I haven’t been keeping up on my journal lately but I have been a lot of images and modeling. Most of the modeling I’ve done in the past has been done with slight manipulation of primitives. I started working on modeling some clothing objects, definitely a real challenge. I’ve been wanting to get into that for a long time, so its a good thing to get my feet wet.

It’s becoming more clear to me all the time that the thing I like best about the 3D modeling process is the texturing. I love doing textures and I’m about to make the decision that’s the area I’m going to focus on.

A couple of my recent images that I fairly proud of. The first, titled "Wrong Door",  is a vampire, I really jazzed about how the blood work came out. It was done on the texture before rendering.

The second image is titled "Lonely Nights" and is just one of those images where I followed my muse and I liked her destination.

If you haven’t already please check out my vampire site, www.vampirespromise.com

I almost didn’t even post this cause I didn’t think it was as good as it could have been. But then its turned out to be one of my most popular deviations, go figure lol.

I love doing animation and wish that it wasn’t so time consuming. I’d do it all the time other wise

Pretty Woman by =stagehand007 on deviantART

The title says it all and something that has always impressed me throughout my life. That a person might be beautiful or not so much on the outside, it doesn’t matter so much. But what does truly matter is the beauty on the inside. The ability to appreciate the wonders of life and the universe, to imagine and dream, and the way we interact with each other are all part of that beauty.

In the Eyes of the Beholder by =stagehand007 on deviantART

Night Vision by =stagehand007 on deviantART

Her Domain by =stagehand007 on deviantART

I also got back to doing some modeling in this scene, so most of what is in there is modeled from scratch. By far the most time consuming part of this project was getting the lighting right. Lighting is huge working in 3D, it can make the difference in something looking photo realistic or looking cartoonish.

This image may also be viewed on my web site, Vampire’s Promise.

Her Name is Lust by =stagehand007 on deviantART

The way that was stated lead me to believe this might have actually been the first time that either a woman or African American had ever been nominated. Again I don’t know Oscar history that well, so I might be wrong on that, just was my impression. As it turned out Kathryn Bigelow won as best director for The Hurt Locker, so now indeed we do have the first woman to win best director, congratulations to her

It got me to thinking, yeah it happens every so often for me. Here it is 2010 and we are just now seeing the first woman to win best director, and we still haven’t had an African American or either gender win. And I do remember enough about Oscar history to know that it was just a couple of years ago that Densel Washington was the first African American man to win the best actor award. And this is Hollywood we’re talking about, which certainly has a reputation as being a fairly liberal institution.

It’s all just another stark reminder to me about how much inequality exists in the world today, and especially within the US, and just how difficult it is to overcome. I guess on some level progress is made, but it sure seems slow to me.

Over the past week or so my life has been mostly consumed with my site, Vampire’s Promise. I  have gotten several other artists to contribute their work to the site. Lots of 3D renders, and some very cool drawings and paintings too. I have a couple of story writers lined up and will be posting some of those this weekend.

So something not vampire related that I was thinking about today. I don’t know when this all started, I think it’s a project management type of thing, where they refer to people as "resources". I’m sure it probably got it’s start from MS Project or something where you fill in the time lines with "resources."

To me it’s rather degrading to be referred to as a "resource", it’s like it takes the human element out of it.  I think you call people "resources" and all of a sudden it become much easier to use them just that way. No one seems to think twice any more about assuming someone will work at any time, there is no regard for personal life it seems any more. And of course its that much easier to cut payrolls when all they are is "resources" and not people.  Just a thought….

The idea started out as just a place for me to display my own vampire related art work. It soon grew to include the artwork of some other artists I have met, and finally I decided to make it a site to cover all things vampire. So in addition to the art work, there is information about vampire related books and movies, of course information on True Blood, and will soon be adding stories and information about vampire lore. It’s been a fun project so far and I think its only going to get better, probably not due solely to me but I do have some epic friends that I think will be a blast to work with.

And lastly thought I’d post one of my renders that I did this past week, it’s titled Dark Red.

Thomas by =stagehand007 on deviantART