Author, animator, and overwhelmingly grateful everyday to God for the life to do those things. www.JKRiki.com
Creativity is, in many ways, about endless possibility. Limitations can help guide your process, but at its core the early stages of Creativity require you to lower the castle drawbridge and invite any and all ideas into your courtyard. As a result, you can come up with a ton of amazing ideas, even if those ideas have almost nothing to do with one another. Last week I talked about Weekend…
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The game development studio my wife and I started this year “Weekend Panda” (which now has an About Us page!) is getting closer and closer to releasing our first game. I thought I’d take a minute to talk about it today, to let you know what’s on the horizon! The game is called “The Death of Mr. Fishy” and it’s a full-version of the little prototype we made last year…
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Have you noticed how much SHOUTING there is online right now? Over the past week, I have grown a tremendous amount by learning from experience, and I want to share one of the lessons. Whether you listen or not is up to you. I’m not going to be saying anything groundbreaking or new. I’m going to be passing along wisdom known for thousands of years that I should have applied…
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As my wife and I continue to work on our new full-time Indiedev venture, I am learning lessons on a daily basis. (Most of them revolve around patience when technology doesn’t do what I expect it to. Or rather, how little patience I currently have for such times.) One interesting and unexpected lesson from this new job is discovering a pretty massive difference in views on productivity between Artist and…
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I’ve had my fair share of existential crisis experiences in my life. One might say more than my fair share. Today I am experiencing something new, which I think is best explained as “an existential crisis, but art.” Long story short, I like this image: That is a good looking image, right there! It has appeal and style, and I am content to look at that image for a long…
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Sometimes we KNOW what we need to do, we just don’t do it. Last week I wrote about listening to others with more experience. The truth is, sometimes we don’t even need someone else to tell us the right path. Often we’ve already learned it, but we don’t listen to even ourselves! Case in point, this past week I decided to jump back into animating for the first time in……
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When I was a younger artist, I was arrogant. I’m sure I haven’t completely rid myself of this terrible habit, but I remember many instances when I scoffed at the advice of more experienced artists, thinking I knew better. Or, at the very least, thinking MY journey in art was different, so I didn’t need their advice. I was super wrong. I live life without regrets. I do my best…
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For almost a decade now I’ve taken to writing down yearly goals as the calendar rolls over. Some years it’s a list to check off, while others have been more like guidelines. This year I wrote ideas down while on an airplane from Tokyo to Minnesota. The flight was 12 hours long, which might explain why my list this year is longer than all the previous ones combined!* *That wasn’t…
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A new year is upon us, and I noticed something as the calendar rolled over. A lot of artists (and folks in general) did not think fondly of 2017. I saw comic after comic of people fighting with an anthropomorphic version of the year. Some of them were beaten up by Mr. 2017, some of them delivered the blows, but in all cases the same theme appeared: Violence. It was…
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A few weeks ago I talked about the future of the blog here, and last week I mentioned the big news that my wife and I will be starting full-time work on our own small business called Weekend Panda. Today I want to chat about another change I’m making as I prep for 2018 and beyond, plus the “why” of that decision. You may have read a previous post about…
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