DXS Machina

Getting ready to take off for San Diego Comic con. This year I’ll have a booth to work behind, so I’ll be easy to find helping out my friends at booth #1633. So far things have been pretty relaxed so I’m hoping the con goes well and isn’t too crazy… or at least is only crazy in a good way. =]

I’m a little bit crippled for art work as I had to turn in my tablet laptop to get worked on before I flew out to California. My poor Toshiba laptop had started to crack on the plastic around the screen. So I’m using my economic stimulous check to get the part replaced. If it’s not the plastic at fault my warranty may cover it but I’ll have to see how that pans out when I get back home. =/

Hope springs eternal. Right now I’m working on Mom’s 5 year old sony vaio laptop. Strangely it reboots like crazy with a blue screen of death of I connect it to the internet at home… but works perfectly fine out here… I have no idea why but I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Yay convention of doom!

Tags: Art by Diana Sprinkle
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Whew! I managed to cancel the hotel room I didn’t need. So, I’m all ready for San Diego Comic Con this year. More info in a little bit. After I get some real sleep.

Tags: Art by Diana Sprinkle
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Looks like the reshuffling of Tokyopop is starting and it appears that the reality of book cancelings and online versions is happening for many of the people I know/follow online. I keep poking around and looking at these goings on with interest. I had expected something like this and yet never ever expect it to actually happen. I’m use to the comic company that just lingers on and on and on slowly withering but gripping to life with brittle crusted fingers never gracefully exiting the stage until the final moments… sometimes becoming a zombie and lurching back to life type thing. This sudden shifting fast paced Tokyopop news relay has me a bit taken aback. Then again TP use to be Mixxzine until suddenly it wasn’t so I don’t know why I’m so surprised.

Before all this stuff started happening, I made some random “King City” fanart. “King City” is an awesome comic put out by Brandon Graham through Tokyopop. This was drawn last week. I don’t know why I doodled it or what the Owl is doing in that top hat or the tiny whale… but there it is. Originally I had the guy, Joe, holding the cat in an impossible way but then I punched me in the face and told myself to fix it, so now he might actually be holding that cat.

Tags: Art, Comic, Fan Art, Original Art, Sketches by Diana Sprinkle
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So, I wrote this huge huge rant and then I scrapped it. It was fun. =/ I do that all the time. It must be strange to talk to me at cons and get an earful of “shit, fuck, Diana has opinions!” No wonder I like making My Muse, it let me express myself a little better.

Well, sod that, you’re getting my second best version of this rant… a shorter harsher version, oddly relevant to the content.

Okay, Tokyopop got in hot water for their recent chatty poorly phrased contract and I don’t care about that because it’s been talked about all over. My rant is for a phrase that pops up just about any time bad contracts are discussed.

“Well, I don’t plan to give them my best idea anyway.”
“I’ll just give them something I don’t care about.”
“Ect ect ect.”

Don’t YOU just love it when people tell you they want you to pay out good cash for their “Second best idea that they don’t give two shits about”? Dude, I’m right there! Shovel that pile of crap right in my mouth. Oh wait, let me pay you for it before you start.

How about NO. You will receive my second best for your soulless abortion of a book… in that it will remain sad and unloved and unbought. I will also think some bad things about your mother and generally wish you ill will for the few seconds your book impacts my life. Maybe I’ll rant about it to my friends and they will roll their ideas and tell me to get a life.

Still, I do love collecting horrible comics now and then. Maybe I’ll pick it up at Half Price Books when it hits a dollar… or maybe I’ll wait for it to bottom out at a quarter. Or maybe I won’t buy it even second hand. So, good luck Mr. I’mnotgoingtotryveryhardbutIwantacareer. Someone will love your book but it’s not going to be me.

See, everyone talks about how good this is for the artist and the company! Yay, books. Yay, money Yay career built on sub par brain poop. But please, consider the audience, we’re the ones who truly suffer from your soulsavingcostcutting idea. Maybe those kids that sit in the book stores reading manga and never buying it don’t JUST want to freeload, maybe they’re also saying “Hey! Stop shitting in my mouth!” and no one’s listening. I find it’s really hard to voice your totally dislike of something by deciding NOT to spend your money on it.

At least lie to me if you plan to do this… here I’ll do it for you. “Ohhh, I want to work for “shittycompanyX” but I’ll need to make something SPECIAL just for them. Oh, I’ve got to think of something.” Beams!!! Look at that, doesn’t that sound better?

Yay, there’s my rant… feel free to heap scorn on me.

Tags: Art, News, Rambling, Sketches by Diana Sprinkle
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Whew, so A-kon was last weekend and I’m happy to say that I managed to make money this year.

YAY! Things have been a little rocky for me and the anime crowd over the years the more I’ve been moving away from anything reassembling fanart and the like. Also I don’t update my site enough, I’m not working to put out my comic, no one really remembers the stuff that I did do… and on and on. This includes not drawing similar enough things to gain a fanatical following that will obey my every whim, send to me mad cash, and stalk me at conventions. Lacking all of that I take my victories where I can get them. =D

As it is, I have a small and happy fan following that likes to see me at conventions and a few fans that are happily surprised to find that the people who worked on Saiko and Lavender do in fact exist. YAY!

We managed to avoid the huge crowd of people at the con hotel by staying at a different but still close by hotel that kicked ass and had good elevators not filled with anime fans 24-7. Alas, because of this I missed out on some of my people watching but I’d gladly trade that for ease of getting to the room and relaxing after a long day spent standing and talking to people. We roomed with nice cool peeps that made the whole crazy A-kon is “OMG expensive” to go to, nice and cheap. Yay, pockets money.

I think if I just spent some time working hard on my own odd ball art bits, pumping a lot more of it out, I’d do better without what little fanart I do have. Right now I’m trying my hand at painting a picture of my Hypno-kitty due to having bits of extra cash for once. Waves hands in the air. I did forgot for some reason that paint actually takes time to dry. Thus I have time to type this entry out in between coats of paint. =/

It’s taking forever. Fiddles with it.

I leave you with a link to Wacom, where their giant 21 inch monitor that you can draw on the screen tablet of doom is now 500.00 cheaper then normal. I’m not allowed to get it though cause I bought a new computer this year and shouldn’t spend another 2000 dollars unless I start raking in the dough… not holding my breath on that so hopefully this price break will last a year or two. =D

Tags: Art by Diana Sprinkle
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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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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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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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So, I’m definitely going to A-kon this year. Which will be interesting. I plan to take many photos of people in strange outfits… I’m not even talking costumes I just like it when they dress up for the cons. Sometimes it’s unintentionally hilarious. I take photos of lots of people in awkward fitting clothing, mostly pants cause the pants people are selling to chicks now-a-days are terrible to the feminine shape and make us mostly look weird and terrible. I need to draw some from all those photos I took at last year’s A-kon, I really want to get down the horrible shape of the muffin-top because my brain refuses to let me draw it due to the fact that it doesn’t think it looks right at all. So photos have to be taken cause the muffin-top can make even thin anorexic girls look lumpy and fat. It’s not right. =/

I’ll be in the Komik Market at A-kon on May 30th through June 1st. I’ll be at the Bassanimation table though I think it’ll be under a different name since we’re sharing the table with… Steven the guy that ran the Komik Market for the last few years. So I’m not sure what name it’ll be under. I figure I’ll mostly be hanging out at the con and helping Shawnna sell buttons. Hopefully there’ll be room behind the table but that’d be okay… that way I might roam the con a bit and see if I can find some of the people I want to see. It’d be nice to actually see people for once.

Speaking of seeing people at A-kon two years ago I got to see the lovely Shirotsuki and we traded sketches. This was the image I drew for her of her tree guy, Cure. She’s suppose to be at A-kon again this year and hopefully unlike last year where I didn’t see her at all maybe I can get out and bother her. =]

Other Conventions I’m going to be at this year:

A-kon in Dallas… May 30th - June 1st
Anthro-con in Pittsburgh… June 26-29
Comic Con in San Diego… July 24-27

That’s all of them that I can think of.

Tags: Art, News, Original Art, People by Diana Sprinkle
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