Tuesday, September 30, 2008

The Final Date

Well after a long fight to get a big city in Japan, trying first for Nagoya and then for Hiroshima, I've finally landed a position in a city called Okayama. I can't find too much information about the city, but I was surprised to find that even though it's not considered a very big city it still has around 650,000 people. It has a castle and one of Japan's three famous gardens, but I'm pretty pumped for the Naked Man festival held there in February. People run around in traditional underwear and then at midnight some priests throw two rods into the audience. Sounds pretty tight to me, those rods are mine. The more I think about it, even though I would still love to live in a huge city, it might be good to live in a little less crazy place at first. I don't know the language and I think that getting used to my surroundings and getting around on my own will be a little easier in a less hectic place. Japan is so small, and Okayama is on a main train line, that I can easily make a day trip almost anywhere so I think things ended up working pretty well. I just went to a figure drawing thing called Dr. Sketchy's in Minneapolis recently so I'll post up the goofy drawings of roller derby girls I did there plus a few other things sometime soon. Oh, and my final departure date is October 10th, it's coming up real fast.

Monday, September 22, 2008

T-Minus TWO

Well I apologize to those who left comments and didn't get any love back from me. I keep forgetting that I even have a blog, but I'll start checking back more often from now on, I didn't even know that you guys knew the URL. So, my visa has finally gotten processed and I'll be heading out in two weeks. It's really strange knowing that I'll be gone so soon, and it was kind of a shock to me when I got the email. Of course I knew I was going to go, but now that the departure date is so soon it feels weird knowing I'm going to be half-way across the world very shortly. Oh well, I'm ready for it. This week is my last week at work and I'm ready to get out of there. It's good practice, but the budget is too low to make anything worth mentioning and I'm sick of compromising quality due to time restraints and terrible budgeting. I've been working on a komodo dragon, doing the modeling, rigging, and now the texturing and a day doesn't go by without my boss making some snide comment about me taking too long and then disappearing into his office. I'm not a texture artist, and to be asked to jump into Zbrush and make a detailed bump and color map for a thing with a bunch of scales and folds of skins in 2 days is just ridiculous. Bah. Anyway, keep checking back and I'm glad to see that I'll be able to keep in touch with everyone. Oh, and I'm going to start uploading drawings I've been doing. Right now my scanner sucks but once I get to Japan I'm going to buy one and get down to business. Here's two I have scanned right now. Gotta love them prismas.