Friday Rambles 2021_12_10

This week went by way too fast. It's probably because I had so much to do at work this week. Really busy doing all the last minute stuff before the end of the year. Anyway, this is what I've been thinking about this week.

- Naoki Saito videos have been popping up a lot on my Youtube recommended page lately, and I've been gobbling them up because almost all of them were relevant to my interests. They've mostly been about how to improve as an artist, create appealing compositions, and tips and tricks for coloring and lines and such. I just turn on the English subtitles and play them at 2x speed and absorb. I've been bummed out about his involvement in NFT stuff lately but I can't deny these videos have been super informative for me. Hopefully I can apply a lot of the learnings to my future works.

- #DailyVa11halla started yesterday, and I'm playing along with the Sukeban Games twitter account. It's been a while since I last played Va11halla so it's a good way to refamiliarize myself and maybe take the opportunity to do some fanart :)

- I'd do #ArtVsArtist if I were hot

- My drawing time for the next week and a half will be dedicated to my Secret Santa draws, I'm going to finish one by the 15th and the other by the 21st. Wish me luck.

- I briefly watched The Game Awards but I don't think I'm part of the intended audience because I didn't find it that interesting. I'm not really up to date with the latest games and I don't get hype over new announcements anymore. I use my gaming rig to play Peggle and Bejeweled.

- Speaking of latest games, I got addicted to Civ 6, conquered the world, and uninstalled it. I will never play it again.

- We got an Instant Pot. No, we're not cheating on you, Air Fryer... just taking a break...

- I'm pretty happy with my latest Penny drawing. I actually spent a lot of time on it, and you'll see some of my learnings applied there, like the back lighting, higher color saturation on the focal point of the picture, close up of the subject, snow flying in the foreground to establish the environment and excitement of the situation, and so on (although I learned some of this stuff partway through the drawing and it was too late to change the base composition significantly in the way that I wanted without having to redo everything because pixelart is brittle like that). I'm also happy with the warm reception it got. It's not perfect, but I'm more happy about the progress in terms of being able to make "completed" works. In any case I'm going to put more effort into my art for my next ones as well and continue to apply new learnings toward these, and I'm optimistic about the next year for my art :).

- I ate a burger this week but the pic is ugly so I shan't be sharing that. It was from Shake Shack and it was good.