I haven't posted in a while, mainly because I've just been rushing to finish multiple pieces on deadlines that are so close together. I still have several more to go and then I'll be starting on something else. *sigh* Right now I'm tired and I have a teeny tiny cold.

I've been a bit busy lately, so I've sort of neglected my lj for the past few days. I've done a lot of art, some of which I'm thinking of posting later today or tomorrow and I have more rabbit photos to upload that I haven't yet.

I also need to go shopping. :x

My grandfather had his operation and luckily is doing well now. Everyone's relieved.

Right now I'm feeling a little depressed. It's silly really because I probably have no reason to feel sad. I'm just worried over nothing. Still, I hate letting everything rest on a reply from someone in a much different timezone. I get really down waiting when there's an important e-mail in question. Worse, I don't know if I'll get a reply right away or in a week. Maybe I should just try and forget it by throwing myself into more artwork.

Speaking of other artwork, I do have some plans. I have a hummingbird painting I'm planning. I've done a few pre-sketches and I'm still working on the composition of it. I have three lovely hummingbirds living out of my backyard. I've now gotten several pictures of them, including 7 of one of the hummingbirds perched on a plant. Unfortunately, I can't get too close to them because they fly off if I get too close. They also have this annoying tendency to fly off as soon as I raise my camera, lol.

I'm also planning a tiger now, but that will be harder. The closest tiger is Mike, and that's across town. I can't go there regularly right now. So I'll have to just sketch, sketch, and sketch some more until I burn it into my brain. The local zoo's tiger exhibit is being updated and the only tiger it had is now in New Orleans while they fix the new exhibit sometime later this year.

I also have a commission going now and two other projects as well as my website design which I've been working on way longer than I should have. I'm a bit stuck on the wording for different parts of the page and I haven't fixed up the gallery yet either. ^^;; Oh well.

I've had a migraine that just won't go away since yesterday, so I hadn't been keeping up so well with things. I was told my grandpa broke his leg and would be fine, but now it seems that he broke his pelvis instead and they don't think he'll survive another operation. My Dad will be traveling up there, but we don't know what will happen.

Good grief! What's with this week? It's gone downhill so rapidly for me. I'd been feeling much better, so I got lax with my diet. I ate more red meat than I should've and some other foods I should not have and I suppose now I'm paying the consequences. It's not something you get used to -- extreme pain in response to not eating a specific diet, that is. I've been up since 4 a.m. The pain's brought involuntary tears to my eyes and even though I took some medicine, I don't seem to be improving. What's worse is I know I'll have to lay off the Aleve and Advil soon because that exacerbates this kind of pain even more in the end.

I'm not sure how I'm expected to live normally like this if I can't even handle a tiny pressure on my abdomen. The musculo-skeletal issues absolutely drive me mad. It started after that first terrible ruptured cyst and I assumed it would be temporary, but it's been over a year since it started and it's showed no signs of going away. It's been over a year and I *still* haven't figured out how to live with this. I still have problems and I get very sick if I do the tiniest thing wrong. It's hellish for someone like myself who is naturally more messy than particular when it comes to most things. Living with others doesn't help. I have to eat what they eat sometimes or just go without. I wish I'd gone without last night. I haven't felt *this* sick in a long while.

To make matters worse, I learned last night that my grandpa in Oklahoma fell and is in the hospital with a broken leg and a smashed up face. His health has been poor for a long time, but this came as a shock to us all. According to the doctors he'll be okay, but he is in bad shape. My aunt wants my dad to fly up there, so I'm not sure exactly if something more is wrong or what.

I just hope things don't get worse and that I haven't jinxed myself by saying this. For the rest of the week I'm gonna drink only water and avoid bread and spicy foods. *sigh*

I've been feeling pretty sick since yesterday evening. Nothing new there, but I still hate how often I get sick.

Anyways, I know I mentioned before that I'd post some of my website design artwork. That was actually before I changed the design three more times. That piece will be kept on the site, though, but not as part of the design. I won't upload anything yet because although I *have* finished all my layout artwork and everything, I haven't written up the actual writing on the pages yet. It's close enough to being finished that I should link to it soon.

I also got a big commission this month! It'll be a western style painting with cowboys and a dog herding cattle. That's what I was asked to do. I kind of have an idea in mind for what I'm going to do with it, and I'm going to do it digitally because I know if I used watercolor or acrylics, I would lose some of the details, although it'd be easier to detail in watercolor for me. And in this case, the person asking for the commission doesn't mind digital art. It'll end up being $500.

So, it's the start of the weekend and I've gone through several different design styles. I've finally settled for something really, really simple, but it's not exactly impressive. Still, it's not like I'm planning to keep it forever.

Last night we had a delicious beef curry Tracy fixed. I don't normally eat Indian food even though I do like naan and curry and several other Indian dishes. We should have an Indian restaurant here in Central. All the Indian restaurants are all the way down around Essen Ln. All we have in our area is some really nasty Chinese, a not even tasty because it's so dull Mexican, and one or two decent cajun restaurants in the area. My mom loves Nine Dragons, but it is the most vile food I've ever tasted. Even the rice tastes gross. I admit I haven't tried the other restaurant, but I blame that on everyone else around me going to Nine Dragons instead. Frankly, since the other one's in a chain I'd trust it a little bit more. But that's not saying much. The Mexican food here is pretty dull. I mean it. It's bland, it's so dull. That's really bad for Mexican food.

So, if you live in Central and want to eat exotic food, stay at home. Maybe you should just do that no matter where you are if you can at least cook. You'd probably save a good bit. I just find that most of the time, restaurants in the greater Baton Rouge/Central area aren't really... very good. Sure, there's one or two really great ones, but a lot of them are just overhyped mediocrity.

Anyways, today I'm going to meet up with some other local artists. I have a new digital artwork I'm planning to print out to show. It's not that exciting a digital painting, but I didn't exactly do it to please the masses. It's just a portfolio piece I did for the hell of it. I'm iffy about showing it online because it's so easy for people to steal artwork even if you watermark it. I've found the best way is to just keep the artwork small when online. So it's large enough to make out what's in it, but not large enough to print or even credibly edit. Still, that has it's disadvantages. Especially when you're like me and you love showing off detail work.

I spent all day yesterday working on another digital artwork to go on my website layout. I really need to get my website up, but right now I'm a bit stuck with color choices. Because the main image is so bright and has so many varied colors, I thought the best way to keep it from being too overpowering was to use a mild taupe color for the surrounding area and background. On the image itself, the taupe does what it's supposed to do. It looks great. On the webpage, however, it's dreadful. Too much taupe. It looks blech.

So now I'm not sure what to do. I went through several colors when I was trying to work this out and most just don't work at all. It either makes the image blindingly bright or it's too dull and clashes. Black looks dreadful, btw. I'm actually thinking of turning to the grays now because I'm seriously running out of other colors.

On top of that I'm having sizing issues. All of my monitors are bigger than the norm. So it's really a pain in the ass to judge what would be considered too big. At the same time, I want it to fit not only all my large monitors, but smaller monitors as well. I don't want the logo to get cut off either.

Geh. I hate designing sometimes. When I'm finished I'll probably post the image on here so you all can have a look. It's a large daylily with a butterfly hovering over it.

Ugh. I got so into my work I didn't notice when one of the coupons I was hoping to use expired. I glanced at it again because I wasn't sure it had expired or not and it was. :/ That sucks. I really should've used it last week, but I was up to ungodly hours trying to finish ahead of my deadline. *sigh*

Well, it wasn't a huge savings, but I'm really not into spending money. Still, I'm running low on paints and I need more white and several other colors. I'm hoping to buy some Daniel Smith because I like the watercolors and the acrylics look good (plus, Daniel Smith has Buff Titanium). I'll say now that I do not like Winsor Newton paints much at all. The acrylics and oils are not very smooth to work with when compared to M Graham or Maimeri, my two currently preferred paint brands. Unfortunately, M Graham is still a bit limited colorwise, but Daniel Smith has tons of colors to choose from. I want Lapis Lazuli Genuine so bad. Guh.

The thing I like about digital art is that you don't have to buy canvas, paper, brushes, paints, gesso, ect., ect., and then some. You just have to put out for two things: Your preferred program and your tablet. You don't even need to update as soon as a new version comes along. Still, it's a bit harder to achieve some affects even in a program like Painter that you can easily achieve with the right brush irl. Of course I could make my own brushes to rectify that somewhat, but still...

Oh, and I got in my gouache paints a few days ago. Maimeri definitely gives you more for your money than M Graham, but M Graham is just so divine to use *dies a little of happiness*. I have a lot of work to do now. I'm almost giddy. I've got a bristol pad just for those, but right now I'm gessoing some canvases. I hate doing that. Especially since in an accident I spilled a lot of colored acrylic. Ick. It's not even abstractly artistic, imo... it's just a muddy mess. If I'd accidentally spilled red someone would probably buy it, though. *eye rolls* I want to know a good way to get caked on acrylic off canvas. I bet there really isn't any, lol. Just have to gesso and paint over it. Heaven forbid if you spill dark brown. *shudder*

Well... what else can I say? Since I'm talking art. I have a few glazes to use on the leopard painting. I still haven't named it. Maybe I will after the final glaze and then adding the varnish. Can't really think of anything atm since it's currently 4:46 a.m. and I've spent much of the night slapping on gesso to canvases, lol.

I think next post I'll show you all some photos. I'll get a photo of Beast in her Japanese shaved ice saleskitty outfit that Dad brought back for her from Japan. It fits her so well and it's funny. I guess I'll also upload the woodpecker photo and possibly a few more I took.

I've been having printer issues lately. The small, cheap printers my Mom owns (Dell, HP, Dell, Dell...) never seem to have the right ink when I want to print something. I didn't have any of my expensive printers plugged in because they were with the mac and right now I'm preparing to send the mac to the repair shop (I've realized the huge difference using a mac makes to using a pc and anyone who says a Windows pc can suit my needs just fine is DEAD wrong. Seriously) to check out something that's been bugging me. It loads up oddly and the cursor's botched somehow, but otherwise it works fine. Still, I'm being cautious in case it's a early sign of something and gonna get it checked out as soon as I get the time to take it to the shop.

Anyways, I'd been trying to print that photo I took earlier. Printing my digital photos to paint is pretty much how I start things out. Unfortunately, there's something strange with the picture or the monitor or something because each time it's printed out on two different printers and two different computers, the photo is really dark. Now it did show up dark on the other computer, which I thought was because of the screen settings. I'm still not sure about that. Then I set up my Epson Stylus Photo R800 to one of my PCs and printed. The callibration must be off, but more than that the months of disuse had clogged up the printer and I needed to run the cleaner for it. Gods, I wish it wouldn't do that when not used... it wastes really pricey ink like mad.

So, I may just end up working straight from the display. It looks absolutely perfect on the display and it's bizarre that *that* single picture's printed out dark since that hasn't happened to other, similar pictures I'd taken. Bizarre. I might try it one more time with one of the dinky printers, but I'm not really expecting much.

Oh yeah! Thursday morning I photographed a woodpecker! I'm so pleased. That's another bird off my "to photograph for reference" list. I photographed a hummingbird in the backyard as it hovered over the mallow bush. It loves those flowers. I was so excited, though, that I didn't get such a great picture even out of 6 pictures I snapped of it. I've been going out and hoping to see it again since it visits the mallows every day.

I also finished one deadline yesterday and have to send it in sometime today. One down, three more to go. :) And that's only the deadline projects! Phew. There's a lot to do.

Also, going back and doing a few more touch ups on the leopard. It needs some glazing to darken and (hopefully) brighten some parts. Fingers crossed that I don't mess it up! I'd gotten some good suggestions from some other artists on how to perfect it a bit more, so now I'm just tweaking it.