jinkies36

Within days of announcing the alphabet challenge I got horribly ill with the flu, then found myself struggling with fatigue for weeks, until I had just about got my energy levels back to normal, then got ill again. Long story short, I've been really struggling with keeping on top of my job and my housework, let alone my pastimes. I've had some help getting my living space back under control and a couple of weeks off work, and I no longer feel like I'm teetering on the brink of chronic fatigue, but I also have a huge backlog of commitments I've been neglecting.

As a result of all this, a weekly art challenge where I give myself yet more commitments no longer feels like a very good idea. I'm going to work through the polls already put up and draw letters B, C and D, but I'm going to do it at my own pace when I feel inspired. I may or may not put up future polls and continue to work through the alphabet, but if I do it'll be a long term project and not an urgent challenge.

Part of my recovery from fatigue has been to look at how I waste what little left over energy I have after work and personal care on tasks that aren't very rewarding but take hours of my time. Unfortunately, I think keeping on top of my deviantART messages is looking like one of my hugest time sinks. As I'm changing the format of Bridging the Rift to be more like an audio zine than a podcast about fan reactions to Doctor Who episodes, I can't even justify the hours and hours I spend building up favourites as podcast research.

I'm not going to stop using deviantART as a way to host and share my art, but I'm afraid I won't be keeping on top of my messages any longer.

I feel bad neglecting you guys, but here's a little xmas gift to soften the blow, a festive episode of Bridging the Rift including me reading a chapter of an Eleventh Doctor fan fiction xmas story! bridgingtherift.wordpress.com/…

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I present Bridging the Rift, a podcast about the Doctor Who Universe fandom, its discussions and creative pursuits. As part of our remit we discuss Doctor Who, Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures fan art, comics, crafts and animation. Please give us a listen! bridgingtherift.wordpress.com

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I moderate Wild-Artists, a club for wildlife & animal art. If you're interested in wildlife and animals, or you're a wildlife artist, please consider joining!


Clubs I'm in or am applying to join:



Journal skin modified from Fella Journalskin v3 by janvanlysebettens

Check out my scraps for older pieces, work in progress and step-by-steps

The Doctor was beating everyone's nominations for Doctor Who Alphabet letter 'D' by such a long way (20 votes more than Drashigs!), I felt he needed a fairer fight! So I've closed the previous poll and set up a head to head battle with no chance of a split vote! you're now voting for whether I draw The Doctor (remember, I choose which one!) and DAVROS! Cast your votes now!

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Bit of a hitch on the Doctor Who Alphabet Challenge; I've been ill for the last four or five days and so I've been barely doing anything except sleeping, let alone working on art. I'm still struggling with feeling tired all the time, so I'm going to make sure I'm sensibly using my energy on getting back to work and getting the housework under control before I dive into more art. This was very bad timing to happen one week into an art challenge but so it goes.

As soon as I'm back on my feet and feeling back to normal, I'll be drawing The Brigadier, which was the popular choice for letter B, and then a Clockwork Droid, which surprisingly beat Crazy Dalek Caan to victory on letter C. The poll for letter D is now open, although currently 'The Doctor' is beating all competition by a lead of 20 votes! If you think you can sway the vote, feel free to vote on this page (the poll's either bottom left of my profile page or to the right on the journal page).

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Hey you guys! I'm back!

Thanks for pushing my profile over 18,000+ page views and for all the faves, comments and watches while I've been gone!

To be honest, deviantART had been becoming a bit overwhelming for me, I always had literally thousands of messages in my deviantWATCH and things never calmed down after the groups system had been going for a while like I'd hoped it would. I felt like every time I had some time for art, I wasted it on trying to keep on top of my deviantWATCH messages. When my premium account expired last month, I didn't feel like renewing...

BUT! I was looking through my old fan art last night, remembering how much fun I had sharing my art with you guys and talking in comments, and I decided that I should give myself a challenge to get back into fan art again. So, I've renewed my membership and starting next week I'm going to be doing a new Doctor Who Alphabet Challenge!

You guys may remember back in August 2008 when I did 26 alphabetical Doctor Who new series full colour fan art pieces (and three or four other things) as part of the National Art Making Month 2008 challenge - gallery here jinkies36.deviantart.com/galle…

Well I'm not thinking of doing one a day again (that was a bit crazy!), but I do want to do at least one letter a week! It'll be Doctor Who monsters, aliens, creatures and characters again, working from A to Z, but this time I don't want to limit myself to just the New Series, in fact I want to slant a bit towards the older eras of the show and the Matt Smith series because I covered the Tennant Series so well already.

I also want to get you guys involved in deciding what I draw for each letter, so I'm going to be taking suggestions in comments and on Twitter and then putting my favourite suggestions in a poll for you guys to vote on. Whichever monster, alien or character gets the most votes, I'll draw next! I'm going to try to draw a good mix of interesting aliens as well as human characters, so I reserve the right to leave out obvious choices for a particular letter if I feel like they're too similar to what I've drawn already.

Hopefully this'll be a good way of getting me into the habit of doing weekly art, will give me some practice to improve my skills, give me a chance to try out new art styles and make deviantART fun again!

So coming soon will be a poll of Doctor Who monsters, aliens and characters starting with 'A', as suggested by my Twitter followers (comment quick here with your own letter A suggestions to get included!). Remember, last time I drew A-for-Adipose: jinkies36.deviantart.com/art/A…

What do I draw this time? YOU DECIDE!

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I present Bridging the Rift, a podcast about the Doctor Who Universe fandom, its discussions and creative pursuits. As part of our remit we discuss Doctor Who, Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures fan art, comics, crafts and animation. Please give us a listen! bridgingtherift.wordpress.com

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I moderate Wild-Artists, a club for wildlife & animal art. If you're interested in wildlife and animals, or you're a wildlife artist, please consider joining!


Clubs I'm in or am applying to join:



Journal skin modified from Fella Journalskin v3 by janvanlysebettens

Check out my scraps for older pieces, work in progress and step-by-steps

You might have noticed that I haven't been around recently. Since my last entry I've been distracted by podcasting, Second Life and conventions - including the Gallifrey One Doctor Who convention in LA which I flew over to America to attend last week! If you want to hear more about how that went, take a listen to episode 17 of Bridging the Rift: bridgingtherift.wordpress.com/… (and look at the links to all the amazing costumes I saw there).

When I logged back into dA I was met by 6500 new deviations and 650 messages in my deviantWATCH! I just spent the weekend working through all of those and I'm now back to inbox zero - Phew!

I also discovered that while I was away I'd had another 2,000 pageviews! In fact I happened to check last night when the figure was at exactly 12,000! Thanks everyone for all the views, especially since I haven't been posting anything new to really justify them. I'll try to find the time produce some new art soon. I had the chance to get some advice from professional artists at Gallifrey One and found that, the Fan Art Seminar and the Art Show all very inspiring, so hopefully you'll see more art on these pages soon!

And as always thanks to all the people who watch me and all those who post encouraging comments, it's all greatly appreciated.

In other news, Wild-Artists has now been converted from a club into a group. If you're interested in wildlife art, especially if you want a group where you can find painted, drawn and digitally created art without having to wade through hundreds upon hundreds of photographs, then go check the group out and consider joining!

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I present Bridging the Rift, a podcast about the Doctor Who Universe fandom, its discussions and creative pursuits. As part of our remit we discuss Doctor Who, Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures fan art, comics, crafts and animation. Please give us a listen! bridgingtherift.wordpress.com

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I moderate Wild-Artists, a club for wildlife & animal art. If you're interested in wildlife and animals, or you're a wildlife artist, please consider joining!


Clubs I'm in or am applying to join:



Journal skin modified from Fella Journalskin v3 by janvanlysebettens

Check out my scraps for older pieces, work in progress and step-by-steps

I present Bridging the Rift, a podcast about the Doctor Who Universe fandom, its discussions and creative pursuits. As part of our remit we discuss Doctor Who, Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures fan art, comics, crafts and animation. Please give us a listen! bridgingtherift.wordpress.com

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Update 2009-12-13: Oh wow, 10,000 pageviews and before the end of 2009! Thanks everyone for the early xmas present and all the views, faves, watches, comments and encouragement! My Tooth and Claw werewolf also happened to reach 700 faves this week - that one deviation really seems to have a life of its own!

We've also just recorded a fun xmas special for the podcast with an extra long creativity section celebrating a whole bunch of fantastic Doctor Who Universe fan creativity, and discussing xmas in Doctor Who, so keep an eye out for that - I'm editing now and it should be out in the next week

Happy holidays to everyone, whatever and however you celebrate!

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Update 2009-10-27: Wow my Werewolf goes over 600 faves and then my pageviews go over 9,000 in the space of a couple of days! I also now have 133 people watching me and 1,900 favourites total! Thanks so much for everyone who's visited my profile, favourited any of my work and especially to those who watch me!

How do pageviews work anyway? My Werewolf alone has 11,284 individual views, how can one item have more views than my overall pageview count?!

You'll be happy to hear that I started working on new art, but I haven't finished any because my trial version of SketchBook Pro 2010 ran out and when I went to buy the full version I noticed that it's ridiculously expensive in the UK and literally half the price in the states! That was so unfair I started evaluating other art packages to see I could get good enough results - So far I've rejected Art Rage 2 as no good and I've established that I can get openCanvas+ to produce the same sort of results but the clunky interface is driving me crazy. Can anyone recommend another cheap drawing package with configurable brushes and a blending airbrush that's optimized for tablet/pen use?

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I Aten't Dead! I've just been very very busy working on a new podcast ...OK so we've actually recorded twelve episodes so far, but as I said, I've been very very very busy. So busy in fact that I've barely looked at dA! Oh look I went past 8,000 pageviews ...about 800 pageviews ago ...thanks!

The podcast's about Doctor Who, Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures fandom, what we're talking about and all the amazing creative stuff being produced by fans. We have a different guest host on every episode. We've had episodes about Time Lord Rock music (trock) with Alex Day from Chameleon Circuit, about fan fiction, about funny fan comics along with Girl-on-the-Moon from The Search for the Truth, about conventions, and the next episode to go out is about costuming and cosplay. Even in episodes that aren't about creativity there's a 15 minute or so section dedicated to looking at creativity related to that week's discussion. We've talked about loads of fan art. Take a listen, you may well like it


Sad fact is though, the podcast's taken up so much of my spare time that, what with arranging guest hosts, doing research, recording and, worst of all, editing, I haven't touched my tablet PC's stylus since the podcast launched! After 12 weeks of this though, my co-host and I have decided to change the release schedule to only release an episode every other week rather than weekly. Because of that I suddenly have lots more free time and I've fired up Sketch Book Pro for the first time in months!

I'm extremely motivated to start working on a new fan art digital painting now, but I'm so out of practice that I'm feeling really overwhelmed too and feel like I don't know where to start... I'd like to do a different fan art for each of the top ten in the recent Doctor Who Magazine Mighty 200 poll, but I'm also thinking I should maybe start with something a bit easier to get to grips with! Any advice?

I also have to admit that I've been put off updating this journal because it felt like I need to work on getting together a load of features before I can update and that was too much work. Well I've decided today that all the work I put into talking about art on Bridging the Rift and putting links into the show notes there counts as features work. But you can still of course keep track of the Doctor Who and general art I like by looking at my collections and favourites: jinkies36.deviantart.com/favou… jinkies36.deviantart.com/favou…

Anyway, thanks for all the pageviews, favourites (my Werewolf got to 550 favourites on my birthday and is now past 580!) and watches that everyone's been giving me while I've been basically ignoring the site. I'll hopefully be around a lot more now I only have half as much podcast post-production to do, and with any luck I'll even have some new art to show you!

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    I moderate Wild-Artists, a club for wildlife & animal art
If you're interested in wildlife and animals, or you're a wildlife artist, please consider joining!

Clubs I'm in or am applying to join:



Journal skin modified from Fella Journalskin v3 by janvanlysebettens

Check out my scraps for older pieces, work in progress and step-by-steps

    I moderate Wild-Artists, a club for wildlife & animal art
If you're interested in wildlife and animals, or you're a wildlife artist, please consider joining!

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Update 2009-07-21: Cripes, my Werewolf just passed 400 favourites! Which is crazy as none of my other deviations have even broken 75 favourites! Thanks to everyone who's faved it, and thanks to Kittas for the 400th fave!

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Update 2009-07-05: You know that I have some ambitious Doctor Who fan art to finish then a 'Crime and Punishment' Ball costume to make. After that I was planning to do another Doctor Who Alphabet like last year in August as it's National Art Making Month (NaArMaMo) again, however! I've now been inspired to do a different highly ambitious long term Doctor Who fan art project...

This year my ambitious marathon art project is to draw or paint individual covers/posters to represent each the 30 TV seasons of Doctor Who so far, and likely the Eight Doctor and the 2009 specials too. I've always found that my favourite Doctor Who art involves multiple images from one story combined in an interesting composition and I think my biggest influences are the covers of the Target Novelisations that were a huge part of my childhood. I've got 30 seasons to cover, so I should be able to try lots of different styles, including tributes to some of the most influential Doctor Who artists. Obviously this is likely to take me longer than a month, so the deadline I'm giving myself is to finish all the seasons before the Matt Smith Series 5 starts in Easter ends in summer 2010... I'll likely be starting in early August once NaArMaMo's kicked off - wish me luck!

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Update 2009-07-01: Everyone, you HAVE to check out this amazingly awesome Doctor Who fan music video to Chameleon Circuit's An Awful Lot of Running! I can't believe this was animated using Photoshop & Movie Maker and NOT Flash! I swear it takes me that long just to do one piece of static fan art, that's some serious talent! (Urgh, useless deviantART keeps screwing up the YouTube video link no matter what I do so I've had to link to the creator's profile page that currently has the video embedded).

Apologies for promising some Doctor Who art earlier and then failing to deliver - I seem to have developed a social life or something! I'll do my best to be anti-social enough to finish it soon

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Oh it looks like I went past 6,000 pageviews sometime on Friday! I completely missed it though because I got an iPhone delivered that morning and only wrenched my eyes and fingers away from that shiny glass screen this evening

As always, thanks everyone for your support! Especially as I've ended up submitting only one new piece of art for months...

To celebrate I'm posting a work in progress that I haven't managed to work on for two or three weeks, so watch this space! I'm working on some gift art now, so I thought I might as well get this out - encourage me and I'll colour it

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I'm planning two big time consuming projects soon, most likely a costuming project in July and another National Art Making Month in August (yes, that's drawing a new piece of art every day in August!). Because of this, I need to make deviantART 'admin' less time consuming so I have more time for art and less time thanking people for favouriting my art work...

I hope you all understand, but from now on I'm not going to thank everyone who favourites any of my art or say 'you're welcome' to everyone who thanks me, instead I'll be replying to comments that need a reply and instead focusing on making NEW ART! And looking at your art and giving you comments and favourites

So, really sorry if you didn't get a personal thanks or you're welcome from me - I do appreciate all your comments and favourites! So in lieu of a personal message, here's a message to everyone:

         
         
         
         

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I hope you've all discovered Harnois75! If not, here's some samples of the amazing Doctor Who art you're missing:



And as it's traditional, here's some general Doctor Who features (in no particular order because it'll take my hours otherwise):

:thumb121524763:

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    I moderate Wild-Artists, a club for wildlife & animal art
If you're interested in wildlife and animals, or you're a wildlife artist, please consider joining!

Clubs I'm in or am applying to join:



Journal skin modified from Fella Journalskin v3 by janvanlysebettens

Check out my scraps for older pieces, work in progress and step-by-steps