Category: General Words

My Yearly Tradition of a Portrait

January 10, 2019

Every year I draw a portrait of my OC Azra.

I mean I draw him a lot anyway, but I make a point of drawing him as the first drawing of the new year. A few reasons for this. My first being is his birthday is January 1st! I conceived of this fella on December 31st, 2001 into January 1st, 2002 while I was on the phone with a friend while babysitting. Yup. He is 18 years old this year! What a guy what a guy.

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Inktober 2018

November 1, 2018

If you follow me on social media, you may already know that I like to participate in Inktober every year. If you don’t know about Inktober, essentially it’s a drawing-a-day project meant to just keep you drawing. There’s not really any official rules to it, but some people come up with themes or prompts for things to draw each day. Personally, I just commit to ink, and draw whatever happens to come into my mind. Continue reading Inktober 2018

Is it OK to go back to old works and revise them?

June 15, 2018

As an artist, you’re constantly plagued with the idea of a work being “finished” and “done”. When is a work done? When should you stop making changes to it? While some artists might say “never”, there’s definitely a point when you’re working on a piece and you’ve got to just stop. When is that point?

When do you stop doing something? Unlike a conventional form of making something, like baking bread, there’s never really a completion point when it comes to artwork. I mean, yeah, there probably is, but where is that point? For some people, it’s when they share their artwork with other people or with the world. For others, it’s when they sign the piece. The hardest part about digital art is also a great part about digital art – there’s no canvas. Because there’s no canvas, that means there’s no physical work, so you really can be making changes ad infinitum.
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How to Set Up Your Raspberry Pi B+ with Plex Media Server

June 1, 2018

Updated: September 9th, 2020: I had to redo all of this all over again and some steps have changed, so I’ve updated it.

I don’t often yack about this kind of stuff on my blog as it’s pretty much exclusively an art blog, but I recently bought a Raspberry Pi B+ that I thought I could use as a lower powered Plex Media Server rather than having my (dying) iMac run constantly. This is both in an attempt to prolong the life of my iMac and to help my incredibly high electric bill (whoops). While there are lots and lots of tutorials on how to set up Plex Media Server on a Raspberry Pi B+, I couldn’t find one that went through all of the steps I needed. So I’m going to compile them all here!

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Dear Apple, I think I want a divorce

April 20, 2018

Dear Apple,

It’s been a while. Quite a bit of time, actually. Maybe really close to 31 years, actually. We’ve been together through a lot of things. That awkward stage where all of your hardware was beige (hey, it was the thing to do in the 90s!), through all of your Mac OS iterations. I was with you, as passed down through my family, at risk of sounding like a total hipster, before you were really popular. I was a fan of yours, going in to Circuit City and other hardware/software stores looking for the four titles that were available on Mac… Breakout, Super Breakout, Photoshop… I even attended a MacWorld Expo years back with a friend I was slowly converting into Machood. Remember when… Remember OS 9? Haha, I think it’s funny to think newer Mac fans probably don’t even know that Mac OS X is literally called that because it is the 10th iteration of your OS, and Mac OS 9 was VASTLY different. Remember when you adopted Mac OS X? And the availability of applications for Mac was so limited and valuable that for years we could run an emulator (called “classic”) to run OS 9 applications until eventually the catalogue was good enough again you could remove it? Remember VersionTracker (Now MacUpdate) as being the go-to source to get apps before the invention of the iTunes store? Remember all the old startup chimes? Remember the rainbow colored Apple logo? Remember TinkerTool? Remember Aspyr Media (the only one that was actually trying to port games to work on Mac)? Remember ClarisWorks/AppleWorks, now Pages?

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