Blog 9-27-17 – Breaking Down

It is now deep in September after a wonderfully productive July and August. Over those previous two months I was able to keep up a good posting record of almost every day, with basically four art supply reviews a month. Now in September I’ve missed more than half the days and most of the posts have been comics and not written posts (not that the comics are bad: I love doing them), and I feel like I should explain myself.

The long and short of it is that I started school again, and I’m now grateful that I didn’t attempt to bring back an actual posting schedule in the last few months. My goal is still to post something every day, but lately I’ve been sort of creatively zapped. I am recovering, though, (I know it doesn’t look like it, but I am) and I should be picking up the pace soon (“should”). I hadn’t anticipated that this would be much of a problem, but I haven’t been back to school in several years, and it appears I just didn’t remember.

And on a bit of a tangent, as part of my “recovering” I am beginning to work on project for the Alpine Artwalk 2017, so be on the lookout for updates and new things becoming available.

-Austin

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Blog 5-19-17 – Catching Back Up (and dates)

I can’t believe it’s already May! Normally I am not in agreement with people when they say “time flies” or “man, this year is going by quick”. But this last year has been an exception. I’m still trying to catch up, but that’s always a harder proposition than it seems. Hopefully, you’ve been able to see some of the fruits of tquichis labor this month, though. Of course, I’ll try to continue to keep up some semblance of this output and if all goes well, I’ll prevail.

In any case, I’ve begun work on comics again (my favorite and least viewed part of the website) after some time of debating with myself how to do it. I have been keeping track of how many I’ve missed during my hiatus (as I have with my written projects) and I intend to catch up. But I will be posting them on an “as-made” schedule and it will still be some time before I get back to the old schedule. But there won’t be any backdating and pretending in the future I didn’t go on hiatus (even if that would make it look nicer).

I use the term “hopefully” a lot in these update blogs, and things do never turn out as well as I would “hope”. But things are moving forward, falling into place, and getting better. There’s more of the old stuff and lots of cool new stuff in the works around here and it may take me a while to get to it but it’s coming. And I hope that some people out there can get the chance to enjoy them as much as I do.

-Austin

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Blog 9-7-16 – September Update

So it’s September, and I said I would update y’all by the first week of the month, and here I am, proving again that I am not dead, and not much has changed in the way of the posting schedule.

I had no idea that the process of my moving would take more than a year, but, as many more productive people will tell you, when you can’t devote your full attention and effort to a single project, it will get done less efficiently. I definitely wasn’t able to get done what I had set out to do in a reasonable amount of time and I am sorry that in doing that I have severely diminished the amount of content that has been featured on this site (hopefully temporarily).

But, things are getting back on track, as hopefully the last few (and next) days of posts will prove. I didn’t do as many exciting things these two months as before, but here are a few photos from another art show “Clarity in Chaos” that I did with the new West Texas Collective (Facebook Instagram Twitter) in Alpine Texas. It was a really fun show, and I hope to do more like it in the future.

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I won’t be fully up and running for a while longer now, but I’m getting close to being back in a position where I can do so. It’s more than likely I’ll have something working by the end of the year. I’ll post another update by November, and be on the look out for that one, because there are a few other really cool things that I’ll also be doing in November. So stay tuned and thank you for reading/watching.

-Austin

Dragoncompany.org   Artsupplycritic.com   Dragonfunnies.com

Blog 7-10-16 – July Update

Hello everyone, Austin Smith here, and it is July 10th, also known as the absolute last day one could possibly consider in the first week of July. Though I must admit I believe I did fail when I said I was going to have an update up during the first week. I did spend some extra time making sure the two posts I put up as tokens of proof that I am still going to update this site were a little more polished. The update is: I have not reached the point yet where I am in a position to fully restart my posting schedule. But I have said all of the things before about how I’ve seen Internet projects disappear, and how not getting things done snowballs. So I won’t go over them again, instead I’ll tell you about some of the things I did that are holding up the content but were still great to do. I’ll post another update by the first week of September.

The first really exciting thing that I did was go out to California and administrate a wedding for a family member. Unfortunately for me right now the photos haven’t come in, and all of the others that have me in them aren’t great (but I wasn’t who people were there to see) so I don’t have a photo from the ceremony right now. So instead here is one of me in Texas in the same outfit that looks like the Lord is shining down upon me.

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I’m also still moving, and here are ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos of what a literal ton of books (as in actually 2000 pounds) looks like boxed up and on the shelf.

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Most recently I went to both of my local 4th of July festivities, in Alpine Texas. The first one, Fiesta del Barrio, I attended as a vendor selling some of my books. But I’m bad at taking pictures so I only got one of the parade, and one of a horned lizard. I also missed the second parade and only got one picture of it as well.

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And here is a panorama someone took of me from the Reds show I was featured in in early April.

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Anyway, hopefully those photos and my posts from yesterday sufficiently prove that I am alive and dedicated to these blogs. Thank you for your patience.

-Austin

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Blog 5-2-16 – Reconstruction

Hey guys, Austin here again. I said I would post an update in May after my April suspension of my posting schedule, and I’m here to say the posting schedule is still suspended. Things in April didn’t work out as I had planned (at least as far as this Blog is concerned, my sanity might be slightly restored though). And thinking I could get it all sorted out by May may have been a bit too optimistic of me (see what I did there). I’m working on quite a few site- and content-related things behind the scenes, but they aren’t translating at the moment into much that is visible on the front end. Still, I do want to get things out there so it does look like I’m doing something, since I can say I am all I want but without any new posts it sure doesn’t look like I am.

Unfortunately I will still have to extend my schedule suspension until I’m caught up and can return to it. I don’t know how long it will take to do that exactly, but I will post an update about it by the first week of July. Once things do get back on track, though, be on the lookout for some announcements of cool new things, I’ve got a lot in the works.

-Austin