Rat Creature's Journal

January
a dragon (original fantasy art)
February
Iskierka's hatching (Temeraire fanart)
illustration for Beth's In From the Cold (Snape/Shacklebolt, HP fanart)
a Sarah Connor ratcreature icon
March
illustration for Trinityofone's Dæmonology (SGA/His Dark Materials fanart)
April
Junkie!Roy (DCU fanart)
May
Sheppard & Steampunk!Puddlejumper (SGA fanart, done for the paintedspires fest)
Bowtruckle (HP fanart)
Teyla as Waterbender (SGA/Avatar: The Last Airbender fanart, done for the paintedspires fest)
June
Nothing. :(
July
Nothing. :(
August
Nothing. :(
September
a tentacle rape and a steampunk ratcreature icon
various drawbles based on prompts, some fannish, some not
October
a Linus ratcreature icon
November
John Sheppard Halloween '75 (SGA fanart, done for the paintedspires Halloween challenge)
Matthew sketch (DCU fanart)
Red Cap (HP fanart)
some doodles (an US election themed doodle, a werewolf, a dinosaur with a raygun, a baby cthulhu, a monster, a vengeful teddy bear)
a Minbari ratcreature icon and a nitpicking ratcreature icon
December
some sketches based on prompts (Travolta!furry, steampunk!Batmobile, dragons, Sheppard, 'cheese eats mouse')
Merlin and Arthur ratcreature icons
Christmas doodle (SGA/Merlin/Numb3rs fanart)
and finally the not yet revealed Yuletart art.

There was a sad lack of any art production for several months in summer, however overall I posted more fanart than in 2007, especially when just counting the fully fledged art. Also I started using acrylic paint to color, and found it much easier (and more error tolerant) than my sad attempts to use watercolors ages ago. And while messy and somewhat time intensive, I think my attempts with that look better than my digital coloring.

I tried doing this meme where you list your favorite work, your most surprising work and so on, but I couldn't come up with any answers for half the things, so I gave up.

Though I don't draw professionally or even all that often, I still have a habit of collecting interesting visual things for reference or inspiration. Even with libraries and these days internet image searches it is not easy to find the exact kind of interesting picture you need when you need it, or sometimes you don't even know what exactly it would be you need to realize some vague idea. Or at least it is like that for me, so if I come across something that is visually stunning, unusual, interesting, seems like a good inspiration, or a possible reference for something I might draw some day I keep it.

Like, if I'm at a used book store, I habitually look if there's a bin of old cheap National Geographic or other travel magazines and leaf through them to see whether any have cool photographs, if I see an interesting picture on the internet I will safe it, and so on.

Obviously after a time this results in an organizational problem if you ever want to find anything again. So I'm wondering how others deal with this.

It's not so bad with the books, I just have a shelf with books I got for their pictures, like for example collections of photographs from the 1920s, 30s and so on, books of animals, places, people, cars, design... It's harder for the magazines because things like National Geographic aren't topic specific, so I never know whether I decided to keep some issue for pictures of some place or some animal, or even whether it was in the title article. Which makes finding things again a bit harder.

Digital stuff is the least problematic in some respects, because I have created a bunch of folders labeled by topic for photos (reference for buildings & cityscapes, landscapes, actions, clothing, animals, plants, objects, symbols, textures,... with some having subfolders) and some other folders for art by other people, and yet another set of folders for fandom character reference, so it's not hard to find which folders to browse. The main problem is that I don't always know where I got some image from, because it's so much easier to just save a picture than to save it and add something to its meta-info field. That isn't a big problem if I just use it as inspiration or reference some parts of it, but if say a landscape photo was to serve as main reference for a drawn background I might want to acknowledge that, yet often by the time I use something I have no idea where it came from anymore.

Photos I've taken myself before having a digital camera are more of a mess, because those are mostly in big boxes, and most are kind of boring holiday photos with some cool landscapes and animals scattered inbetween. But the worst are the boxes of, well I guess "junk" fits, i.e. stuff I've kept for because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Much of that is also paper, like exhibition catalogs, flyers that looked interesting, clippings from newspapers or magazines, posters, but there's also stuff like feathers with a nice pattern, stones, tins, even some bit of metal that rusted in an interesting way, and so on. I mean, I try to keep the non-paper junk down to one box or so, because I really don't need to go down the road of people who end up smothered by their packrat piles collapsing on them, but well, I'm not a very tidy person to begin with, so it's an uphill battle. I guess what I really need would be del.icio.us tagging for RL objects and/or a physical search engine, but I fear that level of virtual home and computer merging is still a way off into the future.

So, how do you deal with organizing your reference and inspirational collection so that is actually useful for you rather than a pile of messy clutter? Do you have some kind of system? Or just really good spatial memory?

I'm at home rather than at a party, mostly because I'm not much of a party person but it also has the advantage that I can soothe my rats through their first New Year's Eve explosions experience. So far they seem thoroughly unconcerned with all the loud noises and flashes outside, but then they usually are pretty good about distinguishing sounds outside that don't bother them and ones coming from the inside, that may pose a threat. Actually I'm wincing far more often than they at some of the sudden really loud fireworks.

So I thought I'd occupy myself with listing the stuff I drew this past year. Overall I have posted even less art in 2007 than in 2006, especially full fledged artwork. However I managed to draw a bunch of drawbles and such on request, and also did some drawing exercises, though the latter not as regularly as I intended to. I guess my New Year's resolution will be to restart posting exercise suggestions to slothsdraw, and to actually do them regularly myself this time around, rather than just one or two in a haphazard fashion.

Anyway, here's a chronological list of all things I've drawn this year:

( list of all fanart, drawbles, icon creature doodles, and exercises I drew and posted this year )

So in conclusion, if I extend "drawing" to include all doodles, icon sketches and drawing exercises, no matter how quick or lame, I have drawn and posted something almost every month. If I only count "proper" artwork, my output was far less, but at least I tried a couple of new things, especially digitally, and I made an attempt to practice more regularly, even if my slackerdom caught up with me again quickly.

Since I am now crossposting on three sites, and have already backed my old entries up to GJ and intend to do the same to IJ eventually, it is a real hassle to update the SGA thematic list I maintain (the one listing stories with alien Pegasus cultures and new non-human aliens) directly as journal post, so the thematic list itself is now on a separate webpage. It's very bare bones, because it was annoying enough already to reformat it and to convert all the lj-shortcuts. I didn't even bother to replace them with "proper" author names if the pseuds differ, because there's well over a hundred stories on that list by now. But it should be serviceable enough, and I'll have to add stories in one place only instead of two or eventually three. Of course the original LJ entry is still there and now links to the webpage, so if you have for some reason linked my thematic list, your link won't be broken, though people have to follow an extra click.

On a slightly more fun note, I've posted another, slightly belated monster for amarin_rose, who asked for a "Purple People Eater":
( beware of the monster lurking behind this cut )

I try to tag every fanfic I read on del.icio.us so that I can find it again. Now I'm reading some post-DH stuff and naturally my regular tagging (which includes names for all characters in a story for example) as well as the summary blurbs (which I've tried to be better about including in my links), would contain spoilers for DH. I know some people subscribe to del.icio.us feeds or just browse there, and it's not like I can spoiler cut. I'd really like to keep with my bookmarking and tagging routine, but I wonder whether I'm going to get lynched for having tags with spoilery character names. I could make all my post-DH bookmarks private, and unlock them later, but that negates the point of using a social bookmarking site, and I may forget about the unlocking, because I tag a lot of stuff, and even if I have a post-DH tag to find them all again, there's afaik no mass action for making bookmarks not private, so this course of action is somewhat inconvenient. So how should I handle spoilers on a social bookmarking site? What are you doing about your spoilery bookmarks?

Since I can't post polls here, here's a link to it in my LJ. (or of course you can just comment here)