Posting here from now on:
the illustration deadline

A Single Man
I saw this movie Friday...it was GREAT. Really great. I always appreciate a movie where there's more to enjoy than just the acting/writing/story...this is one that's just a total joy to see. What would you call that...cinematography? I usually call it the movie's "aesthetic"...It's something that's true of many of my favorite movies, like Lost in Translation, and The Royal Tenenbaums.
This isn't really my usual style. I'm not sure how I feel about this...I mean, I could make one billion of these, and I think it's a pretty popular sort of style, but it doesn't feel very unique, and I'm certainly not pulling it off as well as a lot of great illustrators with a similar style. I need to give this more thought and do more experimenting.
Also, I've been working mostly on Illustrator recently, but I did this one totally in Photoshop. That means giving up a lot of things I've been doing in Illustrator with texture, but it means a whole host of other great things, like getting to keep pencil-y-ness without pulling out all of my hair. Always a good thing, right?

Ok! Here are the things I've been doing lately to promote myself, directly or indirectly.

1. Joined illustration mundo. You can view my little page-y here.
2. Started linking to my portfolio site whenever I comment on other people's blog posts.
3. Sent out my first query letters. (Then, became super depressed when I realized that in a letter to a magazine I totally want to work with, I included a horrific mistake in the letter. LAME.)
4. Sent out my first few emails to magazines.
5. Submitted my info to 15+ different agents. Then, learned about rejection from most of their responses. (Probably best to learn that feeling sooner rather than later, right?)
6. Ordered/received postcards and new business cards from moo. They're gorgeous. Some of them have been addressed, and are ready to go once I buy postcard stamps. Some of the postcards will just get dropped into new query letters once I verify addresses/names tomorrow.
7. Designed half of the response postcards that will get stamped, addressed, and put into query letters so editors can send them back, letting me know if they're interested. (I still have to design the front of the postcards.)
8. Scoped out some projects that will let me practice design/illustration work for free. I have an idea in mind for the Haiti Poster Project...screenprinting! Whoo!
9. Read an extra thousand advice/FAQ pages on various illustration-related blogs. Then got depressed over chances of success. Then came back slightly, remembering that success is linked to how hard I work...right?
10. Created 2 complete pages from the book I'm working on with my friend Lizzie, who wrote all the text and is giving me lots of help illustrating it. We even got a really positive response from an illustration agent! So hopefully over the next month or two, we can put together a dummy book etc etc etc...
11. Printed out a ton of copies of pdf's of my work, for sending to various magazines/publishers, depending on what they specialize in. I have an Education sheet, a Childrens sheet, and a general Editorial sheet.
12. Printed out a nice full sheet of each image I've made, and put it in a portfolio.

I'm also doing lots of indirect work, creating a huge document with all sorts of contact info, mostly gleaned from the Artist and Designer Handbook, but somewhat from some of my own research as well. Still to do:
1. Generate a list of blogs to write to about my work.
2. Make those calls to magazines to verify contact info.
3. Work on Haiti Poster.
4. BE MORE PRODUCTIVE. I haven't created anything in what feels like aaages. I need to make more new images and improve my portfolio.

Hello! My portfolio is here!!!

There are not enough exclamation points in the world to declare how excited I am about this. It was not a pleasant journey. I made some pages from scratch, using dreamweaver, and got them all uploaded, painfully, to my hosting site. Some of the pictures wouldn't load - namely, a pretty sidebar I had made with clickable pictures that took the user to various parts of the site. I didn't know what to do. Plus, in general I just wasn't loving how it looked. So I gave in to the far-off whisper of indexhibit, the CMS (?) responsible for some of my favorite artist porfolios (namely, meg hunt and Lizzy Stewart). I love the clean, white spaces and kept reading how easy it is to set up one of these accounts. And IT IS.

Ok: Disclaimer. It was super stressful/scary/hair-pulling-out for like an hour or two there, but not because of indexhibit. Rather, because I couldn't follow directions. Once I sorted out my issues and spoke to a lovely godaddy.com representative, and waited a little bit for my site to be moved to a linux server, all was right with the world.

And now! I'm up and running! Come check it out! Let me know what you think!!!

I'm hard at work on portfolio-related activities. I made the self-portrait above to put on my contact page. Yay! It's very exciting/scary.

Frank Chimero did a series of inspirational posters "to help clarify a few thoughts I had about the creative process". You can see them here. *The one I always think about when I'm procrastinating reads:

Remember! Looking at design is not making design

I desperately need to remember this. I could happily spend hours and hours looking through illustrators' portfolios online, looking at good illustration blog/sites (illustrationmundo is a current fave), and oohing and aahing over a pool of illustrations on flickr. I need to produce more, and "look" less.

Above: A little illustration I did based on a drawing I did of two of my students during class this week.

*I was totally unsure about just lifting that pic off his portfolio, so I only put the words up here...I know I have to save the picture to my desktop and not just link to his, but somehow, for something that fantastic, I don't know...Just putting it up here feels totally wrong. Go look at it. It's awesome.

An illustration inspired by a recent article in the New York Times about a collection of essays all about The Big Lebowski. (Look! A background!)

As it's New Years Day, some goal-writing for the new year is in order...
1. Take more risks - ie, start working freelance.
2. Get more organized - particularly when it comes to finances.
3. Make more thoughtful purchases - no more clothes hanging around for months in the closet with the tags still on!
4. Have my artwork displayed somewhere...A coffee shop, a gallery, a book store, whatever.
5. De-clutter - I have a move coming up in the summer, my first in 4 years, and I've amassed waaay too many belongings. Some things will be donated, some will be sold, but I need to start moving on that, because the clutter is weighing me down!

And I am not calling these "resolutions." The word makes me shudder. I don't resolve to do these things. I aim to do them. It's an important difference!

I don't think this is the most original idea I ever had for an illustration, and not the best execution ever either. But I am trying to produce more, and trying to stick with certain techniques and within a certain style, and that is working out well. I'm off all week so let's see what else I can make happen!

Playing with texture = tons of fun. Today I had a bit of an epiphany in Illustrator, realizing the enormous potential of the Brush tool. Somehow, though, adding these textures makes my computer/Illustrator enormously tired...I mean, not that that will stop me or anything, but it sure is a pain!

Meanwhile, in life, I have a big break coming up and plan on going all out producing illustrations so I have enough that I'm proud of to put together an online portfolio in January. I currently own cleverviolet.com, but it forwards to my etsy site...I wonder - should I use that as my portfolio site, or look into buying my full name? Or both??? What do you think?

I'm working on lots of projects all over the place, trying to build up the number of pieces I can put in an online portfolio later this month...eek! I am happy with this new one but there's so little time left till my Christmas/New Year's deadline, and so few pieces that I'm happy enough with! I gotta keep moving.

It makes me happy when I create a new illustration and promptly hate everything else I've done. It indicates progress, right? Here I was trying to do something that's mainly digital, but without any fake textures...I don't know, when I add textures, it's so clearly, "Hello! Look! She dropped in color, pasted in a texture, and played around with some options! Whee!" Bleh.

This feels better, somehow.

The style is coming along more. Kind of. Yes. I'm experimenting more with photoshop, putting illustrator work on hold for now. I read a tutorial on how to isolate pencil sketchings, and have been a lot more successful with it than I expected at first. I love all the smudges that are visible!