I've started school with Westwood Online for Game Art. Things are going great so far and as always I'm getting high praise for my drawings.

This all came about rather suddenly. I was going to follow my grandfathers footsteps and become a fire fighter. But after some time keeping to myself and not contacting my ex in any way, I was able to get over her enough to finally decide that I needed to do something with my life since I had nothing holding me back anymore. Not that she ever was, more like I was preventing myself because I put her first and took care of her. And while being a fire fighter would have been great and I probably would have been great at it, art is always where my passion has been since I can remember. I've always drawn and I've always been told that I'm good and should do something with that talent.

So here I am. Taking a risk in making it my career while tying it into my other favorite pastime of video games. Though that's not the reason I want to do game art. I decided to go into this career because the advances made in the technology behind the games is amazing, and its only going to get better. I want to be a part of that. Things are getting to the point where it is getting hard to tell CGI from real life (watch the extras of Iron Man, even the production team was amazed). And not only does this career choice lead into game art, but can also lead into movies, comics, or even the military uses game artists for their training simulations they create.

Most the the stuff in my gallery on here is just doodles, I will be posting stuff from my school assignments and all my old stuff will be moved to its own section. Not really scraps but close to it. For now it is all traditional drawing, but I hope to soon get to test the power of my new computer.

Which brings me to...

Turns out Macs are not as widely used in this field as most think, so I sold my MBP (yea, had it for less then a year but LOVED it and will have another someday) and bought the brand new Alienware M17x. This thing is amazing, very well built... more so then my Mac was. I've got it nearly maxed out in specs, I think the only things I could have upgraded more was to go with SSDs, Blu-ray Burner, and more RAM. I will probably upgrade the RAM once the 4gig sticks come down some in price. The qx9300 quad proc is so blazing fast, and the fact it can be OC'd makes it even better. Having SLI in a notebook is mind-blowing to me, let alone SLI since I have never had it (200fps in WoW on Ultra!). I still only have 4gigs RAM like my Mac had, but this thing hogs it more... must be the code cluttered OS. The thing that really annoys me though is the screen. I love the E2E glass, even if it is glare city, but the auto-contrasting feature is hell. In Fallout 3 I swear I'm actually playing a game about a rave club because it keeps getting really bright and then really dark back and forth a lot with all the light and dark areas of practically every frame in that game. And dark games like Doom 3 are a real pain to play because you can't see anything at all. Alienware just came out with the M15x revamp and it has a WLED screen, so maybe they will offer that down the road for the M17x and I can get it changed out. *crosses fingers*

But now it is time for bed, take care all!