In the downtime during my ever continuing quest for employment, I've taken up a few extra hobbies to keep from going completely bored. Some are more relevent to my future line of work, while others are simply for my enjoyment.

One thing that I've attempted to take up again is drawing. My skills currently sit somewhere between mediocre and decent, a stat I'd certainly like to level up. So, my brother Chris and I have periodically enjoyed an evening of drawing while watching the nerdy sitcom, Big Bang Theory. Unfortunately, we've finished the first two seasons and now are forced to wait a week for new episodes, as the third season just began. For the off days, BBT has been summarily replaced with Pinky and the Brain.

In keeping with my new found - and probably unhealthy - fascination with the land of the rising sun, I've been taking cues from the manga/anime style (much of which is fan art). So, for those who enjoy that sort of thing, here's a gallery of some of the artwork I've created over the lest month and a half.

[gallery=Summer 2009 Art][/gallery]

So, there it is. You probably noticed that there's a bit of a common theme to the above pictures (beyond the manga/anime thing). If you didn't, you lose five points and get no cookie.

This is just a quick color job of a sketch I did a couple days ago. I hold that of all the anime I've watched ad manga I've read, Haruhi is by far the hottest character I've encountered. Or, in the immortal words of the famous Solid Snake, "Oh my God, hotness. I wanna bang you!"

Sketched with pencil, colored in Photoshop CS3

Over the past few days, I've been developing a library to help in drawing graphs for various stuff on the music page. I've built to to be a fairly complete solution that is both robust and simple to use. Today, I offer phpGraphs to the masses to do with as they please, free of charge. Follow the break for a quick tutorial on how to use it.

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For the casual frequenter of my blog, you've probably seen me mention the illustrious Music Page before. It has been my pet project for a year now and has been the catalyst for a few leaps in coding practice for me. Firstly, it's responsible for my becoming quite adept at advanced "OOP"-like JavaScript-ing. Secondly, it's given me an outlet to try out new things such as dynamic graphs in PHP or using Bing's search API. Let's take a brief walk through history.

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I decided to break away from direct copying for a bit to apply the techniques I've learned over the last few days. What I came up with was Keri, my new OC.

I'm pretty happy with how this came out, only a few complaints about the eyes and shape of the face. For the shading, I used the artwork of MoogleGurl as a reference for shading and background (check out her stuff. It's super cute).

Well, I hope you like it. At this stage, critiques are extremely welcome.

Tools used: Pencil/paper Illustrator CS4 (inks) Photoshop CS4 (everything else)