Hi everyone, guess what? Stopping now is out of the question. Isn’t that great?
Growth in two ways: One, growing better technically as an artist. Two, growing to love your work and appreciating the works that have gotten you to where you are now.
Growing is a process that is so baked in to human character, that you do not always feel it happen. Progress is often incremental, and time often passes quickly. When I compare my new work to the old, I see the refinement of my style. Like a piece of land eroded by millions of years of water and tectonics, my mental palette of design choices had settled into something that I can call my own. There are limitations, and there are strengths.
So great, how did I develop that style and why am I so happy with myself all of the sudden? Iterations! Practice! Discipline! And lots of sacrifice. Sacrifice of game nights, of sleep, of time spent with friends.
I am working on my Fallout: New Vegas landscape diligently, and it is looking fantasmic if you ask me.
Work in progress, 2021 by Ben Sutter
My next post will be detailing my process, looking at this drawing from its fuzzy beginnings to a stellar finish. In the mean time, thanks for checking in!
There are pieces of art I have been working on, feverishly! And what is more, they look really cool and I wish I was able to share them. The pain I feel is the pain of having to keep it to myself.
There is good news, and that news is that there are more commission slots open now. And your work does not have to stay unstreamt unless you have some wild tastes. I still stream, not as often as I could, but just as often as I am able.
I have been messing with NeuralBlender lately, to make all sorts of wacky designs. Lots of these are ripe for iteration and background work. You take a prompt, write it down, and the network iterates it over and over again until you end up with something nightmarish.
Besides this, I have been working on pixel-art, working on the website, setting up an INSTAGRAM like some sort of instagrammer. You may notice that navigation is a little different now and that is because you are a very observant critter! I will be adding a Merch option to the menu soon. Not in love with the way the menu is on mobile but that is a minor quib.
Upcoming improvements:
-A banner for the merch store -Better Commision page, with more options and updated prices -Finish more art I can show off. Here is a little horror poster done in a pixelart style (80×120 pixels, 8 colors:)
It’s been a couple of months. My garden got big and I ate lots of tomatoes. Then the shade and heat won, and I was left with withering stalks. Still, the season was alright, with cucumbers and herbs overwhelming. We even had a few decent melons.
School started for my daughter. She is learning to manage her expectations of humanity… after a year of being home-schooled she is out in the thrashing waters of humanity and she wants to know if people ever calm down and act smart in groups. I really hated to tell her that no, this is the way it is. You can control yourself, and what you think and do (up to a point), but you cannot control everyone else.
Anyway, the title, why do I write things like this? I love creating, and I just want to make piles and piles of things to exist forever until I cannot anymore, whether that be a song or a drawing or an emotion. i have opened up my commissions page for the first time in a very long time and it represents me creating for others as well, sharing and creating things that have depth in their meaning. By doing this I am overcoming a fear of sacrificing more of my time, and part of that is feeling that it is NOT really a sacrifice, but a step forward, and a concrete way to help me continue to create.
Hopefully all of that will give me a deeper bond with my fellow humanity, that is really what my end-goal is here. Making things for people to love, the way that I love making them.
So in other news, I have fallen deep into making pixel artwork. Imagine picking up a program and it changes your creative course! I am speaking of Aseprite, a program that allows me to make animations with some pixel art with amazing ease! Look forward to my pixel art gallery coming soon!
Some of the animations I have been working on in September.
UPCOMING UPDATES: I will be making a new gallery for my pixel art, and a new easier link to the commissions page. Thanks for checking me out, kind reader. I will never get less weird, that is my promise to you.
It’s taken me years and years to learn that sometimes, it’s my allergies that are doing the driving. This time of year seems to always sap my creativity a little, as I have to medicate my insane seasonal allergies away. Even if I do medicate, bad enough days in the lustful Miami Valley can literally incapacitate me. One day in April I sneezed probably 50 times, each one a whiplash-inducing explosion (my sneezes are unfortunately very strong and dramatic). This kind of thing will cause me extremely bad headaches, an inability to concentrate, and generally result in SLOPPY WORK. Oh man I hate it when I do sloppy work!
Anyway I am working through that and I am making good art again. I have held off on doing commissions for now since I really do not have the bandwidth for it yet. It took me working on music to realize that I was just stacking on projects until I had too many; I want controlled growth since that it what I can handle, being a single human and all. In the last year I’ve already done plenty of drawing and style development. I’ve opened a TeePublic storefront so you can order shirts and magnets and stickers with my designs RIGHT ON THEM. I own a few of their high-quality tees and they are really comfy, so thus far I have no qualms about their products!
Fauntleroy Jonkens appears to have some various fans outside of my direct circle so that’s nice.
I am working on getting more designs onto the shop, at least monthly, so check that out! They sell prints as well, and you can order prints through them, but I am currently exploring alternative options to that. Now that I have my vaccinations all done, I feel a lot better about getting out into the world and finding a local printer. I will do a few test prints and then we will sell those myself, probably with it’s own navigation page.
TO DO: I need to update my gallery again. I have been posting everything to my discord but I don’t want ALL of that to end up on the site here. It’s all curated, the gallery here.
TO DO: My commission agreement language is almost finished. It’s lack of bandwidth, but I need to finish that.
I am working on a piece with Jimi Hendrix in it now. Hopefully I will finish soon! Thanks for the support, everyone. Do it for Fauntleroy.
Hey everyone, thanks for visiting the site. Check out the galleries for neat art, check out my Twitch stream for live art and music, and check out my commissions page to see if I can draw something for YOU!
In March I finally got a music stream going. Now I can play my MIDI piano on my stream which is pretty nice. I have been doing tons of drawings, which has also been nice. But something has been looming on the horizon, less sinister than burnout but almost as damaging: it’s the Maze!
Comic I did early March 2021 on my attitude
Life has not always been easy. I was pushed very hard to be a concert pianist and that got really old really quickly (not to mention that nothing in my upbringing really screamed ‘classical’). As a teenager I did not know what the future would bring but I knew I wanted to CREATE things. Home was not a safe place though, and most of what I made was lost or destroyed in various eras of my families negligence and rage.
Life DID get better. My grades in college (design school) were far better than my grades in high school, but I still felt like I was not making progress in life. I had more skills but nothing that really made me enough money to live on, so I went back to college in an attempt to be a pharmacist. Back I went to Sinclair Community College, which was great, to learn chemistry. And I love chemistry! I felt smart, like I was learning something IMPORTANT. My grades were even better; I put in tons of effort. Then off to WSU which was also nice, for a college that dedicated practically no money or effort to their chemistry department. I got a bachelors in Chemistry and here I am! I learned that I didn’t want to be a pharmacist, but I lucked out and got a great job supporting water quality equipment.
And yet all this time I knew that I really wanted to MAKE things, to inspire and entertain. What was I doing? I wanted to draw so I went to design school; I wanted to play music so I did, but in private. I started learning chemistry and saw a whole other WORLD that opened up via mathematics and physics. What was I doing? I felt that I knew things, that I understood something about art and music and science. I attacked projects but it was in every direction, all at once. If I hit too much resistance, I stopped.
What was I doing? I was wondering the Maze. Looking for that path that meant the most, that felt the best, that was calling my name. And I don’t know where the maze ENDS. If there is a goal to life I don’t know in what direction it lies. Maybe the maze is the goal? If life were not about the endless accumulation of wealth, I think life would be so much happier. If I could afford a home, if I could contribute in small ways all over the place instead of grinding a job in a big way, if I was amazing at one single thing, then I could just throw myself into it. But I never know where I am in the maze; if I persue one interest and move headlong in that direction, I get lost.
The worst part is feeling left behind. Seeing friends and colleagues excel at something they are great at and move forward. Designers, artists, musicians, scientists; I am all of these things and yet I am not 100% dedicated to any of it. What does that make me? A jack-of-all-trades? A pretender? A has-been, or a never-will?
Here’s to another month of wandering the maze. Thanks to the guides and well-wishers in that maze who have offered me advice. Here’s to leaving those behind in the maze who have chosen to let me wander alone. And here’s to finding a new part of the maze that looks like peace.
What’s in the pipeline for 2021? What little nuggets can I send your way? All I have to offer is words and pixels, at least until they are printed on a shirt or a mug or something. Oh speaking of that:
I am still working on A Thousand Miles of Dust, although it has been slower. I need to do some of the less-fun aspects of it so I can playtest, like making real character sheets for cars.
Streaming is still going strong! Name change upcoming, should be slightly more professional and it will look slick too!
Thanks for reading, those who do. I’m small-time now but I keep working on those dreams. -Ben
Due to technical limitations, I am not getting music on the stream yet. I will continue to practice as much as my left wrist will allow. I’m about 10 weeks out from surgery on the left wrist, about 5 months out from the right wrist. Having the use of my wrist is amazing! I can draw and play and cook and love and clap and climb and have confidence again. Yay!
Priorities for 2020: Now that I more confidence in what I am doing, I plan on selling certain designs on T-shirts. I want to see what they look like and how the return/payment options are before I commit to a certain vendor. Look out for those, I love wearing art, it can help justify the art as being ‘useful’ as clothing if the pragmatic part of your brain tends to do the driving.
Thanks for checking out godrod.org. We have fun here.
HI everyone. Nice day to be stuck inside, as always.
I’ve been working hard on images for an RPG that I am working on, as well as some other projects which are bringing me a lot of joy. I’m trying to get better at daily output, something which will be incentivized by another exciting piece of news: I’m finally an affiliate over on my Twitch channel. That means that when I draw, people can support me financially to some small degree, so that’s a step in the right direction. Currently I am working on a few computer system upgrades so that I can make the stream as good as it possibly can be.
Lately I’m churning out drawings without even thinking about it. My right wrist is feeling good after 4 months, and my left is also recovering nicely at 6 weeks in.
I had a nice run of streaming some drawings for a week or so, and they were fun! Now it’s been a week of working on drawings that are not-so-stream-able. I will post some parts of them here, but not enough to scare away my many, many sponsors. I may make a whole webpage of the 80 or so sketchbook pages I have produced in the last week, but for now you get just the dribblin’s.
Most of the sketches are really fast, loose and sloppy, taking 5 minutes or so.
I drew red ninja woman/demon a few times. I have to draw nudes about 50 times and then I bust out the anatomy books. You have to learn nudes before you do clothing. Also a great excuse to draw nudes.
