Yay. I completed my second piece of vector art Tuesday night and submitted it for approval. Hopefully it will be approved soon. I’ve posted my first submission on my comics site and altered the look to fill a 700×550 space. i could make it bigger but the point is to sell it on iStock so I purposely kept the detail art too small to scale larger, but if you want to see it without the iStockPhoto watermark, it’s at comics.jsmind.com. Once my second piece gets approved, I will post that to the comics section as well. BTW, for those of you who have been wondering, the little witch looks like Joon, but it isn’t her. I’m going to try to make it a point not to actually use any of my j’s mind characters in stock art, but then again, all my characters look the same so one or two of them are bound to end up in stock art eventually.

All of this drawing has really gotten me wanting to draw a new comic but part of me is too lazy to attempt it. Drawing a single frame image isn’t as time consuming as drawing a series of panels, especially since I try to do each panel from a different angle. I guess I should try to economize and be one of those artists that use the same sketch for EVERY frame and maybe tweak one detail, like the eyes and mouth so each frame just looks a little different… Blah. It’s funny. I’ve had comic 107 written out over two years ago and actualy have the pencil sketches for it, I’ve just been too lazy to convert it into vector art.

Blah. I’m sitting here now stuffed form over eating and too lazy to go to the gym. I saw a job posting on LinkedIn and applied for it. I normally wouldn’t mention it but the job was located in Boston. I don’t think I’ll get a call back but it looked like a great opportunity to go work with a fairly creative group of professionals and it would be a nice change. I’d be closer to the nephews too so that would be a plus. Sometimes I wonder why I stick around. If I don’t want to end up as “the babysitter,” for everyone else’s future children, I better find something to do with my life.

well, sorta. I submitted my artwork for a halloween competition last Saturday night and it was finally approved today (8 days of waiting - ugh). For a long time I didn’t want any vector files of my art out there for people to deform and stuff, but oh well. I gotta make money and really, you can;t control what others do with your art. You can only hope not to see it if its ugly and hope to see it when they’ve managed to take something you did to the next level and appreciate it. Anyway, its not like my doodles are fine art but he’s my first “cutesy” entry for the halloween vector art competition. My secondary piece which I’m currently working on will also be along the cutesie-whootsie line but a lil twisted. :P

I don’t think non-contributors can vote but if you can, awesome! Lets keep those fingers crossed for some moolah coming my way!

Click on the link to see it on iStockPhoto’s website…
better yet, buy a copy! support meeh!

So it’s finally here. A day I’ve been dreading since I turned 21… I am now the big THREE ZERO. It’s time to curl up and die.

Yesterday, a group of us went bowling in the afternoon and then ate dinner at Lazy Dog Cafe. It was fun despite my pathetic bowling score. I believe the problem is this, I have yet to find a bowling alley that drills LARGE ENOUGH holes for my friggin hitch-hiker’s thumb. What usually happens is that the the bowling balls with large enough thumbholes for me tend to be the 15+ pound balls and those just get tiring to throw after a while. I guess I need to get my own bowling ball. Did you know that Gable House has a “Bowling with the Simpsons” league on Monday nights starting in the fall? You get a choice of t-shirts and a choice of a bowling ball featuring Homer, Bart and a group of other characters… maybe I’ll need to get my own ball if I want something light enough to hurl down the lane that will fit my fat thumb.

So after bowling, we headed over to lazy dog where I got a Blue Cheese Flat Iron Steak and it was good. The other thing I had fasted from was beef and that steak tasted great! Apparently though, few of my friends appreciate blue cheese. That’s a shame.

In other news, since I’m turning the big 30, I wanted to pursue something new in life… so I’ve decided to bring my j’smind character drawings to iStockPhoto. Well, I’m not actually going to upload any of my comics there but the style of drawing I’ve developed over the years is perfect for contributing unique vector art. So in the future, I will hopefully be able to start generating revenue from my silly sketches and doodles. I sent in some samples already for the site’s application process and have been approved already (the file inspector also complimented my samples — two of which were my 2005 Thanksgiving and my 2006 Anniversary Art pics).

I certainly hope to reach a niche market with the word processors and administrators who have a taste for cute stock art. I mean, if I see another flier with those stupid oval-shaped head people from MS Word’s clip art gallery I’ll shoot someone… not myself, I wanna live to be 40.. no wait, I don’t…

Anyway, when I get some samples up and approved, I’ll link it here. :) My first piece is a submission to this month’s vector art contest featuring halloween monsters. I made a cute little image of a kid vampire eying a blood red candied apple. I’ll also add these to my portfolio eventually (now I’ll have to add another section called Vector Art)… Great…

So I’m sitting at my desk Friday afternoon when Gimpy calls me up and asks me if I’m over my fried foods fast because he wants to try fried chicken from Honey’s Kettle (a place neither of us has been to). Initially, I was going to wait until my birthday on Sunday, but then I changed it to Saturday since that was when I was going out for dinner with friends… but like a little kid before Christmas, I decided I wanted my presents early. :D

So abut an hour later, me and the Gimp had more fried chicken than only two people should eat. It was goooood, though I still prefer Church’s chicken more. The biscuits at Honey’s Kettle are superb though. Hmm, fried excellence.. how I’ve missed you.

So this past weekend Enoch and Karen were in town with the kids. On Labor Day Monday, we all went to visit my grandma (on my mother’s side) in Monterey Park for lunch. It was sooooooo freaking warm that day. Ugh. i detest these typical indian summers. :(

Anyway visiting my grandma’s with the nephews is so surreal… why? Well, for example, looking at that picture above, if I wanted to, I bet I can find a picture in my parents photo albums somewhere a picture in which my brothers and I are just a few years older than my nephews are now and we’re sitting on the same couch in front of the same coffee table in the same condo. That’s weird. I’ll make it a point to look for such an image the next time I visit my parents.

After lunch, we all went our separate ways. I headed over to Baldwin Park and picked up Lyndon to go hang out for a bit. Since it’s like a million degrees in Monterey Park it was like a million + 1 degrees in Baldwin Park so we opted to seek comfort in an air conditioned environment — the mall. Unfortunately, everyone else and their momma decided to do that too. After driving around the parking lot for about 30 minutes looking for parking, we were finally able to bask in the air conditioned goodness of the Santa Anita Mall.

Since we didn’t really have any plans as to what to do at the mall, we checked out the AMC which was not showing anything either of us wanted to see. We then just walked around and did typical stupid stuff like people watching and making fun of merchandise so ugly, we’d be amazed if it sold. At one point, we passed a barbershop; since Lyndon had been complaining about his horrible haircut from the previous week (it was ugly), he decided to get it fixed but getting an extra short trim. While he was getting his hair cut, I decided to go get a pretzel from the food court–this is were my poor citizenship came into play.

As I was waiting for the pimple-ridden high schooler to roll my pretzel in fat and sugar/cinnamon, these two girls came up behind me; they looked to be in middle school/early high school and were dressed like little whores who fell out of a Bratz movie trailer or Forever 21. Since I thought they were just customers waiting, I didn’t pay them any attention; but then one of them says “excuse me?” I turn around puzzled and one of the girls asks me if I can spare a dollar — they’re really hungry. At this point, my brain went into typical Jacob mode: what is the easiest course of action to get rid of these annoying pests? Well, the answer was obvious, just give them a dollar and shoo them away.

As they took the dollar greedily to perhaps buy a McDonalds hamburger to share and then throw up, the Wetzel’s Pretzels clerk told me casually I shouldn’t have given them the dollar and that those two girls come around quite often asking for money. So that got me thinking: these two girls, one Asian and one Caucasian, are dressed decently and do not look like their are in much of any need. Certainly if they were hungry, it would be their own faults for not going home and getting food. The way in which both were dressed, I would hardly expect that either came from struggling families. At this point, I just became disgusted — disgusted with them and with myself.

How wrong it is on Labor Day of all days to be pan handling for money at the mall? Especially when you aren’t in any real need? What kind of low life scum does that? And to not just point my finger at these little pre-teen prostitutes in training, but why the hell did I give them a dollar to begin with? In my mind, a dollar isn’t much, but then again… isn’t it a lot? Sometimes we see homeless people, humans with a genuine need, asking for money and we don’t give any to them. If I’m too busy to spare a dollar for a homeless man on the street, what kind of jerk am I that I give a dollar to two little girls that don’t really need it and further more have shown behavior completely undeserving? Ugh, that’s why I’m a bad citizen. Next year, I’m only giving dollars out to homeless girls. :p