I've been working on these two paintings for quite a bit longer than I'd like. Painting lately has become a push-pull struggle between too dark and too light/bright, where a work will goes through several stages before settling in. However, both of these were way too bright and busy for my tastes. A frenzy with some black paint ended up making them better in some ways but worse in others, so last night I took my good friend the fan brush and made them white and wispy.

I'm no longer afraid of the end result, but I do feel as though a bit more black paint, and then some judicial use of acrylics, might save them. I'll post more pictures as they develop, but 98% of the work is in my head, trying to figure out exactly where to apply the brush before it happens.

I sent this painting to a friend for Christmas and they loved it so much that a friend of their friend wanted one just like it. Well, 'just.'

I've been feeling inspired by the various paint/draw this again challenges that ask you to take an older piece of work, something seminal that you felt represented your best at the time, and redo it now. It's a great way for artists to judge the distance between their old work and their current ability. Sure, I painted this in November 2014--just over a year ago. Yet, I saw one in my mind's eye that had some improvements done.

I've mentioned before that it's hard to capture the acrylic sheen on my oil + metallic acrylic paintings. This is still true. However, this painting represented my best work at the time, and a technique that I first tried in college--painting something that appears to be coming out of or going into the white space of the canvas.

​Here's the result:

I wanted to play more with the idea of light bands, so I used a fan brush over the main architecture in the bottom left-hand corner. I also wanted there to be more artifacts, so I added blue circles by spinning a small brush and pink lines with the fan brush as well as a highlight brush.

When it's dry, I'll add acrylic details similar to Memoria's and clean up the dining room table so it's not a mess of computer parts and paintings.

Having a guild is much like sitting on top of an active volcano; it's going to erupt, and you're just going to have to sweep up all the ash when it does.

What I'd like to be doing is manifold. I have a mountain of work to do, and I'm dipping my toes into Fiverr. A friend of a friend has commissioned a painting, and I'm still working on some art for myself. Likewise, there's another 16gb of RAM just waiting to go into my computer, but I haven't had a spare moment to turn it off!

So of course there's a ton of guild stuff that I've had to do instead, or in addition to all that. Someone left one of our swtor teams so there's been some tracking work trying to find a replacement. We're still in WoW startup mode, so we're dealing with the repercussions of having fewer people, less stuff, and more need to delegate. Running a guild that spans MMOs is not as easy as taking the old SWTOR workload and dividing it in three sections, unfortunately. A lot of the 'reward' of being an established, large guild in SWTOR came from its solidarity. So we've plunged our SWTOR guild back a few tiers while trying to invest in other games. I'm trying to delegate as much as I can, and intelligently to boot, but I just feel like I'm doomed to fail at some level because there's so much work to be done.

All the while, I'd much rather be debating the important matters: should my GW2 heavy armor be dyed silvery white or gold?