Today is a special day. Today is the day that the Cubetoons/Fred forum retires. It’s been a fun ride, but now it’s time to say farewell. The good news is that there’s no reason to stop chatting with the folks you knew for all this time, because a new forum has risen from the ashes to keep things going! Yay.

Best part is I’m not in charge of that one, so I can be a normal member like everyone else. Yay!

Also, after a length of time I’m not sure how long it was and don’t wish to go figure out, there is a brand new Kingdom Blue comic today! Issue 16 awaits! But wait- since it’s been so long, you might not remember what’s going on. I know I didn’t. (Kidding, I did. Mostly.) So why not just start back at Issue #1 and read through the whole thing? It will only take a minute or two, there’s only 16 issues. Go for it!

Also, the new blog look will wait until next week. I had some trouble getting it working.

I just realized that I’m pretty sure I switched from a blue theme to a red one in 2009 here on the blog. Isn’t that right? I was going to put up a Daily Drawing and realized it was red and said 2009 at the bottom. That means it’s time for a color change! New year, new look. Actually I wanted to upgrade it more significantly, but for now I can at least change the palette, right? Right.

So I suppose I’ll hold off on putting up the Daily Drawing until tomorrow.

Yesterday as I sat struggling to do my drawings I had a sudden realization. I needed to stop trying so hard and just do a bunch of stuff that I never tried before. So today I was quite excited to get to work. I sat down and drew the first of the many, many monkeys I’ve been assigned to draw, and victory! It turned out AMAZING!

Then I overworked it and it ended up looking like crap. It was all downhill from there, and I grew frustrated and quit. Sigh. I guess I better get back to it. I can’t quit forever…

Or CAN I?

No, I can’t.

One would think that since I have a website called Fred the MONKEY dot com, I would be extremely excited to find out that my homework for the week is drawing cartoon primates. The false logic in that assumption is that I haven’t drawn a monkey not named Fred in half a decade, so tack on one more thing I’m out of practice on.

For class we HAVE to draw 27 depressed primates. I stress the word “have” because that is the required amount to not fail. In truth, we should be drawing hundreds. I myself don’t know if I’ll make the three digit mark, but I’m going to draw until I can’t think straight anymore. If you’ve ever tried to draw 100+ different versions of one thing before, I can tell you it isn’t particularly easy. They start blending together after a while, and you lose variety and originality. Not to mention I have a feeling I would be beaten if I drew Fred for this assignment, since he barely even looks like a monkey and his structure is extremely off. Perhaps I’ll draw a variation of him.

I’m not sure if I mentioned that my scanner broke, which is why I haven’t been sharing all these scribblings with you all here on the blog. Should I find a way to get them into digital form, I’ll post them. I warn you now, they aren’t very good… More practice for me…

Today I logged out of the IGN message boards for my last time. It was a lot of fun back in the day, but now I have work to do and most of the people who I used to talk to there are gone. It was time for me to move along.

The Fred/Cubetoons boards are shutting down this Friday as well, so that means my two biggest time-sucks will be out of the picture come next week. I think that should help me be tremendously more productive, since I’ll stare at the internet and have few places to go. We’ll see I guess!

I was pretty depressed in my class yesterday, because I sat with the full realization of just how far I have to go if I want to be good at this stuff. It’s far. Really, really far. I have an insane amount of work and practice ahead of me if I’m going to improve, and it’s not going to be easy to do. Sometimes I’m going to hate it and want to quit. I need to make sure I don’t quit, though. I need to push through to see the other side. My teacher drew four lines on tracing paper over my drawing, taking it from “bad” to “OMG AMAZING.” I sat there, staring at these four masterful pencil lines and wishing I had half that amount of skill. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

I then tried to mimic those four lines and failed utterly. They are so freaking amazing. Just pencil lines, but they breathe life and dimension into the drawing like I can’t seem to achieve. Incredible.

I’m currently super busy with homework due shortly (not my fault, I was out of town for the weekend again) so here’s a link to a blog entry I did over at Vertigo Games last week. As a stand-in for a normal one here. It’s on logo design, in case anyone is interested.

‘Till tomorrow, then.

I’ve been doing a rather good job at sleeping when it’s nighttime recently, but today was one of those patented “I woke up an hour ago and can’t go back to sleep so I might as well get up until dawn” times. I had a dream about school work, where I was doing school work, and when I woke up unfortunately all I had done was DREAM school work, which is not nearly as productive as real-life school work. Because, you know, my dream sketchbook I was working in is stuck somewhere in my subconscious. Which is worthless.

SO here I am writing my blog before the sun wakes up for the day. I can’t believe it’s already Friday! Probably because I’ve been so busy, and also I was out of town Monday so my work-clock still thinks it’s Thursday or something.

Q is feeling much better, and has a renewed sense of wanting to get the Fred store up and running. Probably so these T-shirts that have been piled in the office for a year will start to be removed in exchange for funding for the website. The last thing I probably need is to take on ANOTHER project that I wasn’t focusing on, but HEY! It’s 4:30 in the morning so it seems like a GREAT idea right now! Everything seems like a good idea. I wrote a cartoon just now for FtM, and I know when I re-wake up later today it’s going to be terrible, but right now it’s HILARIOUS! Ha ha ha… So good…

My eyes really hurts. Is that a word? Hurts? I think it is but I’m not sure at the moment.

I still have too much to do, and I’m just not sure what to do about it. I can’t keep up with everything I’m supposed to be working on, and as a result everything suffers. I can totally understand getting a desk job now. You wouldn’t have to think. Every day you could just go to the 9 to 5 and do what they tell you and then when you get home you could not think about work anymore. It seems like for me work is 24/7, and I have no escape from it. Especially since I tacked school onto things, and homework is eating away at my being like a water balloon full of acid. Stupid homework, now I remember you.

I can’t find a single thing in my schedule that I can get rid of without taking some major hit. I scaled Fred stuff back so much that any more and I’d just have to close the website completely. The house is in such a state of disarray that I feel it will never be in order again. I’m trying to help the school’s animation club from ceasing to EXIST. There’s just too much to do. I’m about to go crazy again.

I think I’m going to have to seriously re-evaluate things and see which direction to go, because apparently “every direction” is not the right one. AGAIN. How many times am I going to get myself into this spot before I learn some sort of permanent lesson? I just don’t know. It’s like I keep waiting for things to calm down and they never do.

Sigh.

So how’s everyone else doing?

I finally finished Ace Attorney: Miles Edgeworth. Finally. The last case took FOR-EV-ER! It was a blast, though, and aside from one character (who you were supposed to dislike) I really loved the characters. It made me long for a sequel, which proves they did something right. I hear there’s those Phoenix Wright games out there, so perhaps I’ll check them out now. I never played any of them, but if it’s anything like Edgeworth, I’m game.

We were in Orlando for the weekend, and have now returned. Unfortunately it appears Q brought back with her some sort of miserable stomach ailment, so she’s feeling pretty sick. The trip was otherwise a lot of fun, and we got to spend a day at Universal Studios. I missed going to Disneyworld, I have to admit. Universal is fun, but there’s nothing quite like Disneyworld…

Now I have a tremendous amount of work to catch up on, so off I go again.

Well I was going to write my blog entry for the day before I went to bed. Then I started working on homework and I just noticed the clock now says it’s tomorrow. So much for yesterday’s blog entry!

I have a tremendous amount of work to do for school before noon tomorrow (er, today). It’s not that I waited until the last minute, either. I’ve been working on it since Monday. It’s just a lot of work to be done in a short amount of time. And speaking of school work, I’m going to start scanning in my assignments so I can share them here on the blog. They’re not great, but I have a good reason for that. I neglected my drawing for the better part of five years, aside from a Daily Drawing here and there. I grew so accustomed to letting Flash redraw the characters every frame after I did the initial work that I forgot all my fundamentals. Of course, that’s saying I had fundamentals in the FIRST place, when really I didn’t. I had habits and I got very good at certain ones (like drawing Fred and Space Chicken and nothing else). So it’s back to the drawing board for me! Literally!

I’ll post the first set of things next week when I get them back.