JillJohansen

I know it has been a loooooong time between my most recent upload today and my last. Since it's been so long, I figured people may be curious as to why. There are a couple reasons.

First, there was problems with chronic tendonitis. I simply could not draw for very long at all without crippling pain in my hand. I have been doing stretches, exersizes, resting from the painful activity (mostly mouse use, but also drawing to a slightly lesser extent), I got a left handed mouse, massages, hot and cold packs, I started taking fish oil capsules.... It took AGES, but  I have FINALLY got it under control. It's still very much at risk, so I can't draw as much as I used to or I risk just going back to that again, but I can now get a few pictures out.

Secondly, just as my hand was beginning to heal, my computer had a total meltdown. I had a water cooling unit on my motherboard. It sprung a leak... while the computer was running. Motherboard/CPU, video card, power supply, my C drive, all toast. I had to build a new system from scratch.

but, I am back up and running now, and I will be uploading pictures again!

I had been using Livejournal, but besides the fact that no one uses LJ anymore,  free accounts had become bogged down by so many restrictions and ads I stopped bothering posting there, and if i wanted to embed my blog on a website (namely, Kentauroi's website and my much neglected homepage) I'd have to have a paid account. But wasn't really in any hurry to get a new one up and running, so i just let it go.... But I am finally getting Kent going, and wanted a blog on the front page. I mean, I COULD have installed Wordpress or something, but I like the idea of using an existing service so people can follow it and not have to keep coming back to check the site manually, just have the post pop up in their feed.  I looked around a lot for what blogging service would fit my needs, and settled on Tumblr.

But then... I figured, you know, why restrict yourself to JUST ONE? not everyone likes Tumblr, some people use Blogger, or LJ etc. so I started to mess around with If This, Then That, and got it so that whenever I update Tumblr, the post is copied to Blogger, Posterous and, Facebook, along with Tumblr's native Twitter integration. I was not able to get it to post to my old LJ account, however, but I did set up Loud Twitter over there so it's not *completely* dead. so. You can find me at the following:

Tumblr: rayegunn.tumblr.com/ <-- The main one, all the others are copied from here, and may have some formatting errors as a result
Twitter: twitter.com/#!/Kentauroi
Facebook: www.facebook.com/RayeGunn
Wordpress: rayegunn.wordpress.com/
Blogger: jilljohansen.blogspot.ca/
Posterous: raye.posterous.com/
and sorta-kinda LiveJournal: jillbamfette.livejournal.com/

I could probably set up others as well, if people wanted. Sadly, while I did find a recipe to post to Tumblr FROM dA when I submit a new deviation, there does not appear to be a way to get my Tumblr posts to be copied here, so this is just going to be to let people know where to find me.

Well, I was expecting to get to work on Kentauroi by now, I'm having a friend of mine, Christopher, write scripts from my plot, cus I suck at dialogue, and he's better with story structure and all. He said he'd get the first pages done over Christmas, (well, we actually did have a bit going around November, but then we changed the beginning, so the stuff we did initially will show up later) but he got sucked into Steam trading during their holiday sale, and that never happened (though he got me Magicka, Dungeon Defenders, The Ship, and some good coupons in his trading frenzy, so I can't complain too much) BUT! he says he's going to do it this weekend, so... soon. after many delays, it will finally get rolling. It's worth the wait, i promise. The story snowballed into something huge, but I think it will be cool. Got action, magic, romance, betrayals, all set against the backdrop of a rebellion of sorts. But it is mostly about exploring the society of the elves through the eyes of the main character, Galen.

In the meantime, I have been working on a drawing of a Chinese dragon for, well, Chinese New Year, since it's the Year of the Dragon. I'm doing something weird with how it's coloured, and it will have DOZENS of colour variations for my online store... I haven't yet decided which one I will feature here at dA.

And now, a little geek-rant. Specifically, comic books. I know I have a few Authority fans following me, cus of my Apollo and Midnighter pictures, so at least a couple people may understand. Stormwatch. It is so disappointing it hurts. I was looking forward to this book SO MUCH, and then... we get blond short haired Apollo, and annoying douche Midnighter acting all creepy towards him, and the chin spike, wtf? and angry bitch Engineer, Jack is just... bland... and the writing is chaotic and incoherent in general, moving so rapidly from one thing to the next nothing has any weight to it. And the art, oh wow, it's HIDEOUS. One of the few times I was glad to hear that the writer was up and leaving after one arc. I hope Paul Jenkins can fix things. I just needed to get that off my chest, sorry.

Just an update on my previous entry, where I explained my lack of activity due to tendinitis, and my planned return... I have now played the fuck out of Batman: Arkham City. Love the game to death, I still need to finish the last Riddler hostage and I want to get my money's worth out of the Nightwing DLC I got (I had some leftover Microsoft Points... and come on, it's Nightwing. I love Nightwing. I wish I could play him in free-roam mode) but I'm only 5 Riddler challenges away from 400, so that should only take another day or two. My hand is holding up remarkably well, despite how much I've played the game, even though I abandoned using my Xbox controller in lieu of the mouse and keyboard for better control and access to quickfire moves. So it looks like my hand rest was a success, and I am no longer essentially crippled. I will still give it a few days rest after finishing the game, just to be safe, then I'll likely need to warm up again, since I have not really drawn in a while... but soon now, real soon, I should be posting some new pictures.

I've had pretty bad tendonitits in my right hand, which caused a fair bit of pain when I drew and used the computer.  I eventually decided I just had to stop using my hand for a while, or it was only going to keep getting worse, so I  have been trying to do everything I could left handed. I set my mouse to be left handed, avoided games with WASD+mouse, movement,  and relevant here, avoid drawing. It's taken months, but think I've gotten my tendonitis under control, I think it's pretty much healed. I'm keeping the left handed mouse except for in certain games to help prevent a recurrence (But I am not going to miss out on Batman and Skyrim over this. though I am waiting for the GOTY of Skyrim, so all the good mods will be made for it and everything by the time I play,  I've got Batman pre-ordered for the PC)  So. I am giving it another week to be sure, then will play Batman and a bit of sketching to test it out and THEN if that works out, I should be back to drawing more regularly.