I’m on holiday. Since last Monday.

It’s not one of those holidays where you queue at the airport, drag kids and bags and boxes around and schedule every minute of your day so that relatives and friends can get to see your face.
It’s rather one of those holidays where you try and stay in your underpants for as long as possible, eat things straight from the can and possibly gain a couple more levels at Skyrim.
Christ, after level fifty the experience bar is just frozen solid no matter how many dragons you kill.

Anyway, it’s also one of those holidays where you try and get a couple of long-outstanding things done.
Reply to old emails, clean up folders and things like that.
At the top of this week’s to-do list, after “sell your violin” and “get rid of the brushes you haven’t used in a year”, there was also “upgrade the bloody portfolio”.
As a matter of fact, I grew tired of 90% of the images I currently have on my website.
Every time I see them I notice more things I’m not happy with, more mistakes, more changes I would make.
True, sitting on my Hard Drive there are some interesting things I recently did as freelance, but who knows when I’ll be allowed to publish them. So in the next few weeks I just plan on drawing new artwork and replacing the old one.

I haven’t done much about it in the last few days to be honest.
I’ve basically just complained about the old drawings while playing Skyrim.
Bloody game, someone should save me from it, I knew I should have never started it.
Anyway, I wrote a post on Reddit asking for suggestions. I figured the Hive Mind could come up with better ideas for subject matters than my own puny mind.
They haven’t disappointed me so far, some ideas are actually pretty cool.
So, expect sketches soon, hopefully.

In the mean time, since I’m also clearing my Instapaper archive of all the links I was supposed to read later, here’s some of what I considered worth saving in the last couple of months or so.

Arkive.org Really, save this in your bookmarks.

With the help of the world’s best filmmakers, photographers, conservationists and scientists, ARKive is creating the ultimate multimedia guide to the world’s endangered animals, plants and fungi.

It’s not only a bloody good cause, it’s also a HUGE archive of images artists can use as reference.

Lines and Color’s blog post about Sargent on Met Museum Website John Singer Sargent is my favourite painter ever, and the beautifully redesigned website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art features no less than 600 of his works. Just type Sargent in the search field and enjoy.

In this blog post on Muddy Colours you can see Syd Mead’s concepts for Blade Runner. Do I need to add more?

Then, emm, a gif I saved for some reason I can’t remember (lol it’s funny though)

and possibly the funniest image on the internet.