Up for a promotion!

Hello!

I am happy to report that I am up for a promotion at my job! I'm one of the candidates among those who applied to become Trainers here, due to my prior experience as both a trainer and a supervisor at another job! The pay is $2 more per hour, and it gets me off of the phones... hopefully I'll be one of the people selected for the job.


In other unrelated news, while I was working on the F90 Type-V kit I purchased recently, I managed to give myself the worst model-kit related injury I have yet to sustain. On the bottom of one of the feet, there is a recessed area in the middle between the treads that is really hard to get to for the purpose of getting rid of any glue piled up on the seam... so I took an angled "chisel"-type hobby knife blade to scrape away the glue. Well... the glue line resisted for a bit, then suddenly gave away; allowing the blade to slice RIGHT THROUGH THE TREAD ON THE SIDE OF THE SOLE and into my finger. The blade went all the way through to the bone, severing an artery and instantly unleashing a small spray of blood; some of the spatters reaching 3 feet from my desk! D: Two paper towels were completely soaked in less than a minute as I attempted to contain the bleeding, then I held a proper cloth towel over the cut for another half-hour or so until it slowed down to the rate of a normal hobby knife cut (lol). It's now been about 4 days since I did that; the hole is healed up, but my fingertip is still numb... The amusing thing about the whole ordeal when it happened was that the first thought that went through my head was not "OMG this hurts" or "Wow, that was stupid"... but rather, "I'm glad I was planning on painting this thing!" :D

Anyways, the art lessons are going fairly well; I'm still having a bit of difficulty fitting everything into my schedule, though... but I finally managed to get some decent screencaps of the mech Hathor from Zone of Enders for the redesign project requested by Kyle 3 months ago... so hopefully I'll have some time to work on that before too much longer. ;_;

Moar portrait works!

Here's another portrait painting I just completed today, of Megan Zhang from my series Trooper Blaze. I learned on the previous portrait of Amanda that I didn't really need to draw in shading with the colored pencil I did the linework with; just doing shading with the paint is fine. :P

Here's the portrait; let me know what you think!

On a sidenote, I need to find a type of paper that takes watercolor paints a little better... I'm currently using heavy Bristol boards and they wrinkle all to Hell whenever I use the paint over a large area... D: I know that there is specially made "watercolor paper", but it wrinkles just the same and has a terrible texture that often ruins the picture....

Learning to be a better artist

I have decided to start studying up on whatever materials I can find on tutorials and other ways to become a better artist. I have been showing some progress in my work, but it's still not enough for my liking... so I'm going to try to "kick it into overdrive" throughout the next year or so in order to improve as quickly as I possibly can.

Here is a portrait that I have just finished... I used a purple colored pencil for the linework, and colors with watercolor paint. The whole thing was an attempt at a "speed-illustration;" trying to produce a quality image with materials that do not allow for mistakes, and get it done as quickly as possible. This one took about 1 hour 10 minutes to complete; not including the time for the paint to dry.
Let me know what you think!