Merry Christmas and all the best for 2020!
Happy Holidays!
I hope you all have a good, peaceful and happy holiday season. Spending my Christmas in tropical Australia still feels weird. There are the presents, a lot of time spent on dolls’ house figurines and furniture for my grandkid, and a wooden Christmas I painted for a charity sale, it’s hard to get into the right spirit. Coming from Germany, Christmas is about cold, a real tree, wax candles, the smell of cookies and the fireplace burning. It’s not quite the same as summer, sun, and beach at 30C.
It’s scary to see how little I posted this year but other things had priority and took up a lot of my time and energy. I do feel bad about it and (as usual) would like to change it. 2019 threw a few nasty punches at me and it looks like the year is ending on that note as well. My neural pains have been a problem the past few days and I taking it easy. There are a few new approaches to battle the aches I am trying at the moment. The first results are quite promising therefor I hope for a better run in the next year!
I wish you all the best for 2020!
Sunny greetings from Downunder,
Chris
It’s been a while… and the reasons are plenty…
Still alive and kicking
It’s been a while…
since I posted a quick video and even longer since I worked on a proper tutorial. The reasons have been plentiful. They range from simply being ‘too busy with life’ to serious health issues. I had a major health threat that took a long time to be checked out and finally ruled out. When the doctor told me that it might be cancer, the initial response was ‘sh**, why me?’. I lost close family members to cancer in the past. It felt wrong. I am too young. I watch my diet and lifestyle and keeping as fit as my muscular condition allows it. Maybe a bit more at times. I haven’t had any of the symptoms normally associated with it. Yet the blood tests confirmed the numbers. Next up was an ultrasound and an MRI. Both of them showed ‘a zone of interest’. Ultimately, the doctors decided to take a biopsy. It dragged on for months. Even though I tried not let it get to me, it did paralyze me. Finally, two weeks ago I got the all clear. It was a major relief.
Oddly, the immediate reaction of joy and the loss of the burden came with a loss of tension and drive. I felt sorry for myself when I should have been the happiest. It’s taken a while [with too much coffee and chocolate] to get back into a mindset to open up the blog. I look at the declining viewer numbers and realize that I miss the posts, the tutorials, and the pains of putting together a video. Passing on some of the knowledge I acquired feels good. The intentions are there, the plans and the ideas for new posts are plentyful. A lot of them sit in the dark corners of my hard drives already. They are just waiting to be released. I will try and find the time and energy to make that happen.
Thanks for your patience. I hope to see you around for more entertaining and helpful posts in the near future.
Under construction – working out the issues
New Website
Update
So… I changed over from Blogger to WordPress a short while ago. A lot of things have improved since. It should be easier to navigate through the site, the index should work and most of all it’s a lot easier for me to post.
There are still issues though. I am aware of some, while others probably still hide in dark corner just waiting to jump at me. After an avalanche of 404 errors relating to feedburner, I fixed the RSS feeds today. I also added subscription options at the footer of the site.
It will take a little while before all the older tutorials will be updated to the new format. . As a result, they should be a lot more mobile friendly and easier to edit. Which in turn will remove a lot of mistakes, spelling errors, and typos but also allow the translations to finally go online. It’s been a task I had planned to tackle a long time ago but wasn’t able to implement without major problems in Blogger.
At the moment there might be issues with the quality of some of the art (please let me know if you come across those and I will try and fix them right away).
In short
The website is still undergoing construction but it’s improving slowly. Bare with me while I fix them… and find time to post new tutorials. Hopefully, the next video tutorial will be up soon as well.
Monster Builder Kit – some initial design ideas
Modular Monster Builder
Design Ideas
One of the requests from a reader has been a tutorial/ video/ art pack on monsters. The initial idea I have is something along the lines of the ‘Modular buildings’ or the ‘Spaceship constructions kit’. I am thinking of writing a step-by-step tutorial on creating some of the parts – e.g. eyes, body, extremities, and decor elements. Following it up with the kit as a free download and a video tutorial on the how to easily create, alter and add to it.
These are the first designs I came up with. I am not sure I will keep it this bright, shaded and saturated though. A plainer, more muted, darker version with the focus on shapes could be another option.
Let me know what you think.
Under construction – reworking the blog
It’s been a while…
and I put it off for way too long…
but eventually, there was no way around it. The 2dgameartguru.com website/ blog had become a proper mess. Consequently, it stopped me from posting – among other things. There was no easy way to fix it in blogger.com and I made the switch to WordPress last August. It took a while to find enough time and motivation to learn it. The approach is similar yet different – but with a lot more possibilities. I finally worked out how to format the tutorials in ways that will make it easier to read them on mobile devices. I at least I hope so.
Pushing myself to become active again
Daily routines and unforeseen events put the project on the backburner again. It took months before I finally revisited the WordPress tests. I had not posted anything new for a long time. It was supposed to go into the “shiny, brand new” design. The unfinished new design leads to no new tutorials and eventually made me cranky. I was stopping myself from having some fun with the blog.
Eventually, I made the switch. Unfinished, rough and lacking a lot of the features I was hoping to include – for now. The blog is out there in its new look and there is no excuse anymore.
Going back and reworking the blog
At the moment I am still going through the old tutorials. I am reworking the newest and most important ones. Exporting the images again, adding information and fixing a lot of spelling mistakes. 🙁 There is a lot of optimization needed and it is time-consuming. It’s not much fun for a creative person like me either. Nevertheless, I plan to work my way through it and start posting new content as soon as possible. Bare with me and I hope I can reward your patience with new tutorials on Inkscape, Affinity Designer, Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw as well as integrating some of the translations into Spanish, French and German.