Hey howdy. It has been awhile since I last updated, my apologies. Things have been kinda crazy around here lately…by crazy I mean my normal work schedule. Actually no, so far this year freelance has been pretty slow, which means I can work on more personal stuff. Three weeks ago I launched my first purchasable video tutorial and it has been doing fairly well I suppose. I really feel like I missed the mark a little bit with my debut tutorial because it wasn’t as in depth and “cool” as I would have liked. To remedy that I have been working on a new tutorial. It has multiple figures, it has a background (kinda), it has horses (well only 1), it has armor, and it has fiery magical goodness. I plan on finishing the illustration soon…by the end of this weekend would be ideal. I am still battling with finding the right settings and location for recording the audio, but maybe I am being too picky about the background noise. In any case, the audio should be better this time around.

In other news I am also working on an iPhone art book app with Bobby Chiu (am I allowed to talk about it?). I will say yes, and if not, I blame Dave Rapoza because he mentioned he was doing one before his came out . I think I am doing around 12 or so brand new illustrations designed specifically for the app. I am not sure when I will be finished with all of the illustrations since I have to squeeze them in between my full-time job at Mythic and my freelance work for WotC, Blizzard, and Fantasy Flight Games. Soon I hope, soon.

I also just spent the last two days remastering the audio on my YouTube tutorials and I put them up on my store for purchase. They are in HD and come bundled with the custom brush that I made in the custom brush tutorial and the psd file for the Nibru painting. Oh, and they are all bundled together (six video tutorials) for the price of $5. They are also still available for free on my YouTube site, but if you want something in HD and with better audio then please consider picking them up. I am also in the process of remastering the audio for the Liche Priest video, which will be available for free.

Oh, some other exciting news…I am planning on making a limited run art book. If everything goes according to plan, I will have them available at the Magic: The Gathering Grand Prix in May at the Dulles Expo Center. Right now I am still in the planning stage, but I think I will only print 50-100 books (maybe 200). The book will feature work from Magic: The Gathering, World of Warcraft, and some new personal paintings that I haven’t shown yet.

(Dave Rapoza is also interviewing me on March 16th at 6:00pm EST and no, I am not nervous at all…)

I can’t believe I forgot to post this. This was my entry for the Beautiful Grim fundraiser. I can’t even remember how many times I started over, I think I started 8-9 completely different paintings before settling on this one. Coming up with an idea was really hard for me because of how mentally and physically connected I am to the event. I wanted to create something that conveyed how I felt about the whole process, but yet I didn’t want to come off too grim or generic. Since this is for a fundraiser I also had to take into consideration what people would want to buy and hang in their house, which is also hard for me because I paint mainly evil fantasy illustrations that people would never buy for their living room wall. I also wanted to incorporate the moth from the Beautiful Grim site somewhere in the painting. I had this printed on watercolor paper and mounted on foam core. The size is 14×24. I am still trying to decide if I should get a frame for it, but I think I actually like it without a frame. I also recorded this painting, so I just need to go back and record the audio.

A few more of my Magic: The Gathering cards for Worldwake came out. I wasn’t too happy with these, but they are what they are. Sometimes it is really difficult to get excited about certain illustration briefs. One of the big challenges I face as an artist is trying to get excited and create something “cool” out of a description that seems silly.

The trailer for the Female Hunter tutorial is up on my YouTube site. The store will launch on February 10th, so stop by on Wednesday! The url for the store will be daarken.com/store.  I just wanted to remind people that this video tutorial is not available as a physical DVD, but is only available as a digital download.

Woooo, I finally finished recording my new video tutorial, let the clouds part and angels rejoice. My days of recording in the closet are over…until the next time I start recording a new tutorial that is. The video is approximately 128 minutes of real time video. There are two versions available, one in 1280×800 for $10 and one in 1440×900 for $12. Both versions come bundled with the brushes I use and a psd file of my illustration. As a special bonus for purchasing this tutorial, I will select a random person to receive an Intuos 3 6×8 tablet. To enter the drawing, simply purchase the Female Hunter tutorial and your name will be added to the list. If you already have an Intuos 3 or 4, please consider opting out of the drawing so that others who don’t have an Intuos 3 or 4 can have a chance to win. You can opt out by adding a comment in the “Special Instructions” window during the checkout process. The drawing will be held on March 15th. Please note, the Intuos 3 is used, but in brand new condition. The surface sheet has just been replaced and still has the protective cover on it. The tablet comes with the stylus and the installation disc, but does not come with the mouse (I think the mouse is in the Closet of Doom…don’t ask. If I ever find it, I will be sure to send it to the winner). A trailer for the video will be released on Monday on my YouTube site. The tutorial will be available for purchase on Wednesday, Feb. 10th through my new online store, daarken.com/store.

Speaking of which, I’ve been working on a new online store for the past week and it is almost ready to go. The store will launch on Wednesday, Feb. 10th. I still need to do some more testing to ensure a smooth launch. You will be able to purchase prints, proofs, and my video tutorials through the online store. Be sure to tell your friends!

My first card from Magic: The Gathering Worldwake has been posted on the WotC site. I have a total of three cards in this set, not quite as many as some of the other sets.

In other news, I am still working on the Female Hunter video tutorial. I still have about 80 minutes of audio to record. I also have another 3 videos recorded, but I haven’t added any audio yet. I am not sure how many of them will be free videos, but I have been playing around with the idea of releasing free versions of all of them on YouTube…which means they will be sped up and in lower quality.

When I am not working on freelance or at my full time job, I’ve been working on a 30 painting personal project. So far I only have one out of 30 finished, but hopefully I can get the rest finished in the next month or two.

Today my interview with 2DArtist Magazine came out. I have been a long time contributor for 2DArtist Magazine, but for some reason or another I never got around to doing an interview. I have to say, I am quite pleased with the result. After getting my download link I was pleasantly surprised to see how many double page spreads they added…they are huge! I guess I can’t hide anything now.

The issue is packed with a ton of great art and some really neat tutorials, so be sure to pick up a copy on the 2DArtist site. You can also download some really cool custom brushes that are featured in the tutorials. Hopefully my ramblings are somewhat coherent and mildly amusing. Thanks Rich for the great interview!

A few of my new WoW illustrations for the Naxxramas raid deck came out last month. I also did the Cover of Silence card, but that illustration was pretty lame so I’m not going to post it. I refuse!

As many of you know I have been releasing free video tutorials for the past 5 months on my YouTube site. In addition to those I have released several written tutorials over the past few years. I have always genuinely believed in giving back to the artistic community in any way that I can. I will continue to release free tutorials as often as I can, time permitting. I currently work 80-100 hours a week, 7 days a week. These tutorials are made on my free time when I am not working. One day I hope to have more time so that I can focus more on making these tutorials.

For the past few months I have been working here and there on a new video tutorial. I finally finished editing the video last week and I currently have 90 minutes of audio recorded out of roughly 144 minutes. It takes approximately one hour to record and edit 5-10 minutes of audio.

I wanted to do something different with this video, something that my other videos lack. One of the limitations of YouTube is that you can only upload videos that are 10 minutes in length. In order to release tutorials longer than that I have to spilt them into smaller parts, which can be a real pain for people to find and watch. Even if I break my videos into smaller sections I still have to increase the video speed drastically. Splitting a two and a half hour video into 10 minute segments isn’t the greatest idea. The Liche Priest video I released was split into 8 segments that ran almost an hour in length. The actual painting time was around 8 hours, so you can imagine how much I had to increase the speed. I found that most people only watched the first part and never really bothered to watch the other 7 parts. Other people would watch the first and second part and then skip to the last part.

I didn’t really like having to break my videos into so many sections, plus I didn’t like having to speed them up so much. It is hard to tell what the artist is doing when you have to increase the speed by 8x, especially when they are going through menus or using commands that you aren’t very familiar with. I spoke to a lot of people and they all wanted the same thing, a video tutorial filmed in real time. I tried this out on a small section of the Nibru painting I did and people really seemed to enjoy watching it in real time. I still had to deal with the 10 minute length issue.

The new tutorial I am working on is filmed completely in real time and has a length of approximately 144 minutes. The actual painting time was 4 hours, so I had to trim it down a little. I didn’t think people would want to sit around for 4 hours watching me paint the same thing…plus trying to make a 4 hour long HD video available for download wasn’t very plausible. Here is the catch, this will be my first video tutorial available for purchase. I plan to bundle my Photoshop brushes and the PSD files with the video so that you can see the different layers I work with. This will be a digital download, as of right now I have no plans on making it available on DVD. I still haven’t set a price tag as of yet, but it will definitely be affordable. I am still not sure if I will release this tutorial with a third party or if I will release it on my own. Sink or swim, we will see how it goes.

Update

The other day I decided to pop on my headphones and listen to the audio I have been recording. To my horror I realized there was a lot of background noise in all of the audio. There was enough that I decided I did not want to release something I wasn’t happy with…especially if I expected people to have to pay for it. After a few minutes of flailing my arms in the air and kicking imaginary objects, I decided to redo all of the audio. It took me 7 hours of testing to find a solution to eliminate most of the background noise and to redo 15 of the 90 minutes I already had. I tried a few different mics, tested it with a few different headphones (my Bose headphones and the Dr. Dre Beats headphones), and tested it on a laptop and a desktop. I also tried a few different audio recording programs. This little endeavor should set me back another week before finishing the video.

In the end I found that Saran-wrapping a Guitar Hero mic to a camera tripod while sitting in the closet using WireTap Studio was the best solution. If anyone needs to find me, I’ll be in the closet.

Or perhaps I should say bzzt bzzt. In any case, this is such a momentous occasion that it warrants a blog post.

I woke up this morning and realized that I had a package waiting for me in the front office. It actually arrived the other day but the office was closed due to the holiday, curse you holiday! I threw on my clothes and braved the blistering cold wind, and let me tell you, it was worth it. I now have in my possession 6 boxes of Morning Thunder, the bane of fatigue. Here it is in all of its cardboard boxness glory, quite exciting I know.

Why 6 boxes of Morning Thunder you ask? Wegmans has been sold out of this tea for about two months now. I actually had to resort to drinking wheatgrass! Wheatgrass! Yes wheatgrass is healthy, but the taste is a little lacking…unless you like drinking freshly mowed lawn. I am still not convinced of the energy inducing powers that wheatgrass is supposed to have, although I was able to work until 6:00am yesterday after drinking a shot of wheatgrass. I am not sure if that was due to the wheatgrass or my stubbornness to finish my video tutorial…I chalk it up to stubbornness.

The reason I started drinking Morning Thunder in the first place was because I was addicted to energy drinks. I used to drink 1-2 energy drinks per day. I’ve heard of people drinking 8+ in one day, but that is just crazy. Drinking energy drinks made me extremely tired when I wasn’t drinking them, cue zombie mode. Usually the next day I would completely crash, so to remedy that I would drink more energy drinks, thus feeding the vicious cycle. I actually got to the point where I would fall asleep while drinking an energy drink. Call me crazy, but that didn’t seem good. After a few posts on Facebook, Tyler Walpole, a fellow illustrator, told me to use Morning Thunder as a replacement for energy drinks. Morning Thunder is a zero calorie black tea that contains caffeine. How much caffeine does it have? It has less caffeine than Cola. I can drink one cup of Morning Thunder in the morning (:O) and feel awake and refreshed for the entire day. Thank you Morning Thunder, you have saved my life.

You know it is the holiday when large tablets of awesomeness abound. I am a total sucker for new technology and the new Intuos 4 is no exception. The first thing that one notices about the Intuos 4 is the widescreen format and the new express keys and speed ring. The cool thing about the Intuos 4 is its ambidextrous design. In the control panel you can set the tablet to either right handed or left handed. There are two usb ports that you can choose from depending on which one better suits your taste. Yes, this tablet finally allows you to disconnect the cord, now all they need is a wireless tablet.

Pressure

Another feature that I was really excited about was the fact that they doubled the number of pressure levels from 1024 to 2048. The Intuos 3 required 10 grams of pressure before the tablet could sense the stylus while the Intuos 4 only requires 1 gram. In the end you will notice a smoother, steadier transition with each stroke. You will probably need to mess around with the pressure sensitivity in the control panel in order to take full advantage of the larger range of pressure levels.

Aesthetic awesomeness

After rummaging through all the goodies in the box I came across some different colored rings. I realized that these rings go between the grip and the tip of the stylus. I know they are a complete gimmick and serve no real purpose other than aesthetics, but it made me very happy to be able to put a red ring on my black pen. What can I say, I am easily amused.

I also really like the matte finish and the sloped edges. The thing I didn’t like about the Intuos 3 was the clear trim around the edges. Dirt and dust would get lodged in there and it was a pain to try and clean out. The trim also tended to get damaged fairly easily.

ExpressKeys

The eight express keys have a nifty illuminated display next to each button so you can see which button is which in the dark. The speed ring has a button in the center that allows you to switch between four different presets. It seems really cool at first, but trying to change brush size with one preset, then clicking the button to make it switch to zoom, then having to cycle back through to change your brush size again takes too much time. Now I don’t really bother changing to the different presets, I just keep it on brush size. Trying to retrain my brain to remember the new button layout is taking longer than I expected. Recently I have just been using my Nostromo since I am used to using it all the time at work.

The removal of the touch strips on either side of the Intuos 3 is a good and bad thing. On one hand I had to disable the touch strips outside of Photoshop because I would accidentally brush

against them. On the other hand I felt using the touch strip to change brush size was faster. The other problem I encountered with the Intuos 3 touch strip was the fact that whenever I zoomed in or out, Photoshop would close. This may sound crazy, but it happened…all the time. The reason is because I had the right touch strip set to zoom. When I moved my pen hand over to use the touch strip my cursor would go to the top right corner of Photoshop, right where the close button is. For some reason when I touched the touch strip it would think I was clicking, so my cursor would click the close button. Obviously this problem was only limited to my PC. You are probably thinking “but if you clicked the close button it would ask if you wanted to save your image first, and you could just click cancel to avoid having the program close.” Yes and no. No because I work extremely fast, so when it thought I was clicking close instead of just zooming in/out, it would also go ahead and click “don’t save.” I probably run into this problem at least once a day.

Surface

Once you start painting you will notice that the texture of the surface is very different from that of the Intuos 3. The Intuos 3 was as smooth as butter, but the Intuos 4 has a textured feel to it. In some ways this is cool because it starts to blur the lines between traditional media and digital media. You start to forget that you are painting on a smooth, digital surface and begin to think you are drawing on paper, or some other traditional surface. The major drawback I found was that this new textured surface wears down the stylus tip extremely quickly. After only one week of painting (yes, one week…crazy I know) the tip has been worn down to almost nothing. With my Intuos 3 I only changed the nib once or twice in the past 30 months. Now I know why the Intuos 4 came with so many replacement nibs. Maybe it is all part of their evil plan to make more money, I don’t know.

You will also notice that the Intuos 4 stylus is quite a bit smaller than the Intuos 3 stylus in terms of length. This doesn’t bother me since the length doesn’t really affect my ability to paint. The grip part is also flush to the rest of the pen, which I actually prefer.

Other nifty features

All I have to say is Radial Menu. This thing is awesome. You can set one of your express keys to open the radial menu. Each pie section is completely customizable through the Wacom control panel. Below is an example of what I have mine set to. When you click “command” it opens the second radial menu, packed with the essential commands such as copy/paste and distort/warp. I almost never have to lean forward to use my keyboard, which saves a lot of time.

The pen stand houses a secret stash of extra pen nibs: five default nibs, one spring nib, one felt nib, three pencil-like nibs, and a tool to remove the nib.

Conclusion

The Intuos 4 is definitely an upgrade from any of the previous Wacom tablets and is well worth the money. Go buy it!