Kat's Sketchbook

2011-10-23T23:27:00.000-07:00

This is an image for a website a friend of mine is working on. I don't think it's quite developed enough for my portfolio, but I think it's worth sharing here.

ALSO.

This is officially my new favorite website:
Russian, anyone?

Why yes, that is my painting, and then my painting again, totally without my permission.

But seriously! Listen to that music! Surely some noble goal is being espoused in all that russian that they've written over the super stretched out bottom part of my painting.

Really I don't see that I have any reason, nay, any RIGHT, to be upset.

Still more concept art!

2011-10-08T10:23:00.000-07:00

Eventually I'll start posting actual illustrations for this game, heh. It has 9 different "named" beasts, all of which have two forms, though, and I wanted to get a good handle on all of them before I start going in and creating scenes.

So, here's one celestial bird:

And more demons:

Now I'm pretty sure I only have...6 more left to go!

How GoDaddy.com is ripping you off.

2011-10-06T12:01:00.000-07:00

I have to say that it's hard to quantify my experience with godaddy. On the one hand, they give users a decent amount of storage space, bandwidth, and email accounts for a relatively reasonable price. On the other hand, their user interface is almost impossible to navigate, and every single time I try to do something complicated, I am informed that it may take up to 24 hours to take effect.

Still, quite a few of my clients come to me having already bought a 1 or 2 year contract with them, so weather I like them or not, I find myself dealing with their system fairly often.

Let me tell you straight up: They are NOT the cheapest hosting plan out there, no matter what you might have heard.

My current client thought that she was all ready to go after having purchased a 1-year recurring contract for a domain name, some free email accounts, and her godaddy instantpage©. I'm sure godaddy was happy to let her foster this illusion.

So she comes to me to set up her website, and after getting a pretty good page design put together, I log in to godaddy, and discover that although she has a domain name, she does not have any kind of web hosting: just godaddy's instant page.

After helping the client through the process of buying a hosting account (which is 60 dollars a year, and this is in addition to what she paid for her domain name) a process that involved having to turn off quite a few "custom options" that were automatically switched on, we got the hosting account up and running.

So once everything is running properly (it took more than 5 hours for her hosting account to be activated) I log in to set up the wordpress installation. After waiting another hour for that to take effect, I go to the wp-admin page, and what do you think?

Yep, 404. So I check out the simple /wordpress/ directory where the sample wordpress page is supposed to appear, and to my surprise, the instantpage page comes up.

So what is going on? Well I will tell you.

Apparently all of godaddy's features that operate without a hosting account are hosted on some OTHER server with a different IP address. So when you deactivate the Instantpage, it does NOT automatically set the homepage of your site to your hosting account, and you have to go and manually change the DNS zone file.

In retrospect, it would have been much simpler if I had had her buy her hosting account AFTER turning off instantpage. Then the hosting installation would have automatically fixed the zone file, or at least one would HOPE that was the case.

So yeah. Godaddy products are very easy to install. But UNinstalling? Not so much.
Not to mention that the entire time I was doing this, there were continually a thousand little options hanging around the corners of the screen for more probably usless things I could buy.

Seriously, godaddy, I've had enough trouble with just ONE of your proprietary products. Do you REALLY think I'm going to get more of them?

My advice: If you absolutely must use godaddy, do as little as possible through their user interfaces. Either upload with an external FTP like fetch or filezilla, or immediately install wordpress and do everything through the admin dashboard. There is just no reason to bother with anything godaddy is selling.

More concept art and an unrelated sketch

2011-09-01T14:44:00.000-07:00

I've been producing more art that I like enough to post than usual lately.

Here's some more concept art from the project I was talking about before:

This is a sketch for a larger piece I'm planning. Maybe a little NSFW.
Inspired by the song "Daughter of the Glade" by Trixie Pixie (link)

Finally, a sort of rough concept involving the big dipper.

Some concept art

2011-08-22T11:40:00.001-07:00

A friend and I are working together on her thesis project. I can't really go into details, but I can show off some of the concept art I've been working on. These are all character designs.

In progress

2011-04-05T10:59:00.000-07:00

Detail from a large digital painting I'm working on.

Various things

2011-03-01T16:41:00.000-08:00

It's been a little while since I posted. I've been working on some web stuff, and a project I can't really talk about very much yet.

Even so, I have been doing some things for myself.

2010-11-03T15:13:00.000-07:00

Soon I should be getting the "web" section of my page going. I didn't want to set it up completely until a few more of my clients had their pages up on their own servers, instead of just piggybacking on mine.

Just for now, here are a few of them:

Buzzard's Bay Sounding

an artist community based in the dartmouth area. It was necessary to have a content management system of some sort, and a way to search through categories, so I set up a wordpress page for them. Check it out, they have a lot of nice prints and paintings for sale.

Nordli, Wilson Associates

A group of organizational psychologists who needed a site re-design. Originally, one of their partners had put one together on frontpage, with a javascript rollover image menu. I gave them a straight up HTML/CSS page for the sake of simplicity and fast load times.

Dragon Song Studios

My friend Dawn Marie Dunn's site, where she posts her music and her thoughts. Another wordpress site, because she wanted to basically have a blog.

2010-08-24T21:18:00.000-07:00

So today I went over to AC moore and bought some raw wood boxes (that means unpainted and unstained)

5 hours later, the result:

I think they came out pretty well.

2010-08-16T16:04:00.000-07:00

Last time I posted an in-progress picture of a mask I was working on.

Here is the finished piece:

I'm pretty pleased with how it came out in the end.

In progress: new mask

2010-08-08T18:26:00.000-07:00

Halloween is just a few months away, so I've been working on masks lately with more than the usual verve. Here's an in-progress shot of the lastest. It's painted to look like copper that's been treated with a blue glaze. (Actually it's a light weight plastic. Actual metal is somewhat unwieldy to use for a mask that will later have feathers attached to it.)

I haven't been doing so much sketching lately, since I've been busy with other projects, but I did put this idea to paper a few nights ago:

It's inspired largely by a book by Robin Hobb.

Too much star trek..

2010-07-20T12:59:00.000-07:00

Random character design for some sort of alien fish man.

More cartooning

2010-07-20T08:59:00.000-07:00

Another little cartoon for my sister's blogg. You can't overestimate the need to keep your computer healthy and happy, so make sure that if it's feeling blue, it gets the help it needs.

And here is her alien character sharing some icecream with her computer.

Silly stuff

2010-06-30T15:27:00.000-07:00

My sister, who is currently trying to make her way as a writer, has been working on a blog, and I've been making some small graphics for her.

That is an alien character who dispenses internet advice.

Here's another fun little image I made for her:

No lie, I like those little pandas. They came out so cute!

If you want to check out her humor blog, you can find it at Kazara from the Internet

Hi

2010-06-16T11:40:00.000-07:00

This being the first post on this new blog, I'd just like to say welcome to everyone.
I won't be posting much actual finished artwork here, just little sketches and concepts that I'm working on.

So just to kick things off, here's some things that have been sitting on my computer.

First of all an old pencil sketch (a study for a painting)

Another pencil sketch, with some color this time (I don't remember what this character was for. Maybe just for fun?)

And finally a tough looking girl with purple skin. (A character concept I was fooling around with for a while. The huge metal thing is some kind of crazy anime-style sword.)

so there you go, a few fun things to start off with. See you all next time!