Hello! I go by Jacks. I’m 34, married, and currently have a cat and a dog. The cat is about 11 years old, he’s a giant snuggle-bug who loves his belly rubs. The dog is a mix that’s around 9 years old and is a little standoffish, though she does have her cuddly moments—she, too, loves belly rubs. My husband is employed as an IT Engineer at a local company, and he loves the outdoors.
As far as making stuff goes, I’m primarily a self-taught digital artist; I do know how to sketch pretty well traditionally, with pencils and ballpoint pens, but I never actually moved on to any colored mediums in a more serious manner, although I do enjoy watercolor and oil pastel. I have a decent enough display tablet to work with, the Huion GT-191 v2, but I really want to start getting serious and work in 4k, and hope to get something a bit more geared towards that when I can. As far as programs go, I use PureRef to arrange my references in a dynamic and useable manner (I used to basically make collages for this). My primary art program is Clip Studio Paint EX, I really love the sheer number of different brushes you can get for it, as well as how customizable the interface is. I decided to go with the EX version because I like the more robust comic support as well as being able to make animations as long as you want them to be (more than 30 frames). I’m learning how to use Blender so that I can make models of the characters I plan on using regularly—I feel no need to and have no intention of ever using generative AI: I really enjoy finding ways to visualize my ideas myself. I also have Affinity Designer 2 ‘cause graphic design can be pretty fun; I’ve loved the flame-based fractals of Apophysis 7x ever since I was a teenager (when it was just “Apophysis”), and my understanding is that you can do more with those with GIMP, so I have that too. In terms of subject matter, I really enjoy drawing women, animals, flowers, fairy tale creatures, and hybrids; I also love fashion & costume design and armor & weapon design.
Other creative pursuits are writing (poetry, particularly haiku’s; and short stories, especially fantasy and soft sci-fi), music composition (I’ve noticed that there’s a sort of nostalgia in my music; I also like to use more unusual instrument combinations, such and the harp and ocarina or the trumpet and violin). I’m gonna count programming here too! I’m learning C# and the .NET MAUI framework (with ML.NET in the future), and SQL database stuff so that I can develop some apps! (I have the raw information for most of them, just a newbie in programming.)