Hi everyone,

It took me a lot longer to get over my cold than expected, so I missed another week of P&C updates. I’m not falling behind, though, since I do have the script written for the rest of the “Ghost Hunters” story, and I even have been working on a few other projects while I’m sick. On that note, I want to officially announce that my new art forum is now open and ready to go! Called The Inking Room, it is a non-elitist environment of open critiques and tutorials for all skill levels.

The idea for the forum came about when I decided to start making video tutorials. Since my ultimate goal and reason for attending graduate studies at SCAD was to become a professor of art, I wanted a place where I could dump all of my lessons and later send all of my future students for supplemental materials. So if I’m showing them how to ink with a brush, I can say “Check out tutorial #1 on the Inking Room” and they’ll have a little extra help outside of class.

After tossing around the idea for a while, it quickly evolved into a full environment for online critiques. I hate the fact that most art forums I’ve found cater specifically to a certain type of artist, be it digital vs. traditional, cartooning vs. portrait/illustration, etc. The fact remained that this elitist attitude made it so that people who didn’t focus in a particular genre — or who were just starting out and weren’t at the same skill as most everyone else — couldn’t post their work and be taken seriously. I wanted to create an environment that was as close to an actual in-class workroom as possible, since I have come to love the level of critique and honest assistance that I’ve found in my classes at SCAD with my fellow peers.

The Inking Room is dedicated to accepting everyone, regardless of their chosen medium or inherent skill level. The site is not exclusive to any one genre, and is most certainly not a popularity contest like other forums I’ve found. If you’re just now having a desire to draw, or if you’ve been an illustrator for 30 years and just want some feedback or would like to help others, then by all means come on over and sign up. It’s just getting started so there isn’t a huge crowd of people just yet, but the more people who participate the better the environment will become.

I hope to see you there!

The Inking Room - http://www.inkingroom.com

Now that I’m completely over the cold, I’m going to force myself to catch up on lost time. You’ll see new stuff from me very soon, I promise. I really do apologize for the dry spell of updates lately. I’m doing my best!

-Jon P.

Update: I got word from another reader that the site had been hijacked with yet another malicious code insert. I thought I had taken care of the problem by updating to the latest version of Wordpress, but I realized I made one small mistake when putting it up that left a back door open. Needless to say, I cleaned up the code, re-uploaded the site, and closed off the opening. I’m fairly confident that this will never happen again, but please be sure to let me know if it does. I can take care of the problem immediately if someone tells me about it directly either through this site, via e-mail or IM’s (PeterandCompany on AIM). Thanks to Acerynn for keeping me informed!

At least this time I was able to catch and fix the problem before Google flagged my site again.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 4:03 am and is filed under Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.