As I'd briefly touched upon in an earlier post, my place of employ is currently having a little fitness competition: can you walk 10,000 steps a day for 75 days? If you reach the grand and glorious total of 750,000, you are awarded two free days of vacation. Everybody was provided with company branded pedometers to keep track of our steppings and left to our devices.

Now, I'm never one to turn down an opportunity to make money for nothing, so I'm doing my best to make a firm effort and accomplish this goal. If you take a look at the blog main page, you'll see that there is a graph with my current progress on this mission (assuming you're using an HTML5 compliant browser). As you may well notice, I'm a few thousand steps shy of my quota for this week (shame on myself).

Now, that's the boring part. The cool part (and the reason I'm posting) is the really the graph itself. Back in December I switched the site codebase over to HTML5. Now, this was mostly a change in semantics, using new tags such as

and

. I'd not done anything special with CSS3 or some of the newer, funner tags such as

This was one of several K-ON! inspired pieces I did in a week.

Inked in Illustrator, colored on Photoshop

So, I'm walking around the downtown area, an activity I've undertaken in an attempt to accumulate 10,000 steps/day for a work thing.

Anyways, I'm walking around enjoying the scenery and weather when I spot a giant billboard. On it is a man and his three young children. I was slightly touched by this nice picturesque scene... until I read the accompanying text:

Our daddy will sell your home... GUARANTEED!

In just a few words, this man went from upstanding role model of the American family to a parental pimp, whoring out his children to make a quick buck. Does anybody else find this kind of advertising appalling?

I see a commercial for a local used car reseller and his prepubescent daughter is going on about how her daddy will get you the best deal in town. Is this supposed to make people go "awwww" and rush out to buy a car, or are they marketing to pedophiles?

I don't know. I just don't know.

Leave it to Capcom to ensure that the protagonist of their games has a super cute, teenaged female sidekick. I'm down with that :)

Oh... I forgot Ema. Blast it all...

On a final note, I will not use my tablet for soft shading again in a long, long time...

An attempt to break away from the "draw what I see" and start hammering away at my skills. I've been doing a fair amount of drawing the last week or so and subconsciously kept drawing the same character. Once I realized this, I decided that perhaps she can become my OC and drew this. Her name is Hanako, which means "flower child".

I'm beginning to see progress in terms of anatomical accuracy, but still have many issues to work out. The hands and feet I'm fairly satisfied with as well as the legs (though, there's some work to be done). The arms and shoulders, however, are what I see as the glaring issue here. Also, the shape of the lower half of the face. Things to address as I continue my grind quest to become a level 80 artist.