that is. it does a really good job at acquainting newbies with the kinds of decisions that all go into designing a car package: how much storage space, how many seats, how much emphasis on luxury/comfort or pure performance, what kind of engine for what kind of situation blah blah blah... it all sounds like being interesting for car nuts only, but i feel it reminded me of how much storytelling potential there is in props, vehicles and basically everything we paint. good book.
i also bought james jeans collected fables covers which are made of pure win, genius and soybean-shaped purring kitties from cuteness heaven.
im waiting for the two volumes of collected walt stanchfield lectures he held at disney right now. they should arrive any day...


DONT FORGET LEAVING SOME FEEDBACK REGARDING PRINTS/COMMISSIONS PLZ!

so yeah, i kind of tend to neglect these update things. i needed to get this d&d4 rant off the page, though.

WARNING! rambling on random topics following! WARNING!

my life is going well, for everyone whos interested.
the course i teach at uni is going well, im actually surprised (in a positive way) by the students and the schedule seems to work out as planned. happy me!

i uploaded two things i completed recently, too. seems all i do is paint flyers for people. i have some sketches to scan, maybe ill get that done some of these days (or maybe not)

fitness is going okay-ish. im not near where i want to be, but taking ALL the programming into my own hands and ditching commercial gyms was the best thing i ever did. to everyone trying to ramp his or her own fitness up a bit: no matter where you want to go, more endurance, less fat, stronger, bigger, faster etc... dont trust gyms. read up on the matter and do your own stuff. dont fret on not having access to fancy machines and treadmills - they are of next to no use anyway and half a year of gym membership fees buys you quite some equipment.
for most of us sedetary people (artists, students, white-collars...), a little time spent on fitness is a good investment anyway, so get off your butt!

also, there are some amazing books on the market: i caught ashley woods "dos tarino", nicolas bouviers "structura" and carlos huantes "monstruo" - they are all excellent books (i want that huge ashley wood anthology for 80 bucks thats out soon), but if you want to buy just one art book, i absolutely recommend iain mccaigs "shadowline". youll know a bunch of the stuff if you already own the art of star wars books for episode I to III, but every single drawing and the story is worth the books weight in gold.

...basically, this is a kind of blog post about the fourth installment of the dungeons and dragons rpg coming up. i fear this is going top be somewhat lengthy. sorry.

first and foremost, i think i need to clarify that i have a bit of an oddball relationship to d&d (and pen/paper rpgs in general): i dont play myself, but im highly intrigued in the systems, workings and most importantly the intricate worldbuilding that goes on there. its a great classic fantasy universe to entertain thoughts (and artistic visions) in, as far as im concerned. its not a universe around a specific dimension, such as china miévilles bas-lag universe is centered around social power dynamics to a major degree, but just a run-of-the-mill rock solid high fantasy world. we need those, too.
actually, id more than love giving the whole playing thing a try, but... yeah. im surprisingly contend just reading the rulebooks (and the occasional novel - but in essence, i like being able to delve into a world without being distracted by plot)

so yeah, d&d4...
what you hear seems to be either high praise for streamining the rules or the usual drama that comes with every game rule adjustment: that they destroyed the game.
i tend to be a bit of both, now that i have had a thorough look at the stuff.

the rules - they really have been streamlined, systemized and clarified. throughout the whole players handbook its evident that they are speaking to new players. which is a good thing, in my book. however, streamlining isnt automatically a good idea: corel streamlined painter 8 to be accessible to photoshop users and basically wrecked what made painter strong enough to be potentially interesting for photoshop users.
from what i see in the gameplay rules though, i think that the d&d4 streamlining may work very well. i dont really get where these changes are supposed to "kill the roleplaying element", as i read somewhere. the pure role playing seems to be untouched, as i see it. i think that the changes to levels (levels 1-30 are tiered into three tiers with specific "life situation" questions) are a huge improvement in terms of roleplaying.

the world - thats where im less happy.
i can see how dropping closely related, but differing in minutiae, classes can be beneficial to the game and while i liked that there were wizards AND sorcerers and that they were quite different spellcasters, im fine with having just wizards for clarities sake, too.
where real harm has been done is new additions: barbarians, bards and monks have gone the way of the dodo and were "relpaced" by two new classes named warlocks and warlords. uuuuuuh, i see stupid jokes in the vein of "-locked and -lorded" coming. so yeah, the warlord seems to have the air of the old vietnam veteran in movies: he knows wars ropes, keeps newbs from being slaughtered and helps them digest their first actual kill. warlocks seem to be the new "other" spellcaster which i think is a nice idea, but why? why delete the sorcerer and replace it with just another kind of magic-wielder? yeah, so the spells are different, but why not build this dichotomy with wizards vs. clerics?
deleting the barbarian, monk and bard, and then replacing it with a sturdy assaulter, stacked with some amazing feats that has positive effects on the guys around him seems somehow questionable, too.
shifting the druids focus to shapeshifting much more than being just another spellcaster (aside clerics, wizards, sorcerers and bards, somehow in d&d3) is a great idea, though.

even more unhappiness coming: elves. elves arent just elves anymore, elves are either wood-dwelling and wild elves or high-cultured and civilized eldarin. uniting these two concepts are what made elves appealing to me, but that may indeed be just me. the old elven concept offered more than enough room for different kind of elves (see sun elves, moon elves, wood elves, drow etcetera in the forgotten realms setting) under a much more interesting concept. also, elves magically grew larger.
gnomes are gone. sad... but tolerable for base d&d. eradicating svirfneblin (deep gnomes) from forgotten realms will be intolerable, though.
tieflings have been completely rewritten from a concept fitting the lines of classic high fantasy (offspring of human/demon affairs) into descendants of a cursed high culture that has meddled with the dark in the past. they arent more-or-less-subtly evil-looking anymore, they sport huge horns now and several foot long tails. a) shit design. b) there already were the yuan-ti snake people... c) just doesnt go with the epic high-fantasy air.
to top it all off, a new race has been added that is just as much a redundant uuuuuh, eeeeevil-design as the new tieflings: dragonborn - read: humanoid dragons, some dragonish abilities, very strong, very klingon. and very boooooooriiiiing.

so yeah... thats where i find that d&d4 really falls short. it may be a great game, but the world design changes really broke its strong points, for now at least: what was a classic, fairytale, epic high fantasy universe became something... like a b-fantasy universe with shitty and redundant designs (think roddenberrys andromeda, the late stargate universe to a certain extent, etcetera).

im really waiting to get my hands on the new forgotten realms campaign setting. FR is my world of choice, so to say, so im really really curious to see how they are going to handle it. a lot of the worlds intricacies cant be handled with some of the very streamlined d&d4 changes, like the much more complex elven structure for example. another example are core races like tieflings being really tied into a system of similar entities like aasimar and all kinds of elementally planetouched. or that the system of different gods and their quarrels really needs the full two dimensions of possible alignments: chaotic to lawful, good to evil - every combination, not just the four plus neutral of d&d4.

[link]

i know that i dont have many watchers, but whoever passing by who hasnt yet read the above article, please do. now.

edit: since the whole thing gathered attention quite fast, i think ill offer my 2c.
i also read this informative article: [link] and it made me think the whole matter through a bit better.

the most important points -to me- are that orphanedness is a status that vanishes as soon as the rights-holder enters the stage and that to make sure a work can be considered orphaned in your situation, you have to search for its author.

so, my thoughts are like this: if we can be traced by our images, the work cant be orphaned. if enough and the right info comes with the picture, there is no excuse for someone wanting to use said picture than contacting via the provided info.
the most easy solution would be to place a host of information in the image itself, watermark or signature-style. basically, an alias name and a working e-mail address (could be one dedicated to just this one purpose, for all the people concerned about their anonymity) should be enough - but its necessary that the contact info stays alive. i guess that name, country & e-mail address should be secure enugh for the worst-case scenario of links going dead.

another idea i had was to embed info via exif or a similar system of metadata. this, however, would only work when its common practise to do so: when only one or two people do this, its absolutely not part of a "reasonable search" to look for customized exif data. when everyone does, a thief needs some pretty good reasons in court why he didnt look there.

some thoughts on changes, and what i think of them:

-to stand a remote chance in court as an image-(ab)user, you have to have done a search for the rights-holder. while thats a pretty shallow make-up for more grave fuck-ups, at least, its a little rescue line. IF an artist is trackable through 5 minutes of google (even only as an alias), and a thief pledges for the work being orphaned, i dont think there will be much of a chance for him.

-the fiscal situation for sueing artists will be worse. since useage of an orphaned image was legal, as long as you werent there, all you can do is have the bastard cease and desist (the work isnt orphaned anymore, when youre sueing), but since what he did was legal up until now, mammon wont play much of a role in the legal hell that will break loose over him. which sucks.

-the most important change, that i really consider a dangerous one, is what is done on a conceptual level: the old way, art theft was legal in the way that "wheres no suitor, theres no judge" (the same way, bank robbery is "legal" as long as you arent caught with the loot). actually, it was illegal, but there werent any legal consequences as long as the thief wasnt put to court.
now, the former dark-gray area of "its forbidden, but as long as no-one sees it..." becomes legal practise with that orphaned works bill thing. thats the grave point where i consider the whimsy need for a "reasonable search" not enough of an excuse.

so, i finally managed to get the few things i uploaded here sorted into galleries. woohoo... actually, the v2 galleries are a neat feature but i feel they distract even more from peoples scrapbooks, which is a shame because scrapbooks are made of pure win.
also, i guess there might be more people like me who produce endless amounts of mindless doodles and smallish half-finished stuff and tackle full-blown finished artwork only every once in a while. having the scrapbook as a separate gallery next to the regular v2 subgalleries would be awesome...

i also managed to survive christmas and boycotted new years eve as i do for quite some time. its just an excuse for people to get drunk anyway, so theres nothing i could possibly get out of it.
i grew fat over the holidays, too. weight skyrocketed 3 kilos and i certainly didnt magically gain 3 kilos worth of muscle. goddamn im growing old... old and fat. shit.

i also started dabbling in sculpting, as you can see in my latest scrapbook entry. if you can offer crits, please head there. id be very pleased...


meh, uni starts again tomorrow and i just got used to holidays -_-