TLDR: Here is my usual photo dump of the IndieCade trip
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IndieCade was this past weekend in Culver City, CA and I'd say it was a very successful event. It was located in a few different art galleries, with indie game finalists (Closure, Aether, etc) displayed mostly on PC's. Some of them were a bit too artsy for me so I think I'll have to agree with Luis and say that you should definitely use any type of ad or sponsorship money you get from your game to put towards entering it into competitions/festivals. It will get you a lot more exposure.

The awards show was a lot more fancy than I expected, located in Sony Pictures' building. Glaiel-Gamer and I won the Gameplay Innovation award which is very promising for the future of the development of the game!

Basically we all hung out in LA the whole weekend, which is a good break from boring college.

Glaiel, Luis, Bomtoons, and Rog (I-Mockery) are all cool people. Can't wait to hang out with them again at some point.
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Art Portal seems like it's developing really well and growing with awesome artists. There are some truly amazing artists on here that have motivated me to go back to the basics of art in general. My classes at school are pretty disappointing in what I've really learned thus far (it's not really an art school), so I'm trying to budget time around classes and digital game art to learn more on my own.

Conceptart.org forums are VERY useful in learning basic and advanced concepts, with both free and premium tutorials and 'online classes', etc. I can't believe I didn't come across them sooner, and I'm just getting used to where everything is, but it is a very good reference to see a large amount of professional sketchbooks and fine art in one place. Some of the threads date way back to 2000, still being posted in, but it's still cool to see all the steps and processes some of them take to get their ideas down in paintings.

A lot of the pieces are generic 'concept art landscapes, people, portraits, still lifes, sci-fi buildings, etc' but there is still a good amount of anatomy and color theory involved, which is what I'm trying to better myself in.

It'd be cool to see more of the amazing artists on here doing more 'step by step' or even more conceptualized tutorials of their processes and super secret techniques here in the Newgrounds Art Forums.

PS. thanks tom for the rigatoni and french toast