First off, I scouted my first scout in the Art Portal! Meet DrClay and give some of his early work some love! I see potential and an eye for detail in this kid, so I'm going to try and be there for him as an artist helping an artist. That's really what this scout system is for, right? Either way, if this Art Portal is going to thrive, we gotta help each other out. I'm hoping to do my part starting with DrClay.

I'd like to say I'm nearly 100% healed from the motorcycle spill on October 11th. Wrist and thumb have barely mentionable moments of discomfort, and my right knee still kinda hurts when I feel around the knee-cap, so I stopped doing that. lol

The name of the game is production speed; ZoA and DN:O each took many months to animate, and that's just flat-out unacceptable from my perspective now. It's like, yeah, they were the most complex things I had ever made move when I had worked on them for the first time...but nearly half a year for a three minute skit? WHOLLY unacceptable.

Much of the delay was because I didn't even touch the flashes for weeks at a time. After knocking out the Warhammer 40K skit in less than 48 hours, and having similar time constraints with my stop-motion assignment for it's deadline and the Threepio skit so it could make it to Robot Day, it's high time I start knocking out three-something-minute long skits in a matter of weeks, or ideally, less than that.

...but dammit, do I get distracted. Learning to stay focused on these projects seems to be my biggest challenge. Hell, in a matter of hours, I drew Iczer One when I should've been tackling some of the frame-by-frame in my latest animation project.

I just feel like I haven't done enough, and as November chugs along, I feel more than ever like I gotta hustle....and here I am writing a lengthy news blog and...y'know...not working. Goddammit lol

Though I suppose I have my reasons; school being the biggest one of them. At the moment, I'm taking Advanced 2D Flash Animation which isn't teaching me shit about 2D flash animation, just nifty tricks CS4 can do and Actionscript bullshit that's way over my head. I'm also taking Adobe Illustrator. Damn that pen tool...but slowly I'm learning how valuable it is.

Next year I'll be revisiting 3D rendering and animation classes, as well as video editing, and anything else I can learn about 2D animation, or even musical composition so I can create custom scores to my animations, not unlike what Happy Harry sometimes does for his flashes. As far as Newgrounds is concerned, it's my personal goal to gain more exposure on this site. I know I'm capable of producing something better than what you've seen so far. I can talk all I want about it, but I'd rather show you :D

Personal goals for next year:
-Earn a Daily 1st on a solo submission.
-Earn any Weekly Award on a flash submission.
-Earn front page feature on an art submission.
-Begin work on an original, Art Portal exclusive Web Comic.
-Begin developing portfolio-worthy animations for a demo reel. Expect more original work after the initial volley of parodies Hogabeast and I have been plotting.
-Try to make something I'm proud of monthly at the very, very least. (Art or Flash)