Arty things…

With things around Chateau D’Isaster coming back into sync, I was thinking this morning that I might try kick-starting my art again.

With the call from ZeZe out in Virginia the other day and the inevitable “are you doing art again yet?” question, and the fact I’ve got several pieces that other folks are wanting me to do, from back in ’02 when I hung up my pens to pursue this thing called “a life”… Well, I think it’s high time I dug out the my art box, set up my drafting table, and commenced to commence…

I know it’s going to be tricky getting back into it again… The amount of time consumed by even a simple pen and ink will pretty much mean my weekends are over. See, I’m not the world’s fastest artist – it takes me a solid day of just sketching to get a design down that I want to do, another 3-4 hours of ink work to transfer the sketch to Bristol and do all of my line weighting, and a day, sometimes two, to get the color done in the computer. That and I am a very sequential person; I only do one project at a time… I can’t have a room full of half painted canvases, even though with the drying times was telling me about with real paints it becomes essential… I’d go crazy.

Then there’s the fact I haven’t done much more than the very occasional loose doodle in over two years… I foresee a large mountain of crumpled newsprint and much “why the hell am I doing this?” over the next few weeks.

See, the main reason I stopped, and why I may not even get going again, is that producing art has never been a fun thing for me. Its work – and hard work at that and I personally just don’t get all that much out of it… Sure, it’s nice to be able to take things that live in people’s heads and put them on paper for the whole world to see, but damn, why does it have to be so time consuming?

So that coupled with the rather insane hours I tend to work, the software projects I do on the side, the traveling I like to do, and the 1×10^32 other hobbies I have such as writing, photography, drumming, music, tinkering with my car, computers, etc, etc…

See, I’m already talking myself out of it…

Well, before I can really get going I need to get another scanner. I gave my last one away to along with the computer and monitor, and haven’t really done much since. I still have my Wacom though, so there’s $500 I don’t have to spend. 😉

So, by way of getting started, I’ll be working on the colors for a piece I started back in ’02 for a really great person who goes by “Shira Ses’kai” online and lives over in Germany:


Shira Ses’Kai © the player / art © W. Miller

And with that I guess I’ll get some breakfast and get to work.

Have a great day out there folks!