about me

Hi there. I am Jeff Thomann. I started a number of various blogs on blogspot.com in the past on a wide variety of topics, but never got many or any of them too far because I would start something, get on to another topic, abandon the blog, and not come back to it later. I am sort of doing a “redo” here and starting over from scratch here on wordpress. I’m doing this so that I have ONE blog and only ONE blog…

I’ll warn you now… I’m a bit of an eccentric individual with a lot of various hobbies, interests, and things, so will likely post about a lot of different things over time. I’ll try to post Tags to each entry to make it easy to maneuver around the upcoming massive amount of posts about all sorts of things… I’m in to drawing, painting, 3d animation, photoshop, sketching, video gaming, role playing, theater, the tech side of movie making and theater, art history, free-to-air satellite reception, internet tv, and a lot of other things.

A little about me… I’m a thirty-something year old, married man. I live in the mid-west. I have a BFA in Studio Art,with an emphasis in painting, and a minor in Theater. I graduated from Truman State University last century (December, 1999).

I love oil painting, but don’t paint much these days due to lack of time and lack of a studio with a descent ventillation system. Instead, I doodle with color pencils in my sketch books and panels in my spare time, or mess around with creating sketchy type things in MS Paint, 3d Blender Portable, Lightave 3d, or whatever other artsy tools I can get my hands on at the time.

When I graduated from college, I had a lot of interests in finding ways of combining my backgrounds of theater and art, and found myself studying 3d animation on my own. Because of that, I got in to Newtek’s Lightwave 3d, which at the time was the only halfway descent priced 3d package on the market that could do some descent levels of animation. I never got too far in to doing a lot of in-depth animation projects with that because I didn’t have time to create a lot of stuff, and also constantly found myself having hard drive failures, cds that got busted due to improper storage, and other hardware problems that erased everything. I might get back in to it eventually.

I also like taking digital photographs of various objects and textures that I use for reference photos or to upload as reference photos for others on Turbosquid. I like Turbosquid vs other places because it’s more forgiving to people that upload things without doing a lot of editing. I like for photos that are reference shots to stay unedited so that there’s more of the direct just shot looks and feel to the photos, making it like an unblemished, raw material ready for an artist to pick it up and mold it in to something on their own.

I like playing and creating video games, but have not really done any real video game creation full scale yet. However, I have several tools to do so if I venture in to that someday – Photoshop 5 LE, Torque Game Engine, 3d Rad, 3 Impact Game Engine, Lightwave 3d, Motion Builder, and a lot of various 3d and 2d packages that I’ve picked up for cheap or free on magazine cds over the years, or outright purchased.

A lot of my time right now is invested in running my avatar’s Blueprint Consignment shop in Block A, Shop 1, of Omegaton West Habitat’s Delta Tower, in the Continent of Amethera on Planet Calypso, in Entropia Universe. Entropia Universe/Planet Calypso is a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) that you can find out more about at http://www.entropiauniverse.com. My avatar’s name is Maria mastermesh Mesh. Yes, I’m a male, and she’s a female. Think what you will. All I can say about that is that I played Diablo II before joining Entropia Universe, and Diablo encourages you to create multiple avatars, and makes the female characters a lot more powerful than the male characters in the upper levels. Also, Entropia uses real money, and gear for females is usually a lot cheaper in Entropia Universe (EU) or at least was when I first started playing it a couple of years ago. Also, I like playing in 3rd person perspective, and find it a little more fun watching a female avatars backside running all over the planet instead of a male’s back side… Not to mention, I’m straight and married, and did not want my wife to think I was playing this game as some sort of weird way of hooking up with virtual bimbos like some idiots do…

I like poetry. I would not mind writing a book or play someday. I have tried to write for nanowrimo before, but never completed the book that year since it was the year we bought our house in the same month that I was trying to do that.

I will post more later. I’m out of time right now. Thank’s for visiting. Hope to see you here again.