I know I’m out of procrastination ideas when I end up writing a blog post – it’s six months since my last post. Ooooops..

I finished that piece of artwork I was working on – check out my Tumblr, www.marblekittykat.tumblr.com, which gets updated more frequently. I also pretty obsessively build myself new portfolio websites, the latest of which is a mini folio purely for my illustration work – www.illustration.katekillick.com.

Although I am still working to build up my portfolio, I have found a more constructive way than self-set briefs – namely, freelance. I was surprised by the number of mobile game related projects looking for artists on elance and, having finally acquired an Apple device, feel pretty confident that I can meet their requirements. Got a couple of proposals in the pipeline which will hopefully be enough to sustain me whilst we finish Mush development / marketing.

In the mean time I am nervously anticipating the announcement of the student IGF shortlist this  Sunday!! We entered two titles, including mine & Henry Hoffman’s final year project, With the Dust. I can’t say I’m truly optimistic as there have been so many entries this year, but I am living in hope…

Finally, With the Dust *did* get nominated for a Ffresh award, which is “The Student Moving Image Festival of Wales.” I have no idea when the winners are announced (as seems to be typical of these events, they don’t even manage to email people to tell them they’ve been shortlisted….like, seriously?) but you can find out more at www.ffresh.com.

I’ve come to accept that I am a bit crap at blogging. I won’t bother boring you for long with news and the like since I suspect it is of approximately 0% interest to anyone (in summary: I finished uni with a first, had an awesome time at GDC Europe, Mush was announced as a LIVE title and I’ve finally started watching FMA: Brotherhood).

More importantly, I’ve decided to use Tumblr to dump doodles (I draw so much and yet put so little online…) and only blog here when I actually have something to WRITE. Thankfully due to the endless ways of cross posting social media, it will still appear nicely in the sidebar here >>
For the full show though, checkout www.marblekittykat.tumblr.com.

While I’m plugging myself, I’ll also mention that my folio is also looking rather tasty these days: Check It.

Anyhow I am now nicely unemployed and therefore trying to sort through the billion different goals that are buzzing around my brain:
- get a job as a 2D game artist
- go indie?
- develop my 3D skills?
- get a job in Flash/web?
- do a small solo serious game project on the side?
- get a local job? move to Cardiff and do it there?
- try freelance web? freelance illustration?
- apply for jobs abroad?
- finish With the Dust
- wait for Mush release

So far my process of making this decision is as follows:
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Whilst that sorts itself out, and I’m keeping my options open applying to all sorts of things, I have managed to narrow down my short term focus to practising my illustration (and possibly seeing what commercial/freelance opportunities that might provide).

SO what I am roundabout-ly coming to is this: I need Illustrator practice, my main problem being how distracted I get after 20 seconds with different styles, never quite committing to one style and changing things if it doesn’t look good immediately (I seem to have particular difficulty with line art and keeping my palette limited – thinking about reading up on colour theory). To avoid this, and to help me explore different styles to find what works for me, I am setting myself some briefs to do over the next couple of weeks:

- something with no lines
- something pet site style (single width lines)
- something serious
- something without the wacom
- something horror
- something scenic
- something abstract
- something urban
- something highly detailed
- something semi realistic

(some of these may be combined).

I am also trying to follow a few tutorials, more as a style guide than anything. This is one such example I started yesterday (got a long way to go):

(I wouldn’t have put eyes everywhere but it’s the theme of the tutorial…)

I had something else to say but I forgot it.

So…I accidentally deleted my WordPress blog database!

Hurrah!

A bit inconvenient, it means I’ve lost all posts prior to the point I started syncing my WordPress and Blogger (all in all, probably about a year of posts). It also means my gallery and categories are a bit messed up for the time being.

It’s not necessarily a terrible thing, however – I wasn’t exactly a regular poster and since I am finishing up at uni, perhaps it’s a bit of a new start.

Speaking of which, check out my final project, With the Dust, made by myself and Henry Hoffman in Blender:

More screenshots and info can be found at the website for the uni’s grad show: www.newportgames.co.uk – which I am busy organising and promoting. Come along! The opening is on Friday 17th June at 6pm (you can also follow us on twitter, www.twitter.com/newportgames and Facebook…) and is open during the day until 1st July.

The game isn’t quite finished, as we are still planning to polish it up a bit (a fair bit) for the show, but once it’s done we will probably put it up for free download so watch this space.

Mush is *still* in the pipeline – we are still going through some official processes BUT hopefully we will be able to make some extremely exciting announcements very soon (vague, I know). In less vague news, it won the BAFTA Cymru New Media award!

In summary, sorry about the mess and come to the grad show in Newport.