If you follow my Twitter feed it’s no big secret that I began playing Star Wars: The Old Republic this past week. SWTOR is an MMORPG – massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game. The first MMO I every played was World of Warcraft and I got pretty hardcore about it too. Though I don’t plan on playing SWTOR as hardcare as I did WoW, I have begun to have the game on my brain a lot more as of late.

What I wish I had done in WoW was create more artwork featuring my many characters that I have in that game. Creating artwork, for me, is sort of like keeping a diary of sorts. When I look back on much of my artwork I can recall events and people that were in my life during that time. Capturing a little bit of that timeline nostalgia is what I hope to do in this MMO this time around.

Below is, for the most part, what my character in SWTOR looks like as of right now. He’s pretty low level and he has a “companion” that helps him out a lot. The companion is a cat-like guy so I thought Hugo fit the bill very well.

I plan on drawing my character more often as he progresses in the game and his look changes. I won’t document every little change, only when he drastically changes and probably at the highest level of the game. I know there are some of you that read the comic or come to the site that do not play MMO’s or care about them. If you are one of those people, thank you for indulging me my geek-time so that I can have fun in the SWTOR world and share a little bit of it with you. If you are one of those people who like MMO’s and are possibly playing SWTOR as well then you can look me up on the Vrook Lamar server under the name Taunteric. May the Force be with you

This week on the Artzen Podcast we will be discussing the act of actually doing what you have planned. As I’ve been mulling over the topic in my head for a couple of days my thoughts keep returning to the movie Limitless. If you’re not familiar with this movie it’s about a man that is given a pill that allows his body to access 100% of his brain, making him super smart and rich. But the thing, I think, that actually happens is that when he accesses 100% of his brain it doesn’t actually make him smarter but gives him more focus.

Focus is a very powerful thing if you can harness it. There have been scientific studies that say that the human brain cannot, in fact, multi-task. What the brain does is switch from one event to the other rapidly that gives the impression of multi-tasking. This may not sound like a bad thing, after all if we can do more than one thing at a time shouldn’t we? But the problem is that we are doing more, but doing it poorly. You’re splitting your focus over multiple tasks thereby stretching your capacity to do each of those tasks well. Eventually your mind can’t keep up and you will begin to perform exponentially poorly.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not always important that we give all of our focus to each individual task that we do. I think most of us do a pretty good job of talking on the phone, writing an email and searching the internet all at the same time if we have to, and in our busy lives today, a lot of us have to.

When it comes to art and design, though, creatives really need to make a concerted effort to focus on one important task at a time. Last week on Artzen Podcast we discussed list making and planning. I am a HUGE believer in lists because they serve to organize the jumbled mess of ideas in my head so that I can clear them out and start generating more. Lists also help you focus more. The problem with focus is that it takes a large amount of effort to make it work. Hence the reason a pill that helps you focus would be pretty cool.

I’ve found merely making lists of all of your goals and plans isn’t going to get things done. Listing things is just helping you figure out which things to focus on first and for how long. The trick in focusing is to have the will power to start a task and see it through. I’m obviously no efficiency guru but I’ve stumbled onto things that help me focus better that I’ll pass on to you.

I include things at the top of my lists that are one time things to get done (car inspection, gift portrait, pay doctor bill, get print and digital comics online, etc.) I know that once these things are done I won’t have to worry about them again – or for at least another year. Next are simple repetitive things that need to be done right now (write a weeks worth of comics, take out the trash, answer some emails, draw a comic, etc.) I know that these things are going to continue to reoccur, but if I can go ahead and do them now I won’t have to worry about them again for another week or so.

I continue in this fashion until my lists are full of things that are important and can get done and out of the way now all the way down to hard things that are going to really require me to shut myself off from the world and work. When I get down to the real work part of my list – these things are the hard stuff – I find it easier to get myself moving and focusing if I just shut everything else out of my mind except for the task at hand. Remember, by this point in your list – which could take months to get to – you should have all the other important and urgent tasks out of the way so that the thought of, “Oh, I need to take the car to the shop for an oil change” shouldn’t creep into your mind. When I am ready to really get the hard things done I continue to focus only on that ONE hard thing until it’s done. It helps not to be a perfectionist too. You need to set a deadline to have that thing done and do it and move on.

So, to sum all this up. Focus requires planning and will power. But if you plan well enough and start from easy and urgent working your way to hard and important you should be able to find that will power to muster the focus you need to be productive. Just remember, perfection is the enemy of production. Do the best work you can in the timeline you set for yourself and move on. Mulling over a task too long, no matter how focused you are on it, will begin to eat your efficiency and production too. But that’s a whole other blog post

As some of you may know, @khurlebusch and I are getting married in June. Because the two of use are graphic designers, and because planning a wedding isn’t normally challenging enough for us, we’ve decided to create a lot of our own artwork for different things. Karen is going to be sculpting a cake topper for the wedding cake of the two of us. As a reference guide she asked me to draw the two of us in my cartoon style. This weekend I finally got this drawing created.

We are also designing our own wedding invitations – which we will be getting completed in the next couple of weeks – as well as a few other things. We are planning our own honeymoon and pretty much the wedding too. So, by the time June rolls around, we’re gonna both be nervous wrecks!

Honestly, though, these are the things I’ll probably remember the most about the months up to the wedding. Yes, we’re gonna be stressed. Yes, things are gonna be hard. But being married to the person I’ve waited my whole life to find is worth any trial. I’ll keep all of my readers in the loop as the big day approaches and I’ll be showing off more of our artwork and what not as we get things completed. And hit the wish list or I can email you the registry address if you feel the need to buy us wedding gifts (hint, hint)

Today is the one year anniversary of Kidney Stone:2011! It seems so long ago yet just like yesterday. For those of you not in the know, a year ago today I made a huge life decision and moved in with my fiance. On that very night I also developed a kidney stone that would begin a rollercoaster ride of emotions and pain for about a week.

I don’t care what sort of man or woman that you think you are, a kidney stone – or any abdominal pain or injury – will reduce even the most hardened he/she-person to a crying fetus in a matter of minutes. On that day, before I was finally given some pain medication, about six hours or so into the ordeal, I was a crying and vomiting mess. A person doesn’t truly understand how good they feel until they have chronic pain.

Kidney stones block urine that, in turn, feels like it wants to burst out of your side. Imagine having to have to pee REALLY bad and you’re in a car that is running over parking blocks forever! Then, imagine that pain isn’t in your bladder but in your side just below your ribs. That is how a kidney stone feels.

A person that is in chronic pain can concentrate on nothing but the pain and if medication is masking the pain all you can concentrate on is when is the pain going to return. But once the stone did pass and I was out of pain it felt amazing. Just the act of not feeling pain made me feel like a brand new person. It was very weird.

So, if I can get through the night to the afternoon of January 8th, 2012 it will officially be a much better start to this year than that of last year! Of course there have already been a ton of better things in this year than the start of last year. But the thing that will stick with me the most is that kidney stone experience. If I never have that happen again in my life then the rest of my life is gonna be a cake walk

So far this year has turned out to be pretty productive. Even though I have to tend to a lot of off line, non-comic related things (specifically art and writing for my wedding in June) that doesn’t mean I have completely put off doing anything comic related. This week I am putting my nose to the grind stone in order to get book two from Robot Friday completed. Cats in Space and other such nonsense should be up on the site by the end of the month. I also plan to get more comics posted to the site as well, just not as regular – for this month – as it should be. That brings me to the point of this post.

As I worked on Monday’s comic I spotted an opportunity for a blog post about line tangents. Tangents occur in geometry when a straight line just touches a curved line, when this happens it is called a Tangent. For the most part (at least according to me) tangents in art are a bad thing. I know that there are exceptions to the rule, but if I spot a tangent in my artwork I try to fix it if I can. Below is an example of a tangent from the Black Eye Pea strip and how I fixed it.

You can see that Hugo’s hand is just barely touching his stomach line. That is where the tangent is taking place and, believe it or not, your readers will subconsciously notice it and feel a little bit uneasy about your artwork. There is a large amount of psychology that goes into graphic design and illustration that working artists need to be aware of. Tangents can make your audience, readers or clients turn away from or reject designs without them even understanding why they don’t like the piece, but they just feel uneasy about the art and a large part of the feeling is taking place in their mind because of the tangent.

You can also see what I did to fix this bad tangent. It was a pretty simple fix and all I had to do was pull Hugo’s hand back just a little bit. Not only did it fix the tangent but it also make for a better looking composition inside the body shape and made his actions a little bit easier to read.

Tangents are easy to over look – especially for artists that may just be starting out or working on tight deadlines – but they are something you need to strive to be mindful of. For the most part, a tangent may not be that detrimental to your work most of the time, but keeping tangents to a minimum will help give your artwork a more polished and cohesive look overall.