After working for 20 hours straight, I finally finished putting the first wave of art for the Beautiful Grim fundraiser on eBay. You can bid on them here.

For those of you who don’t know, this fundraiser is to help pay for my wife’s medical bills. Last year she was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 25 and had a bilateral mastectomy after 16 weeks of chemotherapy. Please help out my wife and the rest of the women in the world fighting breast cancer by bidding on a piece. This is only the first wave of art. We have over 200 artists on our list, so there is more to come! If you would like more information about the fundraiser or if you would like to take a look at the other artists (and their art), please visit the official Beautiful Grim site.

Here is the list of artists included in the first wave:

Matt Stewart
Ruel Pascual
Pierre Perifel
Fabio Lignini
James Baxter
Nico Marlet
Richard Smith
Steven Belledin
Gabriele Pennacchioli
Lisa Mistiuk 1, 2
Marcos Shih
James Schneider
Anthony Rivero
Audrey Holland
Kevan Shorey
Xiau-Fong Wee
Julie Zarate 1, 2
Randy Gallegos
Nancy Coviello
Glenn Arthur
Soutchay Soungpradith
Kim Gilbert
Vanessa Zuloaga
Chuck Lukacs
Steve Javiel
Daniel Dociu
Ben Jelter
ScarletGothica
Lindsey Messecar
Leif Jeffers
Matthew Buck

Thanks!!

Fantasy Flight Games just announced my new cover “The Winds of Magic” for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, © Games Workshop. They made a lot of changes to my illustration, so this is not the version you will see in print. I tried doing something different with this illustration by adding a little bit of blur to suggest movement. I’m not sure if I pulled it off, but it was fun to try.

Howdy doods and doodettes. I am working on a new tutorial in my spare time (lol) and I wanted to take a page from Cryptcrawler’s (Brad Rigney) tutorial and open it up to questions from the public. I have done several tutorials now and I feel like I keep repeating the same things. There are a lot of things that I take for granted since I have been working for a long time, so sometimes I need to be reminded to talk about them. Since this is an illustration and not just a vignette, like the female hunter, I plan to talk about composition and eye flow. If you have any other questions you would like to ask please let me know. I have no idea when I will be able to finish the tutorial, but hopefully it won’t take too long. Lately I have been messing around with audio filters, so the audio for this tutorial should be better than the female hunter tutorial.

Oh yeah, just in case I wasn’t clear, the tutorial is of this image.

I have noticed that the topic of wrist/arm pain has become quite a hot topic amongst artists and illustrators alike over the past several weeks. As many of you already know, I was diagnosed with Carpal Tunnel in both my wrists and Ulnar Neuropathy (Cubital Tunnel) in my left arm. The past 3-4 weeks have been especially hard on me in terms of getting work done because of the pain. Maybe if I recount my story I can persuade people to be more careful with their work habits and take breaks more often. I was (and still am) notoriously bad about remembering to take breaks. Sometimes I would put in 18 hour stretches with only the occasional break to eat or use the restroom. I always had people tell me to take breaks, but once I start working I tend to keep my head down and work continuously. One of my problems is that if I encounter something that I can’t solve or can’t figure out, I will keep working on it until I do. It is extremely difficult to pry me away from something that is bothering me. So long story short, after working professionally for 6 years on the computer I developed problems in my wrists and arm. The funny thing is, I am right handed, yet I have Cubital Tunnel in my left arm.

About 2 years ago my wrists and arm started really bothering me at work. Me being me, I just shrugged it off and worked anyway. People kept telling me to go to the doctor, but I did the typical guy thing and said nah. I figured the only thing they would do is tell me that I have to cut back on my hours…which I can’t do because I have bills to pay. Now if someone wants to give me a huge raise to work less hours, I am all for it. Other people live in the real world and have to work their ass off in order to make a living. Sooooo, yeah, I just kept working through the pain. As the years passed, my art improved and I started getting more and more work…which didn’t help my situation at all. Then I started getting really crazy deadlines, which again didn’t help. I finally got to the point where I couldn’t take it anymore, so I made an appointment with a neurologist. For some reason my neurologist was backed up with appointments for another 2 months, so I had to wait. I finally go to the appointment and she says that I probably have carpal tunnel in both wrists and cubital tunnel in my left arm. She then schedules me for an EMG test the following day. I don’t know if you have ever had an EMG test, but they suck. You know when you shock someone after rubbing your feet on the carpet? Now imagine that feeling multiplied by 100 that lasts for almost 40 minutes straight. Oh, and the shocks are on your nerves, which causes your arm to jump and spasm every single time you are shocked. Now that is the easy part. After that they stick needles into your arms and hands, and I don’t mean they just put it in and take it out. They put it in, leave it there, and then continue to move and shove the needle around inside your muscles. The ones they put in the palm of our hands are just lovely. Oh, and they also put a needle into my neck and moved it around…that one was fun too. This goes on for probably 20 minutes…and they had to do this on both my arms. They will also ask you to flex your muscles while the needle is still inside. After the EMG test my hands and arms spasmed constantly for several hours straight. It also felt like I just worked out for 5 hours straight. Needless to say, I wasn’t able to work for the rest of the day. Oh, I also might have Fibromyalgia, so that might have exacerbated my pain. I also have never experienced any painful procedures or events in my life before (never had my face punched in, never broken a bone, never had cavities, never had major surgery, etc.), so this was the most pain I have ever felt in my life.

So what am I doing about it now? Well, I’ve been wearing these wrist braces on both wrists while I work…which can be extremely frustrating. The braces have palmar stays, which means I can’t bend my wrist. It also means they are pretty bulky and it is tough holding the stylus and pressing keys on my nostromo. My work speed has decreased significantly since I started wearing them. I am also supposed to avoid bending my arms while I sleep, easier said than done. I have had many people tell me to stop bending my arms while I sleep…but I can’t exactly remember to do that when I am asleep now can I? I tried putting pillows on both of my sides to try and prevent me from rolling on to my side –> fail. I wrapped bath towels around both of my arms to prevent me from bending them (I looked like Megatron) –> fail. I wore my wrist braces while sleeping –> fail.

I also started using one of those stress balls to try and increase my grip/wrist strength. I keep one with me at work and one at home. Squish squish. My good friend Tom Scholes also told me about a nifty little program called Workrave. Workrave is a free program for PCs that reminds you to take breaks. You can set the timer and specify how long the breaks are. I have mine set to remind me to take 30 second breaks every 15 minutes and 3 minute breaks every hour. Workrave also shows you some stretches you can do while you are taking your break.  Now I need to find a good one for my Mac. There is one called Workpace, but it is $70.

Ahhh, medication time. After my diagnosis, my neurologist put me on Cymbalta to treat my nerve pain (even though Cymbalta is used to treat depression). Let me tell you, Cymbalta sucks, or at least it did for me. Let me preface this rant by saying that I was only on Cymbalta for a week and a half, which means I probably wasn’t on it long enough to receive any of the benefits because it didn’t help my nerve pain at all. Instead I was beat down by numerous side effects.

Side effect number 1 - Nausea. Nausea is supposed to be the most common side effect of Cymbalta, weighing in at 30%. From the time I woke up in the morning until the time I went to bed at night I felt like tossing my cookies. You don’t realize how debilitating nausea can be until you experience it for 12 hours straight, 7 days a week. Sitting down seemed to help some. I also tried taking the medication at night so that most of my symptoms would occur while I was asleep, nope…didn’t help.

Side effect number 2 – Drowsiness. Drowsiness is the second most common side effect at 21%. When I say drowsiness I don’t mean I felt a little sleepy, I mean by 3-4pm I was falling asleep and by 7-8pm I was completely passed out (many times I passed out on the floor). I was so out of it that I would wake up and not know where I was or how I got there, which I don’t remember happening. Imagine getting home from work at 6pm and by 7pm you were out for the rest of the night. I wasn’t able to work on any of my freelance work…unacceptable in my book. Oh, did I mention that most of the side effects of Cymbalta have opposite reactions? You could experience weight loss or weight gain, constipation or diarrhea, chills or sweating, extreme elation or thoughts of suicide, drowsiness or insomnia. Why oh why couldn’t I have had insomnia instead of drowsiness? Curse you Cymbalta!

Side effect number 3 – Dizziness. Yup, I had trouble walking from time to time.

Side effect number 4 – Yawning. Considering I was sleepy all day long, yes I yawned…a lot.

Side effect number 5 – Headaches. Yup, I had headaches. I seem to experience headaches a lot anyway, so I dunno if it was from the medicine or from something else.

Side effect number 6 – Sweating. I would start sweating even when it was cold or when I wasn’t even moving around.

Side effect number 7 – Weakness/fatigue. I felt like a walking zombie all day long but without the insatiable need to eat brains.

Add all of these side effects together and you get crap. I could’t wait around to see if my body would adjust to the side effects, it was completely destroying my ability to work. I contacted my neurologist to see if there was something else I could take ,like Gabapentin, or if there was something that I could take for the side effects, like Provigil. She said that Gabapentin is very good, but it will also make me sleepy. She also said putting me on Provigil was a bad idea, but didn’t explain why. Instead she suggested a new medication called Savella. Savella is used to treat Fibromyalgia and guess what, it has almost identical side effects as Cymbalta with the exception of drowsiness. I started out with a very low dose, 12.5mg. I am now up to 25mg. So far I haven’t noticed any adverse side effects, but I also haven’t noticed any improvement in my nerve pain.

If you have a full-time job and you develop carpal tunnel while on the job, be sure to file for workers comp. I filed for it a few weeks ago and they sent out an ergonomics expert to evaluate my workspace. Since many of you are freelancers and might not have the luxury of having an ergonomics expert pay you a personal visit, I figured I would share his input. He started out by taking my history and then measured various aspects of my workspace (chair height, monitor height, table height, etc.). The first change he made was on my chair. He moved the seat of my chair forward so that there were only 2 finger widths, instead of 4, between the back of my knees and the front of the seat. This change was to add more support and decrease the amount of pressure being put on the back of my legs. To the left you can see the awesome drawing I did of my workspace and the changes he made. My many years of art school training allowed me to create that awesome drawing. The first drawing is of my original workspace. I have one of those angled desks where my computer is in the little nook. Directly in front of me is my tablet with the keyboard in front of that. The mouse is next to the keyboard on the right and my Nostromo is to the left of the keyboard. In front of those are my three monitors. The arrows depict the angle of my arms when I am working. Since my tablet is in front of me, my arm is bent at an angle (maybe around 45 degrees). My Nostromo is pushed back pretty far, so in order to use it I have to extend my arm quite a bit. I also have to extend both my arms in order to type. These are all big no-nos. Extending my arms like that for significant periods of time puts stress on my ulnar and median nerve. In order to alleviate the stress, the PT pulled the Nostromo a lot closer to my body so that my arm is bent instead of extended. He also raised the arm of my chair so that my elbow rests comfortably while using the Nostromo (before my elbow wasn’t resting on anything). He then moved my tablet to the right so that my arm was resting straight out instead of at an angle. I then moved my monitors to their maximum height so that I wouldn’t have to look down (to avoid stress on my neck). Next he took a look at my stylus and suggested I use one of those squishy pencil grip things that were popular back in middle school. I think that is the technical term for it, squishy grip thing. Although I am not sure how that will work since I won’t be able to use the trigger on the stylus. He also suggested that I drink a lot of water during the day and he stressed that exercise is very important, cardio in particular. I know I know, I never exercise anymore, but the last thing I want to do after working 80-100 hours in a week is workout. I dunno, maybe I will start skating again.

Anyway, I hope this wall of text helped inform some of you of the severity of carptal/cubital tunnel. I know when I was younger I didn’t really care about it because I had that teenager mentality that nothing bad could happen to me. All you have to do is take breaks every so often and stretch/exercise. It may seem like a lot for your busy schedule, but it is worth it. You definitely do not want to end up in my position. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know. Thanks!

Yay, my first spoiled card from Rise of the Eldrazi. I am sure most people are aware of this, but usually my “new” cards aren’t new at all. This illustration was completed 7 months ago. I think that is probably the typical turnaround time for the release of an illustration (for MTG anyway). Being able to publicly show my “new” art has always been a love/hate relationship. On one hand I get to finally show my work, but on the other hand the work is so old that I always end up not liking it anymore (not that I particularly liked it in the first place). I always find so many problems that I wish I could have fixed or I wish that I could have spent a little more time on the illustration. The lighting is blah, his anatomy is messed up (his arms are kinda whacky), composition errors (his hands are cut off at the wrists), there isn’t enough refinement in his costume design, the flags are ridiculously loose, there isn’t enough value/color change in the creatures…bah.

During my interview with Dave Rapoza people were asking about my Nostromo, so I figured I would post a little tutorial on how I configured mine. I actually cheated a little bit. The picture with the nostromo layout is actually what the control panel looks like on a PC. The control panel on a Mac is very plain and not very fun to look at. As you can see, it is a little hard to talk about how I assigned the buttons without actually showing you what it looks like. The way my hands rests on the Nostromo I have my little finger resting on the button that is assigned to the space bar (the move tool in Photoshop), my ring finger is on undo, middle finger on redo, and index finger on option (alt on PCs which is the eyedropper tool), and my thumb is on the d-pad, which increases/decreases my brush size.

With this layout I can do almost everything without having to move my hand at all. If I need to change to the eraser or brush I can just move my index finger down to the next row of buttons. If I move my little finger down it will save my file. Moving my index finger straight down to the last row flips my image horizontally. It takes a little while to get used to the layout if you have never used a Nostromo before, but I think it is definitely worth it, especially since I don’t really like the layout of the Intuos 4 buttons. I hope that helps!

Tonight the almighty Dave Rapoza will interview me on his Livestream. Will there be coconut oil involved? I guess you just have to attend to find out. Please come and join in on the fun and ask any questions that have been burning a hole in your brainpan. The interview starts at 6:00pm EST tonight, March 16th, 2010.

Congrats to Lane Brown, the winner of the Intuos 3! I would just like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their support.

I will be signing cards and selling prints/proofs at the Magic: The Gathering Grand Prix in Chantilly, VA. I hope to have a limited edition art book available for the show as well. I still need to finish 7-8 new illustrations for the book and find a publisher. I am planning on self publishing, but there are so many out there so it is still hard to decide which one to use. Along with the luster prints I will also have these 18×24 canvas prints available for $125 each:

Bloodghast
Bloodhusk Ritualist
Trapmaker’s Snare
Pawn of Ulamog
Sarkhan Vol
Form of the Dragon
Desecrated Earth
Bog Tatters
Ethersworn Shieldmage
Demonic Tutor
Mind-Singe Ogre
Dread Warlock
Drudge Skeletons
Fetid Heath
Korlash
Suicidal Charge

Matt Stewart, another amazing artist, will be signing cards as well. I have been a big fan of his work for a long time now and it will be great to finally meet him in person. Not to mention he made an awesome contribution to the Beautiful Grim fundraiser .

Dan Scott has just been added as another artist, I can’t get away from this guy!

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…)