So 500posts.com yielded it’s first perk - a paid commission for an architectural rendering.

I actually tried to do this in Painter, but man was the response slow. The original size for this painting was 5400×3600 pixels - so it’s understandable. I wonder how Art Rage would perform…
Anyways, after about 3 hours of wrestling with Painter, I switched to Photoshop - and inside of an hour I had the underpinnings of a painting, and finally feeling like “I can do this”.

The look was obviously inspired by those architectural renders you see everywhere - nothing really fancy there. Overall, it took me about 12 or so hours.

I’ve added a new site to the line-up. 500posts.com

I posted earlier on this blog that I went to Vancouver to help my buddy Kev Chu out on a project produced by Heavy Metal Mag, animated by Blur Studios, written by Kevin Eastmen, and directed by David Fincher. It - was - awesome.

Kev and I spent 10 days working, walking the town, drinking coffee, more working, eating crepes, spending waaaay too much money at Book-Off, working and painting some more, and eating like kings. Good times, thanks a ton, Kev.

But while I was out there I felt something I hadn’t for quite some time. Some inspiration. I usually putter along on auto-pilot, monitoring and doing fixes here and there for the various projects we have going on, but I don’t always feel inspired - like - not in the way where I not only have to do something, but I have to PWN it.

I guess it’s just getting competitive again, finding the inspiration in other artists/painter’s works and pushing yourself to play at that level. I have put off learning to paint for sooo long, I thought Kev just about gave up on me.

My hope with 500posts.com is to learn to paint - and after that? Well, there’s no reason why it only has to be a painting site - it could be the realization of pretty much any personal goal of 500 posts.

I’m now off to do the 2nd of the 500 posts!

Scott Hepburn, a good friend of mine from waaaay back in my college days, has a weekly comic he’s been doing with the group over at Transmission-X.com called The Port.

Scott’s a pro, penciling comics for Dark Horse, Marvel, Udon and the like.  The Port shows his versatility with style.  It’s about a group of kids in a small town coming head-on with some really bizarre shit.  Very fun read - check it out.

A good friend of mine, has a looming deadline ahead of him, so I’ll be flying out to Vancouver for 10 days to help out. Should be a total blast.

I’ve got a good face lift for Shop-Anime.com going on - but it wont be up for another 2-3 weeks at least. The goal with the redesign remains the same, more credibility, improved SEO, and improve the discoverability of product while surfing the site.

It looks as tho I’ll be able to hand the bulk of the web development chores of the Panda-Girls.com site to another developer. He returns from Belize at the end of the month and I’ll show him a complete docket of what I got cookin up. The site’s development requirements are a bit over my head, and this guy’s got enterprise level web development experience - so it could be awesome. We still have to come to a business arrangement, but I’m getting desperate, so I’m sure he’ll be on board. (He’s one of the ONLY people who reads this blog… shit.)

(A storyboard panel I did for Panda Girls.)

While in Vancouver I’ll be getting a crash-course on concept/speed painting, so expect some Panda Girls visual development goodness when I get back.

My writing partner on the Panda Girls anime movie now has a blog over at cromunhinged.com

He probably wants me to say something bangin about him, or tell you to visit his blog or some shit. But do you know what I want? How about A FINISHED EFFIN SCREENPLAY!! T_T

But I know what Crom has planned for his blog - and it’s gonna be nothing less than ball-busting hilarity downloadable directly from his brain. (Crom has agreed to stop taking pharmaceutical drug-tests to be a WordPress guinea pig for their exciting new plugin.)

A person after my own post. The post is long, but well worth the read. I wont bore you with me text - go NOW.

Ah… This is the way it should be.

>Striking writers in talks to launch Web start-ups<

Creative people connecting directly with their audience, and taking the lion’s share of their efforts. Imagine, from a business perspective, how much money you would save if you could eliminate all the unnecessary studio execs, board members, conglom structures, etc.

For me, these are exciting times. 2nd Culture is poised quite well with this movement to entertainment online. Money is flowing, and I believe we have the right mix of creative property, and business philosophy to find our own market and fans, and build a viable business model.

Anyone else wondering what Joss Whedon could accomplish online?

If I haven’t mentioned it already, all the 2nd Culture sites are going through a version 2.0 revamp. But one of the elements that has been wildly successful are the DiaBLOGue format we tested out on the Panda Girls site.

The idea is simple. A blog post is usually written from a single point of view or individual. Sometimes interviews can provide a new POV, but those posts are usually labeled as such “Interview with…”, and one is the interviewer, and interviewee - hardly a dialogue on equal ground.

With the DiaBLOGue it’s more that the blog engine now becomes a stage for two opposite POVs to responding in tandem, laced together for a dynamic effect. In our employment, we used comedy as our genre, invented characters, and represented those personalities with comic strip-like visuals.

After creating the template, the posts are fast and effortless - but the snag is trying to make them humorous. We’re not always successful, so when we aren’t, we usually lean on character-revealing.

The response for this format has been very positive, and I think it’s an example of taking something that is quite common today, and just giving it a little twist. I’ve since been thinking of other common tools to twist - nothing quite as successful has come yet.