The next day after work, I unplugged everything and started to get down to it. when I had it out on my coffee table my initial reaction was "yup! overheated". Mainly because I was flabbergasted at the amount of dust that had accumulated over the vents and fans. I have never seen a computer I've owned with so much dust (and I once went 2 years without cleaning one before). It was appalling. Every fan was pretty much covered. It was like cleaning out the lint tray of a communal dryer. After a good cleaning, I plugged in just the bare essentials (bootdrive, videocard, mem, and cpu fan) and tested. Still no go. So I yanked the battery out of the motherboard, let it sit for a bit and reinserted. Good as gold. I wasn't overly stressed since I still had my old rig's stuff sitting in my closet that I could have used as a hold over til the fall when I build a new box (since there aren't too many games out that i want to play on PC, much less any that require a serious build out). Still, I am very happy that my computer has managed to sidestep death for at least a little while. Meanwhile, I removed 2 of my case fans (still have 2 extra ones in) to hopefully keep the dust down, and to let venting do the job instead...
Saturday afternoon, I started with a quick sketch up of what I had in mind on the canvas. Just enough detail to get a good feel for it, but obviously not all the detail I would end up using. Notice I had a different idea for what I would do with the Reaper.
It was a fun exercise. Still have a lot of growth ahead of me. (At least I hope) Mostly, it was really great just relaxing and painting away. It felt really good. It was a calming and rejuvenating experience.