I'm not following the rules. I'm not on DevArt often enough to know many people anymore, or think they want to be tagged by me. But, on the off hand you want to know something about me, or where the heck I've been, here goes:

1. I work full time. Yup. I'm a full-fledged adult. Nope, the job isn't about art. I work at a bank. But in this economy, any job is a good one.

2. Along with art, I also write stories and do music. This leads to a little bit of schizophrenia, in the form of me neglecting one area almost entirely for months, while I focus on another one. Currently I favor writing, because it's the most portable (i.e. I can do it on my lunch breaks.)

3. If I ever write fanfic, I do NOT use the main characters. I come up with my own characters, and play around in the author's world for a while. I've never done anything else whilst writing fanfiction . . .

4. I cannot do fanart. For the life of me, I can-NOT do fanart. I even sit down and tell myself "I'm going to do a hip cubist version of Naruto with legs and arms bent in odd shapes and with those weird white-in-black-circles eyes." And I stare at my computer screen for a while . . . and I do something else.

5. My best ideas all seem to come in the middle of something else I was doing, or as a sideline from something else I was doing. I once wrote part of a song for a story that I was doing. The story went nowhere, but years later I went back and finished the song. Turned out really good.

6. "My Brain on Vacation" was supposed to be a postcard held in the lap of a girl with holes for eyes, sitting in an armchair. I even made a version of that picture. Then I decided it was too gruesome and complicated and just did the artwork you see now.

7. I can recite almost all the Incredibles introduction (the one with the superheroes in front of the bad camera) word for word. This is just how my brain works.

8. I can never choose "favorite" questions for password security, because I like such a variety of things, the answer I put down today would be invalid tomorrow

yeah

Please check out www.joannahuffaker.com Feel free to tell me what you think here, but note that the purpose of this website is to "go professional" so you won't be able to put up any comments in the gallery. Comments in the blog are welcome.

Most of the materials on the website are already posted here (there's a new sketch in the blog, though, and some of the pictures in my portfolio have been updated) Most updates from now on are going to be on my website, though I may still post occasionally here.

Thanks to all!

Jim Hensen
There was a brief stint growing up where my family had cable (yes, brief). This was when cable was new, and people were calling it the wave of commercial-free tv (that lasted.) Anyway, one of my brother's and I's favorite channels to watch was TNT, which played Muppet Show reruns and episodes of Fraggle Rock. Plus we watched "Classic Era" Sesame Street (i.e., anything before Elmo), and Muppet Babies.

Have any of you seen Muppet Babies? Do you realize how off the wall looney that show was? It was all about getting kids to use their imaginations, and they juxtaposed 2d animation with black and white old movie footage (usually horror or science fiction) and just the strangest stuff. It was wonderful. We all loved it. We went looking for as much Jim Hensen stuff as we possibly could.

Such a shame that he died early.

Weekday Afternoon Cartoons

Those of you living off of Weekday Afternoon cartoons now . . . I'm sorry. I grew up in the eighties (yeah, I'm dating myself) which was the golden age of Weekday and Saturday morning cartoons, where all the stories and ideas were fresh, even if they were stupid. Okay, you now have stuff like Avatar and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, imported Anime from Japan. Not bad. But you don't have the different shows that I grew up with, a few of which I will list here:

Ducktales--the quintessential Disney Afternoon cartoon. They were around before there was a Disney Afternoon.

Gummy Bears--they were around before Ducktales, I think, but due to time zone stuff, I was actually introduced to Ducktales first. Where Ducktales was set in the "ordinary world" (or as ordinary as it could be when populated by ducks and dogs), Gummy Bears was set in the midieval world, with humans, and included Gummy Bears as a sort of leftover from an "ancient society" similar to dwarves and fairies (they lived underground) but furry and in various bright colors.

Talespin--they took all the animal characters from Junglebook and stuck them in a post WWII (50s, I think) environment with lots of seaplanes. It was insane. There was no way it could have worked. It was fabulous. We loved every episode. And because they had planes, the number of places they could visit was vast--and they filled up that vastness with a rich, detailed world.

Darkwing Duck--set in approximately the same world as Ducktales, but it was all about superheroes and making fun of superheroes. (at one point, Darkwing Duck tells his ward, who has to stay home "Ah, it's probably just another 'take over the world' thing.) They also have the credit for making up the corniest organized crime organization every (F.O.W.L.--the Federal Organization for World Larceny, as far as I can remember)

Muppet Babies . . . but I already wrote about that
(a few more from pre-Disney afternoon include G.I. Joe, Transformers, Voltron (I liked the vehicle version better than the Lion version--for those of you not in, this is the show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers stole all of its ideas from))

Bill Cosby

My family took a lot of car trips during the summers to go visit Grandpa and Grandma, and whenever we did, at some point after all the games had worn thin, we'd pop in a couple of Bill Cosby comedy tapes. I never saw too many episodes of the Cosby show, but I will always remember the gags from those tapes (Ice Cream! We're gonna eat Ice Cream! And we'll eat it every day, in the middle of the night! . . . )

Mr. Wizard

During the time that my family had cable (did I mention this was relatively brief?), we had Nickelodeon, and one of my favorite shows on Nickelodeon was Mr. Wizard. He'd always have some kid over to his house (these were the eighties, where such a thing could happen without too many problems), and he'd always show them a neat trick with string or a new shape that could roll as smoothly as round wheels or how to get a coin through a hole in paper that was smaller around than the coin. I'll probably never be a scientist, but Mr. Wizard got me curious about stuff and the world around me. Kind of like Bill Nye the science guy, only Mr. Wizard got to play around with neato stuff that just might be around your own house.

You Can't Do That on Television

I'm almost ashamed to admit this one. The humor was usually horribly bad, worse even than the Muppet Show. But after watching so many shows where anti-aging cream actually did make the character younger (using smoke and cuts and two different actors and a plastic baby doll) and where the show took one phrase and reinterpreted it in as many ways as possible (like complaints about having to all wear the same uniform--first they'd be in the typical "same uniform" then they'd have to all share one uniform--using barrels for modesty's sake--then the'd all be inside one HUGE uniform) . . . anyway, I can't say this show didn't influence me.

Star Wars, 4-6

My family watched these movies so many times during my critical "tween" years . . . And that's about the time when Timothy Zahn came out with his excellent sequels (unfortunately opening the floodgates for a bunch of people who wrote much-less-than excellent (stinky) sequels)

I wish I could take a sponge and wipe out the "prequels" . . . my own version of what happened to Darth Vader is just so much more satifying . . .

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Or do you know someone with extensive knowledge in art history? I'm going to be trying to get together a series of news articles for DeviantArt on the subject. This comes after a chat discussion about the general lack of knowledge of art history on DA.

Learning art history informs and broadens an artist's concept of style, and allows for development of new techniques by building on what's old, or asking questions (Hey, they did this, but they didn't go this way or develop this before they went on and changed and did that, maybe I could . . .)

If anyone knows about art history or knows anybody who knows anybody about art history, I'd sure appreciate a note or a reference that I can contact. I'm not sure yet how the articles will work (since I can't use any copyrighted pics) but I really want to make this one happen.

Thanks

Jo1day
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So, I tried to do a template thing and paste in everything that I wanted, but I think the only things that really worked were the text (if those even worked) Yar. So you're just going to have to deal with the green gloom until I get stuff worked out.

Sigh, and I had the prettiest background worked out, too.
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