Decided to check out my CGPortfolio today, and noticed that the amount of total views is up to over 5,000! Very cool, especially as it's less than six months after my 2,000 view post.

To everyone who has visited, thank you for stopping by, and I hope you enjoyed the artwork. And to everyone who has joined my portfolio network, thank you for your support.

I'll do my best to add to this portfolio and make it worthy of another 5,000 views.

The winners of the World Ends With You contest at DeviantArt have been announced. I did not place, but the winning entries are truly impressive, and I highly recommend checking them out.

Link: http://news.deviantart.com/article/47792/

Also, from that page, you can check out the original concept art from the World Ends With You development team.

Completed an entry for the Square-Enix The World Ends With You character design contest, hosted by DeviantArt. Concept and final drawings all done in a total of four sessions over three days, with the final piece done in two sessions over just one day under tight deadline.

CG Gallery Link: http://imagus.cgsociety.org/gallery/624180/
Contest Entries Link: http://browse.deviantart.com/projec...ithyou/?order=5

Special thanks to aeonseraph for posting his entry for the contest on CGTalk, as it brought the contest to my attention in the first place.

EDIT: Due to a submission category glitch, the entry was mis-submitted the first time around. Hopefully the second submission, which links to the original, will qualify for the contest. Keeping fingers crossed.

As of this posting, my gallery has been viewed over 2,000 times (2,012 to be exact). Very cool.

This is due in large part, I'm sure, to the many artists who have been kind enough to allow me to add them to my portfolio network. To them, and to everyone else who's stopped by, a big "Thank you!", and here's looking forward to another 2,000 visits.

Back on 10/30, I finished up a fairly massive project. On the ConceptArt.org forums, there are activity sub-forums, each providing a weekly topic for artists to expand on - Characters, Creatures, Industrial Design, Environment, and Random Topic.

Well, the Creature of the Week (COW) sub-forum reached its 100th topic and, to commemorate the occasion, rather than a single design, a mega-challenge of 100 creature designs in 30 days was settled upon. The designs would be thumbnail-sized (150x150 max), featuring 10 concepts each from 10 different categories (chosen from a pool of 30), created between October 1st and 30th, 2007.

As if this wasn't already daunting enough, I didn't actually find out about the challenge until October 17th, leaving me with less than half the time (14/30 days) to complete all 100 creature designs. At first, I figured it would be pretty much impossible, and I nearly passed on the challenge. However, fter a fairly fun and productive first day, I decided that it was time to overcome the whole "not enough time" instinct and have a solid swing at it.

And it worked! 12 days later, I had all 100 thumbnails completed and, one day later, they were revised, cleaned up and submitted. I ended up being one of 45 participants who actually completed all 100 thumbnails. At present, the challenge is in judging/voting phase.

As challenging as it was (it took pretty much all my free time over a two-week period), it was actually a lot of fun. Character/creature design is something I very much aspire to, and this challenge has helped verify that it's something that I enjoy doing a great deal. While my piece isn't even close to the best of the group, I'm still extremely pleased with the way it came out, and I'm glad to have another finished piece for my portfolio.

Right now, I'm waiting for clearance from the contest organizer. Once I get it, I plan to post the finished work in my CG Portfolio. For now, all of the entries can be seen here. NOTE: this is a HUGE bandwidth thread, with over 40MB of images on the first page. To avoid this load, the entries can also be viewed individually here. Also, don't try to register just to vote on the challenge... any account registered after October 30th is not eligible to vote.

100 creatures in 12-13 days... sweet!

EDIT: The piece can now be viewed, in slightly reduced form, in my CG Portfolio here.