Monday, October 15, 2007

Hi.

Hi. Welcome to the first post of Jeff's Doodles. My name is Jeff Thomann, and I'm an artist. This blog is going to be dedicated to showing you some of my drawings, and possibly some paintings or other doodles that are mainly sketches. I have a BFA in Fine Art with an Emphasis in Painting and Minor in Theater.

I've been out of art classes for a long time, and sort of fell out of the habbit of drawing over the last few years since my 40 an hour week job has absolutely nothing to do with art. I graduated from college back in December of 1999 and tried to get some art jobs right after school but nothing ever panned out. I used to doodle a lot during college and shortly thereafter, taking sketch pads with me to cafeterias, out on breaks, etc. I loved making art, and still do, but sort of fell out of the drawing habbit eventually, and went in to doing some digital photo stuff, sort of making the camera in to a bit of a quick and dirty sketchbook... well, I never went back and revisted a lot of those photos... but some were amazing, and some not so much so... a good number of them are now on turbosquid if you want to take a glimpse...


Here's the main link to my stuff on Turbosquid:


I recently came across Mattepainting.org and have sort of made that one of my recent cozy online forum homes... I used to also visit cgtalk, 3d buzz, 3dlinks, and lots of other similar places... but for now mattepainting.org is my main forum place since I really want to get in to matte painting, and start using some of my lighting design skills, animation design skills, and painterly skills. I tried to get in to 3d a lot a while back, and have Lightwave 3d, and lots of other programs, but I'm starting to think Matte Painting is my calling... I love cinematography, realistic paintings that set a mood, and lots of other stuff related to matte painting... A few years ago I thought I could do a lot more with 3d and tried to actually make a couple of animated movies, but found the work load for doing that way above my head technically, as far as rigs and animations and weight mapping and in a lot of other things go. I know the rudimentary ideas, and can do some of that stuff, but character animation is a bit too much for me at the moment...

I actually got a few art related interviews back about a year or two after graduation from college, but my portfolio just wasn't strong enough and the location where I am just didn't have enough art jobs available that I could slip in to... I'm located in Mid-Missouri...

Anyways, I fell in to a temp job working for University Hospital and Clinics a couple of weeks after graduation, and that turned in to a full time job for a couple of years until I moved on to another Department in the University. I'm now in the Revenue Management Dept. I spend most of my 40 hours at work reviewing payments on hospital bills from various insurances, and determine if the payments are being paid in accordance to a variety of managed care contracts and laws related to insurances and hospital billing practices... As a result I usually end up sending a ton of letters in to insurance companies on a regular basis that are either appeal letters requesting more money or overpayment letters explaining that that claims may possibly be overpaid. I usually sign most of my letters... so if you happen to work for some of those companies I send my letters to, you may want to hang on to at least the the signature part (don't keep the other parts of letter since it's probably related to confidential info)... I'm an artist and someday, maybe those signatures may be worth something?...(maybe not, but you never know).

I'm pretty good at the job, but it's a bit boring at times.. and is something that I'm pretty sure I don't want to be doing the rest of my life until retirement... so here I am making a blog and am going to try using this and a number of my other blogs, maybe cafepress, turbosquid, membership in a number of different online forums, and other art related things online stuff in hopes that maybe I can improve my art skills, get more in to illustration, maybe matte painting, and let you good people of the world actually see some of my stuff since I currently don't have any artwork in any real world galleries or museums. If you see something you like in this blog, please let me know by adding comments or contacting me by email eventually when I put a link up to my email address... I'm reluctant to do that at the moment because the main email address I've been using up til now is getting spammed out of this world... mainly because I put it in a few too easy to reach places online...... I'll keep that as a spam magnet, which is mastermesh a t gmail dot com , and will eventually put a better contact email in here or some other similar way to get more one on one contact with me, but for the mean time, please post comments... or email me via mastermesh a t gmail dot com with subject line - Jeff's Doodles.

Most of the posts from here on out in this blog are going to be showing you some of my drawing... most will be in color pencil, graphite, pen & ink, and maybe even marker, pastel or some other stuff if I get creative... well I was going to post my first image tonight but Heroes is coming on right now on NBC, so I'll have to wait and post the image tomorrow or later this week. I plan to start doodling every night after I get home from work. My wife will soon be taking college classes, and mean time she's working cross stitch. While she's doing that, I'm sitting in the same room doodling... Hoping to improve drawing skills, get some visual ideas for works I'd like to embelish later, and just getting overall better as an artist. Some of the results of that stuff will show up in this blog soon, so stay tuned.

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