DXS Machina

It’s been one of those weeks. I’m covered in work like stinging ants and I’m also trying to get prepared for A-kon in Dallas this weekend. I plan to have a good time this year or there will be blood. Thankfully I’ve stocked up on low expectations and artists that I really want to give money to and maybe hang out with. Along with selling lots of Shawnna’s buttons (gleeee!), low hotel cost, and generally great friends… I’m hoping it will lack the loud music, porn stealing kids, and hotel elevator time sinks that the last few cons have had. Dear convention gods, stop letting other conventions set up tables in artist alley and do nothing but look bored and play music super loud, thank you.

I’m sharing a table in the Komik Market with my friend Shawnna, under Bassanimation. We’re in Section E, table 11… supposing that something doesn’t happen and we don’t get shuffled around in a musical chair type way. Crosses fingers. I’ll have my print book (with new prints even), some badges… or bookmarks (depending on how my laminator decides to function), and a crap load of buttons. Shawnna will have her giant spread of awesomely cute anime button heads… but my small offerings are mostly adorned with cute cats and food p0rn… @_@ I’ll post some after the con.

The food P0rn is not really as bad as it sounds. Really. Swing by and take a look… some of the kitty images are new due to the fact that I keep finding kitties on my hard drives that I finished and then forgot to post anywhere. This image of kitties I made for Valentine’s day is a good example… hell, I even went and made a web preview of the image and then wandered away. Distracted by, I don’t know, a piece of string maybe. Possible an internet argument.

I should post that cute cat comic I made, oh, those many years ago… only this time I should un-crowd the ending a bit. I was trying to cram it into 4 pages and I think it needed a bit more space. Or maybe better pacing. =/

I’m still working on my website store/gallery. It’s shaping up well I just need a little sliver of time to really kick myself into gear. I just didn’t realize how much art I had generated over the years that needs to be moved over in a logical way. Right now I’m not sure how logical a “people” section that’s 98 images big is… when all the other sections are under 20 images. Meh, I’ll figure it out.

I made a rough for an actual painting, which is odd for me. Normally I don’t bother with natural media but this image… it seems to want to be large and painted. It looks rather good even at it’s strange “I’m a scribble in photoshop with lots of cloned and resized bits and bobs” stage that it’s in right now. But it doesn’t want me to refine it, it seems to want to be rough in a way that requires some paint. It’s a companion to the website banner with the sleeping kitty. You can see part of the rough at the bottom of my website design with the yellow fish and the blue kitty. Now if I can just find the time.

In parting, I leave you with a link to Polyvore a site that I think I will be using to figure out outfits for future characters. If I had the time, I’d fiddle all day on this site making outfits and jumping from collection to collection.

Tags: Animals, Art, News, Original Art, Rambling by Diana Sprinkle
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So, I finally finished my new site design! Yay, for kitties and um fish and other things. I need to start spending some time making another new designs for my site right now so that when I go to update the thing it doesn’t take forever and a day like it did this time. I’m still working on getting all the design elements on the wordpresses side working with the real version of the site.

There is a store but it’s going to take me a little bit to get it up and running. I have to go through all the posts and remove the art currently on them and shift it all over to the new Gallery/Store system I’ve got waiting in the wings. Hopefully this weekend I’ll get to work on that. YAY!

And the best for last, now you can leave comments on my posts! That people can see and things! Yay, so far I’ve approved over half of the 700 real comments I’ve accumulated over the 3 years I’ve had wordpress. But there are some that I’m not sure what I’m going to do with… mostly the one’s where people ask for porn or suggest that I should draw it very loudly with descriptors… ew. Also I have a small set of comments asking to buy things that may not end up on the site as I contacted those peeps through email or forgot and just feel ashamed of myself… And a small set of comments where my friends and others left contact info in the comment. Don’t worry I won’t display your phone number. Right now the comments are still set to be moderated but that should be eased up on over time as I get use to having comments on the page.

Tags: News, Rambling by Diana Sprinkle
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I spent forever on this thing. Most of the work was done in Painter then I switched to Photoshop for the color correction. Painter is doing it’s best to remind me that I suck at picking attractive colors that don’t suck balls when blended. Also brown. Also stop starting sentences with also. Shit.

It’s sad that my favorite part of the image is the background that I made up in Painter that was never a part of the original sketch at all. =E Heh heh. Well that’s one of these narwhal images colored and out of the way. I have 7 more. =_= Obsessed.

Tags: Art, Furry, Original Art by Diana Sprinkle
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My new design for this site is going slowly but it’s shaping up. However next time I’m going to choose a wordpress theme to use that’s a little bit closer to the colors I plan to use. Check this out:

Before

After

I’m still tweaking bits of stray code on it so I figure it’ll be another week or two. That’s not taking into account having to go through all my posts to turn the comments off and then back on again, removing the art so I can post it in the new gallery-store section and other fun stuff. This is never going to end…

Tags: Rambling by Diana Sprinkle
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Sigh, I’m gearing up to update my website and it’s going to be hell on Earth, I know it. I have a reasonable rough for the design of the site. Strangely I’m going to go back to a design similar to the one right before this one. Though with more color and art made for the design and a wordpress framework, so that I can update the thing easily.

I’m planing to pre-build a few different designs so that I won’t be sitting on the same look for two or three years. The main page will have my journal on it but it’ll only have image links or thumbnails. All of the images will be moved to a gallery system that I fear I’m going to break wordpress in half to make. Crosses fingers. On the other hand, I’m also going to add shopping cart buttons to all of the images that aren’t sketches so that I can maybe start selling prints of all this stuff I’ve made. Also having all the art and comics in the Gallery/store area will, I pray, make the site look more professional. As the images will no longer accompany posts with battering on, much like this one. =/

I’m also going to be removing some of the features that I thought I wanted when I started using Wordpress. The main one I’m tossing out is the calender… and the sidebar and the category links (well not completely they just won’t be formated the same way) and maybe some of the ads. Considering just how many posts I have on this beast of a site, the joy of fixing everything, is not something I’m looking forward to. Also I’m probably going to turn on comments and display them which means I have to hide a bunch of the comments that I already have and or edit some of the ones with personal info, or the ones that ask me for porn… or curse me out in Spanish. =D

But here’s some of the art that I’m working up for the site design.

“People think that cats dream of running hard and fast just to feel the ground move under their feet. But Snowy dreamed of waves and ripples and swimming in the sea with goldfish, gliding gracefully with the current. The fish made it all sound so amazing, he didn’t know why his human kept throwing things at him when he tried to go swimming.”

Or there’s always the alternate write up for this image of: “Diana likes cats! White is easy to color! I R good arter!” O_o

Tags: Animals, Art, News, Original Art, Rambling by Diana Sprinkle
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The Little Narwhal

The original unicorn! Ah whales… how can you make them hot? I know, draw them as youthful dudes wearing sea weed. Though I’m freaked out to find out on google that narwhals DO NOT have a horn and in fact it is actually a long tooth. The way I’ve drawn it here it’d have to go through his brain. =D

Bonus: HA HA HA HA HA I made it more like a tooth!!! Poor Narwhal dude.

Tags: Art, Original Art, People, Sketches by Diana Sprinkle
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Pushing that other post off the top of the page. So last week I battled a losing battle against spam bots… In the end I banned a large set of ip addresses from Turkey… sorry Turkey. I figure some of you guys will be happy that the spam robot using some part of my site to send email is no longer able to send stuff. Or something. I don’t know I’m still poking around my site trying to figure out how to really block the bot and find and close up however they are getting in… yet I still don’t know what’s really going on. =/

Also somehow someone had come in and inserted hidden spam in the header of my wordpress theme. Somehow. Which blows my mind. I have no idea how long it had been there either. Maybe half a year. I was using an older version of Wordpress for a long time. Thankfully no one coming to my site got spammed by it since it was invisible but poor Google sure saw it. (Edit and I think Google was punishing me for it as well… LOL my hits from Google were all but choked off for the last month or so and now that I’ve taken off the stupid spam they have resurged close to where they were before. So, thankfully that means I’ve probably only had the spam headers from maybe the beginning of April when I had the huge spike for April fools.)

I really want to change the design of my site. The hard part is that I have so many needs. I want a journal but I also want a more simple gallery structure but I also would like to put my comics up on here. So that’s like 3 different things… oh and also I want a shop. Damn that’s 4 things. The figuring out how to get all of that stuff to work together is killing this pretty good. I can figure out how to get two of them going maybe 3 if I use a paypal wordpress plugin but the comic bit, that’s the tough part. I think I could do everything with Wordpress and comicpress and a paypal plugin but then I’d have to make a theme that could display it all nicely and find the time to probably repost all of my site so that the comic posts and the picture posts were separate from all of the journal posts. Nargh.

Maybe I should just start over… hmmm.

Tags: News, Rambling by Diana Sprinkle
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Must not post! Must not post! Must not! Shit… okay, so that ill made and poorly thought out Open Source Boob Project? Right that thing, hmm here’s a link that doesn’t make me want to kill everyone: http://www.journalfen.net/community/unfunnybusiness/9338.html

So that thing showed up and the SFF part of my LJ friends list have already carved it up good, and then burn the body, poisoned it, kicked it into a well, plugged the well, dropped a mountain on it… with dynamite, and burned the town next to it and three quarters of the villages nearby.

See though, I’d love to have the ability to put in clear words the feelings I get reading the *responses* to this ill made and poorly thought out project but OMG I run screaming. It’s like the energy, the essence is just the purest wail of high emotions rung like a bell made from the torn rib cage of someone’s back with no skin on it so every sound, voice, and word is a hammer… and I feel that ringing sound from the farthest away that I can get…

I can’t deal, my personal pet peeve is a silence of conversation. I can’t take it. I feel like I’m drowning in an ocean of voices that has been carpet bombed by completely understandable highly personal pain and suffering that chokes out all voices. A piece of death and bile of something rotten in the still black water. Fuck and I’ve gone into hyperbole or however that’s spelled. Note to self, find out how it’s spelled before posting.

But yeah, Complete death. It makes me want to post and yet I know that it’s courting everything I hate because I just don’t have the right words when every word means something it’s not. I can’t say anything cause the sharks have come and any movement is an acceptance of some hurt, a finger that points, that this pain, this horrible pain is deserved even asked for even though that’s never what I feel people in the later comment areas that I have muddled through want to say (I didn’t touch the original post figuring it was dumb and probably more choked and deathly to my particular quirk).

I can’t speak in that sea so I stay as quiet as I can but I want to express just this piece of me without any of those charged words. Here, in my area of the net. I want to point to this poison I want to say in my small voice that I don’t like that the conversation dies. I’ve never liked it. I don’t want to spread the fear or pain but… but… opens hands. I don’t know.

Meh. Sorry about this. I just don’t want to write post after post that I never actually post.

Tags: News, Rambling by Diana Sprinkle
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