Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve posted here. Well, the truth is it’s been a long time since I’ve actually rendered/painted anything. Why? I got sidetracked. Or maybe I got back to my roots. It depends. I had been writing science fiction since I was a kid back in the 70’s. Of course, that early stuff was little more than Jedi wish-fulfillment fantasies, but I kept at it through the 80’s and 90’s. In addition to improving my actual skills, I was also living those life experiences that give us the real material for writing, not blasters and X-wings, but joy and despair. All along, I also wanted to paint. I had been a heavy doodler as a kid, but somewhere along the way I lost that ability. Putting pencil to paper was a sure-fire recipe for brain-lock. So, I just had all these images locked away in my brain for decades. Then I found Poser. I toyed with it off and on for a few years, and then in 2005, it finally clicked. The images poured out of me, and as my father slipped away to cancer and my own children began to show some of their own problems, it was a great comfort. Then in 2008/2009, I foolishly let a pompous artist break my spirit. He convinced me that I had no talent and no skill. I was doing little more than stick figures and ink-stamps. At some level, I knew he was wrong, but he found just the right chord of inner insecurity in my artist heart, and plucked it hard. I stopped painting. Every time I started up again, his words cut deep. I staggered on for a bit, but my output dropped dramatically. A year passed. I tried again in 2010, but my heart wasn’t in it. It’s now almost three years later, and I’m brushing off my tools again. Why now? Well, in those intervening years, I returned to my writing, and I went after it with full abandon. I now have three novels written, and one of them is ready for publication. All it needs now is a cover. Gosh, if only I knew an artist who could paint that cover for me… So I cranked up Poser this morning with the intent to create a simple image, nothing more than a portrait. It’s not much of a challenge compared to my previous work, but I needed to get the feel of the tools again. Amazingly, it all came back like I’d never been away: positioning of the lights, tweaking the materials, falling into my file-saving/renaming workflow. Even the old ctrl-Y, ctrl-R shortcuts jumped from my hands, unbidden. This image isn’t the cover. That’s going to be some complicated thing that still several practice images away, but at least now I feel like I can make it. As for my broken spirit… I think it’s healed up and is stronger now. I look back on this jerk and refer to him as “The Art-Hole”. He has no real power over me, and if he insults me again, I think I can come back with both barrels. So, I’m back, hopefully to stay. I don’t think my output will ever reach the pace it used to, but that’s mostly because I’m spending a lot of time writing, too. It’s good to be back amongst you, and from the looks of it, I only have 18,742 favorite-artist images to catch up on. Yikes!