Update

Smacking art right in the stupid face, unsurpassed

Artwork, Stream News

Here we are, starting out summer right. It’s been a productive year so far, artistically and professionally. As I demand more detail in my own artwork, it also demands more time, so I have fewer pieces to show, but the pieces I have worked on I am very proud of. Check out the gallery for updates and the pieces that I have worked on thus far!

My newest Orbicular piece, soon to be available as a print!

This is all besides the fact that I am not an artist alone, but rather an artist, a musician, a father and husband, a writer, and a damn good home cook. I see growth in any of these fields as growth in all of these fields. It’s the holistic approach that works for me. It also staves off burnout, since I am not dedicating myself to any one thing for too long. The flip side of this is that it can make it harder to work on larger projects and maintain laser focus; this does not bother me as much, since on this front I am my own boss and I am very generous with my deadlines. As long as things are getting done, I’m happy.


Artistically, I have learned more about shading, workflow, animation, and the overall business side of it. Musically, I have learned how to better use loops to make songs, and I feel more confident than ever playing live on stream. Speaking of my stream, I have added gaming to the lineup. My setup is getting closer and closer to what I would consider “professional”, so I can add more and more content and feel like I’m contributing something meaningful. Mondays I stream animation and artwork, Thursdays I play keyboard and work on music loops, and every other day (and nights, usually very late) I can play some games! Lately I have been playing a Dark Souls 1 randomizer run, and I want stream more interesting mods of popular games in the future. It’s a challenge in every sense… but I don’t know how to stop creating.

Oh and I have a new mic! A Yeti Blue! Makes me sound so much better than the microphone I was using before, which was actually part of my headset. I even have a pop screen. That makes it so I can draw and play piano and most of that white noise just disappears. I listen to myself on the stream recordings afterwards and you can really tell there is a great deal of improvement. Makes it easier to do everything!

Thanks for coming by. Godrod Studios is still active and happy. Here’s a sketch of Domo to keep you warm at night until next time!

DOMO!!!

Commissions, and the Ethical Bounds of Creating

Uncategorized

Hi everyone. Time for another minor update before I go HAM on a larger one.

Reeling from the news from yesterday about the school shooting. I’m not just tired of the killings, I am tired of the overwhelming inaction, the tacit acceptance of death. We saw it with the (still ongoing) pandemic, we see it with gun violence, and soon we will see it as climate disaster grows more and more dire. People my age and younger have never seen a functional Congress or judiciary, and it is very obvious to most of us that there is no incentive for them to improve the lives of the general population.

I wish I knew the answers to all of our problems. I don’t. I know the addiction to infinite growth on a finite planet will kill us all. Personally, I have stopped eating beef and I am cutting down considerably on other meats, I only drive when there is no other option, and I minimize water and electricity use. I took the pandemic seriously and did everything I could to assure that I would not unintentionally kill others, by getting vaccinated and wearing masks and staying out of enclosed public places. That is what I can do personally, in my small sphere. It is so, so hard to think that I am making any difference, and I know I am not alone in that feeling.

With all this in mind, I had to refuse a few commission ideas recently because they wanted to portray suicide. Light hearted, jokey suicide, but that still sat wrong with me. And I have been working on things that are actually rather violent and grim! It’s a personal line that I cannot cross anymore. Long ago I had a character I would draw called Dex, and he had a friend named Suicidal Vinny who would perpetually have a pistol pointed at his own head as he went about his day. Vinny would take any opportunity to end it all by firing the gun, but some twist of fate always intervened to save his life. That was high school and in retrospect, it was coming from a very dark place. As an adult I would rather not feed these sorts of thoughts, and I certainly do not want to create a looping animation of graphic self-harm. My current limit for what I will do is “Looney Tunes but with optional gore”.

Lastly, things I would like to get done on this site:

  • Update the PixelArt page. I have done more pixel art animation than anything lately and I need to showcase that more clearly
  • Facelift the site completely? This is one of those things that is both more and less work than it sounds.
  • Update my Commissions Page to be more beautiful and user-friendly

If You’re Not Creating For Yourself, What Are You Creating For?

Stream News

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.

RECENT UPDATES: Commissions Page is complete! 2021 Gallery updated with many new pieces! Who knew I was making so much this year?

April – May 2021 Updates: Creativity Strained in Allergy Season

Stream News

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.

Sexual Liquid

Updating Godrod.org

Coloring Cuisine, Stream News

The gallery has been updated with a nice selection of what I have done this year. There is a lot I have left out, but what is there should give you an idea of the growth that I have been going through as an artist and otherwise.

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.

What’s Happening at godrod.org?

Coloring Cuisine

Mm, yes, nothing like a well-oiled, frequently-updated website!

I have been out of the art game after a decent start in 2020, since my carpal tunnel syndrome had taken a turn for the worse. CTS is used as a joke so often these days that it may seem like I’m making a joke too, but no: I legitimately have been artistically incapacitated for months. Covid-19 afforded me a huge chunk of time to be alone and create, but that was not what happened. Thank goodness for the support and entertainment afforded by my wife and kid during the past 6 months!

Instead what I got was months of being stuck in my own head. I could not draw, or write, or play piano, or even play video games without constant, dull-to-intense pain in my wrists and fingers. CPT is like having a zip-tie pulled tight where you would wear a wristwatch. For me, it meant lots of compounding factors: Wrist pain, finger pain, random feelings of ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ or ‘electric shock’ in the fingertips, dropping things like pens, eating utensils, tools. Any exercise that would put pressure on my wrists or relied upon me holding myself up was out of the question; this cut out biking, pushups, pullups, or anything like throwing a frisbee or a ball.

In short, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome sucks really badly. You never realize how much you use your hands until everything has a ‘pain cost’ associated with it. Once my wife noticed that I was complaining of pain a lot when I cracked her back, she encouraged me to do some exercise to improve my wrist strength. I did a few minutes of this exercise, which was essentially a push-up where you rocked back and forth, and the pain was absolutely excruciating. I tried to write on paper, and the results looked like that of an 80 year old; I was terrified.

Three years later, after an unsuccessful Workman’s Comp claim (apparently typing all day for years will NOT cause CTS according to the WC Doctor who denied my case), some pain management, and a few tests, I had surgery on my right wrist. The day after, I could wiggle my fingers, and even though I was still recovering, I could tell that IT HAD WORKED. The random pain blips were gone. I didn’t drop things. I could play piano and my fingers actually went were I told them to go. It was glorious.

That’s where I am today. That procedure was a month ago, and my hand is feeling better all the time. I still have to go easy on it for a while, so I will not be creating new work for another month or so. I already made things worse two weeks post-surgery by trying to practice piano for an hour a day; that lasted for 2 days until my hand got swollen again from overuse. Thus I am going to ‘take it easy’ with the knowledge that I will be back in front of a drawing desk or keyboard in prime condition.

I know there are few, if any, regular readers of godrod.org; after all, I have not been keeping up with the site very well. I will make an effort to change that. Having my hand back feels like a near-death experience with less of the mess. I thought my creative life was over, and I was worried it would lead to a spiral of bad thoughts that I would have difficulty recovering from. At this point though, I plan on adding more art as I make it, and possibly branching out into music and other creative pursuits. The surgery was a new lease on life and I plan on taking full advantage!

Thanks for reading. If your hands hurt, and you joke that you have CTS, remember that that joke may have some truth to it. Don’t be afraid to get it checked out like I did. See you again real soon!