If you are looking for The Rat Hole you must now update your bookmarks to therathole.tonyfendall.com, our new host.

We have made the move and hope that the new site works as much better than this one as it promises.
Cheers to almost 3 years using a wordpress powered blog system. I hope for the opportunity to continue drawing and comic-ing for many years to come.

This picture will hopefully be a lot better after the next post on Tuesday; but things aren’t quite ready yet. Hopefully the long weekend will give me enough time to polish things off and unveil the new site that we’ve been working on.

What day do you guys think would be the best for a single-weekly updating schedule? I might be going back to single updates sometime. I was doing Mondays before but I could do Fridays or Tuesdays, in keeping with the current schedule. Let me know your opinions.

I’ve been able to enrol in my classes finally as of a few days ago with much rejoicing at getting the times I wanted. In the end it was just a general help-line operator who was able to solve in a minute what had stumped even the faculty of engineering enquiries staff for over a week. -_-; Great job, Fail System. That chick deserves a pay rise. d(^-^)

In other news my copy of the Aquaria OST finally arrived. It’s really awesome; I have photos of the packaging to show some time too, but that’s for another post.

Have a fun (safe) long weekend everybody!

One of my few pictures to have a background or attention to setting at all. I don’t think it looks half bad considering.
The picture isn’t perfect though; she didn’t come out as pretty or cute as I wanted to draw. xD
Really liking my light-box though. Its awesome for getting from a rough drawing to a final copy.

Work is going fairly well for the transfer to my new host, tonyfendall.com. I’m excited to see where things go from there.
I’m also trying to get myself a buffer of pictures so that if I miss a week it doesn’t impair the updating of the site (and so I can work on other drawing related tasks in the mean time). That’s hard for me though as I usually stop drawing when I know I can update. xD

As always, comments appreciated. Always trying to get better.

P.S.
It seems that not only has my enrolment into university classes been hindered by bureaucracy; I have also been one of a few unfortunates to suffer actual bugs within the nDeva system (to be honest I’m surprised a system so shoddy is still around after all these years of potential improvement). It’s happened to the extent that I’m supposed to be able to enrol, but nDeva wont let me. I had to fill out a table and email it to the right person to have myself manually entered into my classes. Yay…. At least this way I can be pretty sure that by the end of today I will finally be pretty safe about not missing out on any spaces in my chosen (awesome) timetable.

A fairly easy-going picture inspired by Mark Crilley’s latest drawing video.
Still working on getting the ‘M’ in the signature looking smooth.. Its just too far to the right and I have to move my hand which makes the lines wiggly. >.<;
Not much to say about that though. Picture up for Friday yay!

I still haven’t enrolled in my university classes despite my having prepared and organised my timetable and gotten all the class numbers down. Why? Because the university decided that the copy of my passport that I sent in ages ago wasn’t certified properly. My Father took in the original the other day, and I have been cleared. Just waiting for them to unlock my enrolment so I can go though and finalise it; which should happen tomorrow apparently. I really hope none of the times I chose have filled up in that time!

This is (of course) Naija from the game Aquaria. The symbols on the left are the notes of the ‘energy form’ song; the form that lets Naija toast her enemies with burning balls of pure energy.
Such a difficult angle to draw… =.= but I think I managed it with reasonable success (and without making it too dodgy ).

In other news, if you didn’t already know, I got accepted into the school of Engineering at Auckland University. Woot! This is it, time to really knuckle down and actually work hard for my grades. xD

This is the first picture drawn on the lightbox my Father (and I) recently constructed. It works really well; which I’m glad of. Hopefully it will enable me to ink better and faster so I can draw more, and the test has been positive so far.
This is just one more step closer to being like a professional manga artist. Wish me luck guys; some day its possible I could be living off doing this (though the chances are admittedly slim lol). But even so, I’m happy just being able to have this for a hobby.
Now I think the next step is seeing about rolling out that new site and stuff… I’ll have to talk to my web-admin.

Until next time guys.

As promised, a day early this week since I missed Friday’s update. Unfortunately the inking didn’t go as well with this picture as the pencil looked.
But thats okay, because I now have a new drawing tool: a light box my dad (and I) made. This is a wooden frame with a glass top and a light underneath; shines light up through paper so you can trace easier. It still needs a couple of things to be really nice to use, but it is functional and I hope to use it for the next update (how exciting ).

P.S. Yeah, so I couldn’t think up a better name for the picture. xD Feel free to suggest things.

So I think I’ll finish this and use it as a one picture buffer for next week’s Tuesday. That should hopefully kick me off to a nicely sustainable start….hopefully.

Keep up the reminders/encouragement and stuff or I’ll forget that I’m on biweekly updates now. xD

P.S. The picture does actually look decent so hopefully it’ll be okay.

This is just a random sketch I did. It could represent a style of clothing found in Hiro’s past in My Story; but who knows.

So you may be thinking that I updated a day late. This is partially true, but from now on I intend to update twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays. I figure that I don’t actually draw as much as I should; and if I ever want to draw a comic I have to be drawing in a lot more of my spare time. As it is I’ve been slacking off simply because the deadline was too easy (at least, thats the theory ) so I figure I can cut down on web-surfing and gaming and spend more time being creative. Wish me luck; it’ll be interesting fitting this around work (good practice for University though, which might actually take more of my time than a full time job. >.<; )
Hopefully I can draw better pictures if I draw more too.

As far as news goes things are going fairly well. I’ve been clothes shopping for extra stuff to wear to uni (not being able to wear a uniform every day really exposes the fact that I had like 4 pairs of pants xD ) which partially inspires this picture. The most notable items being two pairs of jeans (my first jeans :O ). I hope they last, ‘cos they’re quite expensive really. <.<;

Also I got to drive a fork-lift for the first time today (and I didn’t even crash ).
The foreman asked me and another guy to come into work early tomorrow to get started on some mammoth job of removing almost all the remaining steel from inside the workshop to make way for some refurbishing or something. I don’t really want to have to wake up so early..6:50am was bad enough… *sigh* but I guess if I show up at 7 I can go home early.

Happy birthday Clawa! Hopefully if I try really hard I can make you feel as good as you deserve at least one day out of 365.

This is the first time I’ve actually managed to draw Kara looking any good, and its as an angel? xD She’s supposed to be the human form of a dragon…
I guess an Angel’s wings will have to stand in for dragon’s until next time. Quite a nice picture in my opinion. Not perfect, but photoshop does wonders. Heh, and I’m only four and a half hours late.. (holy cow its 4:30am >< )

Also, guess what totally beats that Snoopy wallpaper. (note, the wall paper version looks cooler in my opinion as I made the background fade darker, makes it really look like she’s glowing ).

Definitely time for bed. Talk more later maybe.

[EDIT2]
Same wallpaper resized and now with 100% extra Proverbs 31:30. And now with darker text.
Also changed which version was up on display here to the first wallpaper version because it looks better. xD