DragonDePlatino
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Post Drought and Plans
3 min read
It's a secret to nobody that I haven't been posting very often. I've been drawing every day, but nothing has been submitted to my deviantART account. There are a number of reasons for this. First off, more of my time has been dedicated to programming. I want to work as a programmer so much of my time has been spent learning game development, GUI applications and mobile apps. Obviously, I can't submit any of this to dA. And when I do make art, I rarely have the patience to submit it.
Which brings me to my next point. dA just isn't convenient for submitting art. Everything needs a description and tagging which feels like a chore. Most of my friends like TonyZeCorny have jumped ship to Tumblr and I've been posting on forums like TIGSource, MFGG and Starmen.net. It's a lot less work and you're not locked out of basic site features because you lack a CORE membership.
Lastly, my drawing style doesn't lend itself well to submitting. I don't draw isolated pictures. I work on large projects for months at a time and don't like to show things until they're finished. And very often, I don't finish these projects so I don't post them. But enough is enough! I'm going to do something about this.
Starting tomorrow, I will be submitting a few pieces of art a day for the next few weeks. How many, you ask? I'll post one and then however many pieces of art are directly related to that one. So if I post a mockup, I will post all of the sprites, tiles and sketches that go with it. I don't want to overwhelm my watchers so I will slowly work through this backlog. In the end, my gallery will reflect how good of an artist I am now. Most of this art will be unfinished, but it will represent a lot of time and hard work.
So what exactly prompted this? Well, I recently had a dip in artistic confidence. I felt like I never went out of my comfort zone and I wasn't challenging myself. So I played this amazing game called Drawception. It's like figure drawing on crack! You get a completely random concept and are asked to draw it in 10 minutes. And after churning out this garbage for 3 days, I came to a realization. I'm no longer worried about showing people my art no matter how incomplete it is. I've put my best into everything I do and this is true for everything I've drawn from the oldest, cringiest piece of art to my newest pieces I'm very proud of.
So that's it. Expect a slow trickle of deviations for a while. Once I'm done, I'll update with another journal. It's gonna be a heck of a ride through my past two years of artistic growth! See you at the end.
Which brings me to my next point. dA just isn't convenient for submitting art. Everything needs a description and tagging which feels like a chore. Most of my friends like TonyZeCorny have jumped ship to Tumblr and I've been posting on forums like TIGSource, MFGG and Starmen.net. It's a lot less work and you're not locked out of basic site features because you lack a CORE membership.
Lastly, my drawing style doesn't lend itself well to submitting. I don't draw isolated pictures. I work on large projects for months at a time and don't like to show things until they're finished. And very often, I don't finish these projects so I don't post them. But enough is enough! I'm going to do something about this.
Starting tomorrow, I will be submitting a few pieces of art a day for the next few weeks. How many, you ask? I'll post one and then however many pieces of art are directly related to that one. So if I post a mockup, I will post all of the sprites, tiles and sketches that go with it. I don't want to overwhelm my watchers so I will slowly work through this backlog. In the end, my gallery will reflect how good of an artist I am now. Most of this art will be unfinished, but it will represent a lot of time and hard work.
So what exactly prompted this? Well, I recently had a dip in artistic confidence. I felt like I never went out of my comfort zone and I wasn't challenging myself. So I played this amazing game called Drawception. It's like figure drawing on crack! You get a completely random concept and are asked to draw it in 10 minutes. And after churning out this garbage for 3 days, I came to a realization. I'm no longer worried about showing people my art no matter how incomplete it is. I've put my best into everything I do and this is true for everything I've drawn from the oldest, cringiest piece of art to my newest pieces I'm very proud of.
So that's it. Expect a slow trickle of deviations for a while. Once I'm done, I'll update with another journal. It's gonna be a heck of a ride through my past two years of artistic growth! See you at the end.
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Assignments and Hacks
6 min read
Heeeeeeeeey! Guess who's got the guilties from not writing their journals regularly?
School...The abysmal hole that sucks all joy out of your life...If you aren't me, that is.
But nevertheless, my Senior year of school is shaping up to be pretty hard! I've got classes in AP Calculus and Physics, so those are starting to take their toll on me. AP Calculus is as hard as Pre-Cal was, but Physics...Is actually surprisingly easy. When you get down to it, it's just getting an equation like (vf^2 = vi^2 + 2(a * d)) and plugging in the numbers of the problem. Knowing what equation to use for what program is tricky, but after that it's smooth sailing.
On the less academic side of things, Band is has been pretty frustrating. Despite being a Senior and a marching vet, it's pretty hard getting Freshmen to listen to you...It's always rough when you're trying to get a point across, and people just ignore you. This year's show is fun, though. We get to dance! And by we, I mean I'm actually the only one who has the guts to do the dancing that's supposed to be in our half-time show!
Ohh! Ohh! I'm also in Creative Writing now! Since I've gotten a good grade in my English classes, I get to take a super-fun class where we learn good writing techniques! Things like "don't use adverbs when you could use a strong noun" or "show, don't tell". I already knew the latter, but I've been having a lot of fun in this class nevertheless. Very much unlike band, the students who are in Creative Writing are real artsies. Pretty much every other person in the class is into MLP/Adventure Time/Homestuck, and our nerdy teacher herself is obsessed with both Homestuck and Attack on Titan. And you can imagine what a class like that would be like.
Expect me to submit some of my Creative Writing stuff to dA, soon. A 10-page short story set in Terra Confundo is currently in the works!
Rogue-likes have always intrigued me. From the very moment I picked up "Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Blue Rescue Team", I was completely and absolutely obsessed with it. The same goes for Spelunky. Both of those games have an incredible replay value, and are challenging to boot! But what really surprised me, was that I had been playing a genre of RPGs called "rogue-likes", the whole time! Imagine how let down I was when I first picked up Rogue, and discovered that the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series is just a direct ripoff of rogue-likes. :/
So after finding out that depressing fact, I set out to find the root of this amazing genre. After playing a bit of Rogue, I discovered a game called NetHack...And it is AMAZING! Yes, the graphics are bloody terrible (A text-based terminal version of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon) but the game has the most depth I've ever seen in a game. Games like Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress don't even remotely compare to the complexity of this 28-year-old gem. It's been in development (mostly fan-made) that entire time, and booooy is there a lot to it!
Save, I haven't actually PLAYED the game, but I've been meekly lurking on the wiki, absorbing as many spoilers as I possibly can so that I won't go ignorant into the game. Oh! And much like how I started my Fantasy Chess project a few months ago, the absolutely horrible graphics of NetHack INSPIRED me to take on a new personal project! Currently, I plan to revamp ALL 1056 TILES OF NETHACK, as well as tiles pertaining to a few mods such as SLASH 'EM, Unnethack and SporkHack. You know, the major mods out there.
School
School...The abysmal hole that sucks all joy out of your life...If you aren't me, that is.
But nevertheless, my Senior year of school is shaping up to be pretty hard! I've got classes in AP Calculus and Physics, so those are starting to take their toll on me. AP Calculus is as hard as Pre-Cal was, but Physics...Is actually surprisingly easy. When you get down to it, it's just getting an equation like (vf^2 = vi^2 + 2(a * d)) and plugging in the numbers of the problem. Knowing what equation to use for what program is tricky, but after that it's smooth sailing.On the less academic side of things, Band is has been pretty frustrating. Despite being a Senior and a marching vet, it's pretty hard getting Freshmen to listen to you...It's always rough when you're trying to get a point across, and people just ignore you. This year's show is fun, though. We get to dance! And by we, I mean I'm actually the only one who has the guts to do the dancing that's supposed to be in our half-time show!
Ohh! Ohh! I'm also in Creative Writing now! Since I've gotten a good grade in my English classes, I get to take a super-fun class where we learn good writing techniques! Things like "don't use adverbs when you could use a strong noun" or "show, don't tell". I already knew the latter, but I've been having a lot of fun in this class nevertheless. Very much unlike band, the students who are in Creative Writing are real artsies. Pretty much every other person in the class is into MLP/Adventure Time/Homestuck, and our nerdy teacher herself is obsessed with both Homestuck and Attack on Titan. And you can imagine what a class like that would be like.
Expect me to submit some of my Creative Writing stuff to dA, soon. A 10-page short story set in Terra Confundo is currently in the works!
NetHack
Rogue-likes have always intrigued me. From the very moment I picked up "Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Blue Rescue Team", I was completely and absolutely obsessed with it. The same goes for Spelunky. Both of those games have an incredible replay value, and are challenging to boot! But what really surprised me, was that I had been playing a genre of RPGs called "rogue-likes", the whole time! Imagine how let down I was when I first picked up Rogue, and discovered that the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series is just a direct ripoff of rogue-likes. :/
So after finding out that depressing fact, I set out to find the root of this amazing genre. After playing a bit of Rogue, I discovered a game called NetHack...And it is AMAZING! Yes, the graphics are bloody terrible (A text-based terminal version of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon) but the game has the most depth I've ever seen in a game. Games like Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress don't even remotely compare to the complexity of this 28-year-old gem. It's been in development (mostly fan-made) that entire time, and booooy is there a lot to it!
Save, I haven't actually PLAYED the game, but I've been meekly lurking on the wiki, absorbing as many spoilers as I possibly can so that I won't go ignorant into the game. Oh! And much like how I started my Fantasy Chess project a few months ago, the absolutely horrible graphics of NetHack INSPIRED me to take on a new personal project! Currently, I plan to revamp ALL 1056 TILES OF NETHACK, as well as tiles pertaining to a few mods such as SLASH 'EM, Unnethack and SporkHack. You know, the major mods out there.
If anyone's interested and/or is into this kind of stuff, go ahead and PM me so I can get a crit on my tileset so far. I don't quiiiiiite feel like submitting my WIP to dA, yet. :I
To wrap things up, back to my programming progress! It's been...um....Well...I haven't really done much lately!
It's kind of occurred to me that I might actually never be able to program. I sat and thought for a bit, and it's like this...
A looong time ago, I always wanted to make my own pixel art, and animate sprites to make my own graphics! With hard work, dedication and a LOT of time, I'm where I am now! But I needed a story to fit all my graphics into...So I researched great resources like TVTropes, practiced a bit, and now I think of myself as a decent writer. And music...This one evaded me for much time despite being a musical person, but after a few months of work I eventually learned how to churn out a tune or two. In case you haven't listened to any of my stuff, I've got a SoundCloud for that.
But when it comes to programming...it just doesn't feel right to me. When it came to the other mediums I wanted to learn, I just put in hard effort and I learned how to work with them! But learning programming is much different...As you learn and experiment, you don't really see/hear/read any progress. Programming is a long, frustrating process where even a rough product only emerges after a few hours of work. Not to mention, to learn programming, it's not like learning other mediums. You have to practice, practice, practice doing boring things like programming Pong, or Breakout, or a spreadsheet program...It's just...I don't feel like my artistic wings can SOOOOOOOAR! You know what I mean? So...I might want to lay off the programming tutorials for a bit. I'm not really getting anywhere, and they're using up my time quite a bit. One day, if I can learn to cooperate with people and pitch an idea, I might find a nice programmer to do things for me, and I'll handle all the rest. ^.^
Programming
To wrap things up, back to my programming progress! It's been...um....Well...I haven't really done much lately!
It's kind of occurred to me that I might actually never be able to program. I sat and thought for a bit, and it's like this...A looong time ago, I always wanted to make my own pixel art, and animate sprites to make my own graphics! With hard work, dedication and a LOT of time, I'm where I am now! But I needed a story to fit all my graphics into...So I researched great resources like TVTropes, practiced a bit, and now I think of myself as a decent writer. And music...This one evaded me for much time despite being a musical person, but after a few months of work I eventually learned how to churn out a tune or two. In case you haven't listened to any of my stuff, I've got a SoundCloud for that.
But when it comes to programming...it just doesn't feel right to me. When it came to the other mediums I wanted to learn, I just put in hard effort and I learned how to work with them! But learning programming is much different...As you learn and experiment, you don't really see/hear/read any progress. Programming is a long, frustrating process where even a rough product only emerges after a few hours of work. Not to mention, to learn programming, it's not like learning other mediums. You have to practice, practice, practice doing boring things like programming Pong, or Breakout, or a spreadsheet program...It's just...I don't feel like my artistic wings can SOOOOOOOAR! You know what I mean? So...I might want to lay off the programming tutorials for a bit. I'm not really getting anywhere, and they're using up my time quite a bit. One day, if I can learn to cooperate with people and pitch an idea, I might find a nice programmer to do things for me, and I'll handle all the rest. ^.^
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Teachers and Reflections
10 min read
But I really don't feel like a senior. I'm still bossed around by seniors a bit and there are kids in way lower grades than I with like a kajillion times more charisma. It really makes you wonder...but I've never really been a glutton for attention, so I digress...
But do video games elicit emotion? Can the foreboding organ symphony of Ganon excite you? Yes! Can the untimely death of Aeris sadden you? Yes! Can Mr. Prog from Chibi Robo freak you the heck out? VERY YES! Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Stories and Finishes
8 min read
Now, before people start harping on me, no. This is not "Tales of Eternia", and I am most certainly spelling that right...with an "ea".
The last few Pokemon were tough, because I had to search around in the horrible abomination that has been known to be GTS Negotiaions, and I had a few punks sit there and shove their shinies in my face instead of giving me something I wanted...but I did it! 
A color upgrade for my Trainer Card (I'm gold right now), the egg charm, the shiny charm and a pat on the back. Whee. 
If anyone out there needs a Poke they can't get themselves, note me and I'll see what we can arrange. 
10 dA points (I only have 20)Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Returns and Programs
6 min read
But aside from that, it was fun! We headed back to my hometown after a week at my aunt ████████'s house, and things settled down after that...
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