Matt's Place

[lewislong]

Haha that last post was funny. 2nd post in "I'm going to be hitting it extra hard
then".

I've been drawing a fair bit and updating my blog at lewislongblog.wordpress.com.
In no particular order, this is the stuff from my blog during the "drawing a fair bit" period. (Note that "drawing a fair bit" isn't enough of course. Read on!):






























That's the basic idea of how lazy I've been during the "drawing a fair bit" period. There's more from another sketchbook that I'll add soon but more important things need to be done. Continued to next post...............

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I'm here again now for the final showdown. I'm finishing my full-time job in 8 weeks time after which I've planned a 4-5 month break from full-time work to better myself artistically (living off savings and support from my laydee!) and hopefully produce a small portfolio for applying for freelance and/or studio work in Hong Kong.

I'm trying not to write too much but for this circumstance, for people to understand my position, it is a necessary evil! I'll try not to make this too long:

My story is I've drawn and enjoyed drawing all my life. I was one of them people Dan has mentioned before, being praised my whole life, being the "creative one", "quiet and artistic" etc. At my primary and high-school I was led to believe that I was something special in regards to art but I never achieved much past some bullshit pencil renderings, acrylic and oil paintings. I went to Uni studying Illustration and Visual Communication Majoring in Illustration, had a bumpy ride at uni, left with a BA(hons) in Illustration without having a real portfolio. Me and my girlfriend realised there were next to no jobs for us in the UK for what we wanted to do and so we came to Hong Kong knowing we'd have cheaper living costs (rent, bills etc) and got our first full-time jobs after graduation just 3 months prior to graduating.
Life was good, being in a new place (Hong Kong is an amazingly inspiration place for characters and cyberpunkesque vistas everywhere!) Joined Wing Chun classes, Did my PADI open water course, built a fair amount of Gunpla (with more to do!), played a lot of video games, collected a lot of toys and have been drawing and painting consistently but thinly spread. I've had some projects come and go like building a 32 DOF robot about 2 feet tall, making my own iPhone game that I'll pick up again but not after sorting out the lifetime goal problem!

The past 2 months I've slowly discarded almost all of that stuff, and have been drawing and painting an increasing amount but I've felt "Too busy to post", too busy to be part of a community for once in my life when the said community is full of people like me that I can learn and grow with. It's not been until recently that I made the decision to leave my current job, meaning I actually discussed leaving with my boss (who is awesome and will be a good friend in the future), and decided it's time for me to assess my goals with art and find the solution to get me working drawing and painting for a living. As I've been drawing and studying more and planning schedules etc I've realised that there is always time for IMPORTANT things. Meaning if I think about what is important to me and my life with my girlfriend and task myself accordingly, the other shit just dissapears. I'm talking about shit like procrastinating because I'm not serious enough about where I am artistically and convince myself that by watching copious films, playing games, reading books and buying toys alone will somehow allow my art to get better when I want to work in these fields (creating art for games, films, books, toys etc). I'm a pretty safe guy, I don't drink a lot, do any drugs or have any traditional vices past not drawing or painting enough. So my sole problem is about just fucccking DOING SHIT! The problem is rooted in the realisation that I wasn't good enough and had to re-educate myself but taking a very long time being distracted by many things and making very slow progress towards unspoken goals.

So I've been building up to doing nothing but art and realised, through scheduling my time for drawing/painting, that I can still have time to watch movies, play some game, walk my dog. Just not excessively which is cool. I have way more fun drawing and painting than I realise sometimes!

So I'm making my deathline which is my own custom deathline since its the final third into the year already but sticking with the deathline spirit, just on my own calender because waiting to set these goals would be more than retarded.

I had 5 days in a row off last week and instead of booking anything I scheduled my 5 days of 16 hour a day drawing sessions. It was successful on the Monday completing the full 16 hours give or take until I realised on Tuesday that my 2009 13" MacBookPro just wasn't cutting it. I decided to build a new desktop which took me all of Tuesday to research, plan and go buy the parts for the build, Wednesday to assemble and Thursday to setup and move files from my MacBookPro, clean my MacBookPro and all of that good stuff. Friday I setup my first Livestream account (livestream.com/lewislongsstudyrage) and didn't do a lot else. I've been back at work on the weekend but after work I've been rescheduling (down to 12 hours, I can do more if I'm not too burnt out) and have setup 2 schedules that is my Path to Deathline!

The first is for the last 8 weeks of work, I teach children drawing and painting and some basic english based on the topic we are painting so it's been a lot of fun and will miss it. I'll be full on 12 hours a day of studying on Mondays and Tuesdays, my days off since I work weekends, and after work is more free study around whatever portfolio pieces I'm doing. I'm not expecting work I'm doing now to be in my final portfolio at the end of this but to get most of the crap stuff out so I can make better stuff during my 4-5 months study and portfolio cram.




The second is my schedule for when I'm not working for 4-5 months, after which, hopefully, fingers crossed and all that. I should be making steps toward painting for a living. My options so far are a few mobile/pc game studios doing slightly casual stuff, a couple of animation studios, Imagi Studios (TMNT) but I doubt they want 2D only guys and I'm pretty sure any 3D modelling/texturing pieces I manage wouldn't make the grade. They are the full-time options living in Hong Kong. My other options are part-time English or Art teaching whilst freelancing on the side. This may not sound too good but some jobs I've been looking at are 3 days a week with enough pay to cover the visa requirements (big international English only schools, Asia is crazy for'em!) and then I would be open to getting freelance for the remaining 4 days and/or keep pushing my studies and portfolio pieces to get freelance work whilst also sending
updates to studios and looking out for other studios I've not discovered yet.

Weekends are free here to either do more drawing/painting or go for a days hike with my dog and girlfriend. Me and my other half are planning to join some sort of class together to get into shape and keep each other motivated to do so. Yoga or Taekwondo maybe. Sounds lame but yeh, it's just something we want to do together since we had a lot of fun getting our PADI Diving Open Water License last year.



There are some options (that are not options but may be suggested by others) like going back to the UK to live with family but for me it's not an option since noone can afford to put me up, part time wages suck in the UK right now and anything else would be full-time. I'll be going back to the UK in around 2 years to live again at which point I really want to be in a position to freelance enough to fully support me and/or get into a decent studio such as Opusartz, leading light or any of the UK developers with in-house artists, SuckerPunch, Rockstar, Rocksteady and quite a few more.

My goals are still a little optimistic and when you see my work and then see names like Opusarts and Rockstar games in just 2 years, I guarentee you'll be pissing your pants but please judge those goals after my 4-5 months of madness because that's when I'll be taking another look at what is possible and I can make more real estimations and ammend goals after that time.

Enough talk, I'll be streaming mostly all of my schedule if possible (no mic yet) and posting frequently to here and my blog. When my "finished" pieces start coming I'll update my Deviantart and create a CGSociety. On my schedule, the Projects parts also cover Blood Sports! I'm ready Dave and Dan, give me blood!


My Deathline Starts today and will be reviewed this time next year. I'm not doing this just because it's the thing to do here but because I need it, I need focus and I need people to know my goals to help me keep them in check.

My Deathline September 3rd 2013, goals:

1. Have a strong Portfolio geared toward game preproduction art (See my Schedules on
how I'll achieve this).

2. Get fit! Epic dog walks on weekends after I finish my full time job and some
excercise based class with my girlfriend on weekends to sort this out.

3. Keep active on forums:
- Bloodsports
- Livestreaming
- Generally checking on and supporting everyone here any way I can

4. Finances
- Save as much money as possible being mindful of wasted money. No more

spending on toys or adding to my portable game console collection.

Check my Signature for my livestream and blog, I'll be streaming every hour of painting toward my deathline goals!

Lets see where I'll end up a year from now when I'm pushing myself to the limit!