July Art Gallery at Nickelodeon

On July 10th I finally had my art gallery open at Nickelodeon Animation Studio in Burbank. I interned there on Dora the Explorer (in it's first season) in 2000 and have been working there full time since 2002.

It's an incredible place to work...and one part of that is the art gallery they maintain in the main hallway. It's the hallway everyone walks through (from production, to artists, to celebrities. As I put my illustrations in the gallery Alfonso Ribeiro asked me for directions to the security desk to sign in) and I've always wanted to have a solo show there.

In 2007 I came back to Nickelodeon after a small hiatus (between the cancellation of Danny Phantom, the non pickup of Splattapus, and the renewal of Fairly Odd Parents, which had been originally shelved in 2005), one of the first things on my mind was to schedule a gallery. I figured in the few months between signing up for it, I'd have plenty of artwork to show off. They like to plan things very far in advance which meant the gallery was booked up through the end of 2008...and the first date available was July of 2009. It seemed like forever away, but at least it would give me plenty of time to work on my art.

the oldest piece in my gallery - from 2006 - it's a watercolor of a chinstrap penguin

Cut to April of this year - I've had the gallery on my mind on occasion, but I usually didn't think about it - and by April it was the furthest thing from my mind. Luckily for me, I happened to wake up one morning and it struck me like a revelation. Did I have a gallery still? I hadn't heard anything in all these long months, so I figured I'd better check into it.

The very last piece I did for the show (finished on Thursday morning)

What's nice is that I haven't been wasting my time. I had two different areas of interest that I wanted to explore - vinyl toys and children's books. I switched back and forth between ideas and when I checked with the person in charge of the gallery, I had over 35 pieces that I was confident I could use in the show. And since it was only April, I still had three long months to draw like mad.

The gallery right before they announce the opening

The next thing I knew it was June, and instead of drawing and painting (digitally) I had to turn my attentions to finding a color printer place and finding matts and frames for all the art. It's quite a daunting task to accomplish, so I'm glad I had my wife there to help me out. Some time in the next week I'll upload each illustration individually, and you'll see how much of a help she was (everything not in a black frame and black matt is her choice...I can do the art, but I'm terrible at being creative with frames).

Here's me in the gallery after having finished putting up all the titles and prices.

Here's the food spread (thai food and fruit)

The full gallery - wine on the right and thai food on the left

Zebra Berries for Mommy (cover) and other children's book art

A few of my early Adelia pieces

Igor Penguin and a couple of (older) penguin watercolors

Some of my early Penguin watercolors (from 2006-2007)

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Some of my square animal children's book (style) illustrations

Some of the newer Adelia pieces I've done (between late 2008 - early 2009)

It was a pretty great show. I spent half the time leading up to the show wanting it to be over and then in eager anticipation. On one hand I just wanted the art up but didn't want all the attention, but on the other hand I was looking forward to seeing people enjoy the work that I've spent the last two years producing. The thrill part of it won out and I had a good time.

Drawn by all the free food and the chance to hang out (as well as all the nice art, or so I was told) - there were a lot of people. The food was all gone before 6 (but there was alcohol until the very end...so they had the important stuff covered). It was a lot of fun and I was completely flattered by all the positivity and compliments.

One of the pieces that sold on Friday night.

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It was nice to see it all come together after all this time. I ended up with 52 paintings - between my watercolors and digital illustrations.

IF: Shaky and wobbly swing

I don't know if you've ever done this when you were a kid - but when someone was deep in thought on a swing....you charge at ramming speed and push them up and over. Now, when they're on board (or paying attention) they just start swinging and everyone has a good time. But when you catch them off guard, the swing goes all shakey and wobbly as they freak out and try to stay on (sometimes you just end up pushing them to the ground, and that's even funnier). That's what shaky said to me and that's why i drew this picture...

This is the finished version

Short Stumpy Giraffe: Revision

I changed a little bit about this piece - it was pretty much done, but just needed a little push. I added tears to his eyes to make him a bit more pathetic - and then I set about the time consuming task of self coloring the lines - it's not such a hard thing if you're doing the entire illustration in photoshop - but I like to keep my vector lines (that I draw in Adobe Illustrator) in tact, which means that any changes to the lines have to be done in Illustrator.

So here it is - in all it's finished glory - I just have to print it out and frame it...and it'll be ready for the gallery show (all the artwork is due this thursday morning at 10:00)...after two years of waiting, and forgetting, and working very hard...the show is finally here!

Microstock earnings for June, 2009

This month was the second in a row where we had no time to upload new images. We had a total of 9 images uploaded to Shutterstock (three were just variations on another design) but none of them really did anything. Tracey did this image:



Which I was quite impressed with - it was done entirely in Adobe Illustrator - and it looks so photo realistic to me - and while we've had some bites on it (downloads), it hasn't taken off like I expected it to. Hopefully some chocolate strawberry eaters out there will start taking notice and download it (and download it a lot)...

Shutterstock was still our highest earner with 149.74. It's still the best site as far as consistant downloads and it's the easiest to get accepted to (as well as having the most lenient of file acceptance rate of any of the microstock companies)

What surprised me was Dreamstime - they do a contest every month and the topic for June was cooking - so I whipped up a little drawing of a boy making pancakes (and Tracey colored it) - it didn't win the contest, but yesterday it was downloaded for 25 dollars! It's the single highest amount we've received for a file, and it pushed Dreamstime into second place with just over $70 for the month. http://www.dreamstime.com/res1220499-stock-images

the third place finisher was Istockphoto - like Dreamstime, they were the only two microstock agencies to end with a higher total than last month. Our uploads are very slow on these sites (only 3 for dreamstime and 5 for istockphoto), but it hasn't affected our download rates (which have also gone up on these two sites)...

The rest were kind of disappointing...Stockxpert had consistant downloads all month long - but it was only 1 or two per day - which ended up at a low 9 dollars...and the rest of the sites are barely worth talking about...

Whoops - I did forget (for the second month) to list Fotolia on this list. They made a comeback in terms of monies - just under $20 for June. But the downloads are so few and far between...it was rather disappointing to ever check the totals. The only good thing is that the choco strawberry was downloaded 3 times (for a total of $3.90)...hopefully next month it'll pick up - but i doubt it. What sucks is that this site was only accepting vector art as svg files (a terrible vector format) and this last month they finally caught up with all the other agencies and started accepting things as eps or ai files (the accepted Adobe Illustrator versions of vector art), but since I had already uploaded the majority of our stuff as svg files, I expect we're missing out on a lot of sales because they're all the old format.

Anyway - that's the month of June for microstock...once again it was nice to clear $300 (with the addition of fotolia) without having to put in any work. That's why I got into microstock in the first place...was that way my illustrations could sit around collecting me small amounts of money instead of dust...so far, so good!

IF: Worn Out - Trying and failing...

"Evolution wiped out the short and stumpy giraffe"
11x14 - Lines drawn in Adobe Illustrator
Color painted in Adobe Photoshop

I made these characters with extremely short arms and legs - the only reason being (besides looking weird with long limbs) is that shorter arms looked cuter. But because of that I seem to only think up pictures where one of them is at a disadvantage because of it. In this picture I wanted to get a different angle than what I usually draw (three quarters front view) - so I chose a down view to help accentuate the giraffe's shortness.

I also wanted to do this one because giraffes are very iconic in their markings - and I hoped that even though I compressed it into a cube, that it would still read as a giraffe.

Anyway - this is yet another piece for my show - I'm still looking at it as not finished, but it's almost there...

IF: Worn Out - Ferocious Elephant Charge

The little guy is all worn out...



This is another piece for my show...it turned out a lot better than I expected - I originally wanted to do a series of one character drawings at 5x7 or something - but these were turning out so well that this is going to be a 11x14 monster! Well...that's a monster for me...

News!!! - I just found out this image is featured on Illustration Friday for last week! Thanks a lot! I really liked this illustration and I'm very flattered that they chose me. And thanks to all of you who have (and who might) leave a comment!

And, as I mentioned above, this is a digital illustration for my art show at Nickelodeon (in Burbank, CA), which starts next week. I'm going to sell prints of all of my pictures...and in case anyone wants to buy one the tired elephant pictured above - you can purchase it through paypal - each print is 11x14 and is $15:

Tired Elephant - 11x14 print

IF - Drifting: Adelia's Heart

As I move forward in trying to build up a children's book illustrator portfolio (the long term goal) and the small gallery show at Nickelodeon Animation (short term...which is coming up way too soon), I'm drifting further and further away from the character that I originally created.

This little gal was supposed to be the next Olivia - and then I just couldn't come up with a decent enough story - I've done up a dummy and sent it out to several companies, but no luck...

I did this drawing originally in watercolor, a couple of years back. Then, as I was developing my children's book I was experimenting with a style of shading/texture that worked for a time, but I've drifted past that as well. This is the original photoshop color (with hatchey texture):

And this is the new version. As with the original, the lines were created in Adobe Illustrator and then pasted into photoshop and colored. The main difference (as they're almost exactly the same color and light source) is the coloring technique. I've moved on to more of a painterly brush stroke look. And that's where my current drawings are. It's been difficult to leave brush strokes in...as my instinct is to completely smooth out the color...but while it's a struggle, I think I'm making headway and it's looking pretty decent...

Also - the color is slighty less saturated - the reason why is that I did the first one in RGB color and the new version in CMYK (rgb for web, and cmyk for print) - as I'm printing these out for the show...and I think the feet (in the original) were way too bright yellow...

IF: drifting - Angry Bear Attack

I'm still working on images for my gallery show...I started with the Parade which had so many characters - but it seems that the more pieces I work on, the more I'm drifting towards doing illustrations with just one character...

I have two more of these in mind - I just watched 3:10 to Yuma, and I want to do a cowboy character...we'll see how it goes...

All the lines were created in Adobe Illustrator, and the color was done in Adobe Photoshop.

Escalating the juggling - the story unfolds...

So I've done this piece - which I'm posted already - but in an attempt to push the boredom on the panda's face, I changed his eyes to have him look away...



I really thought that worked.

In doing this piece - I had conceived it in two parts (originally it was three, but I don't have the time to do another one as the gallery show is in two weeks!)...the above illustration was part one...the jester isn't really hacking it...

My second piece was originally going to include chainsaws, but seeing as how this was going in a gallery where children would see it (at Nickelodeon), I decided to do a tiny bit of self editing...I know the gallery doesn't let you put up paintings with guns in them...and while I don't really know their rule on chainsaws, I figured it was smarter to take it out and go with a bowling pin. Plus, it was pointed out to me, that the chainsaw might take away from the thrill of seeing the jester juggling a cat.



Now that's some fine juggling!

IF: Craving - excitement...

I've conceived this piece in two parts - this is the first picture where the 'king' is bored with his jester. (and in the second picture, which I have yet to draw) The king, craving excitement, has his jester up the ante by juggling something more fantastical (I'm thinking chainsaws...but we'll see)...

So anyway - this is the first picture, and I'm going to work on the second picture, hopefully finishing it by this weekend...




EDIT:


I had a couple of (people I respect give) some constructive feedback about this piece - so I redid several bits - I changed the ball colors that the skunk is juggling (as well as moving the top ball down a little bit, so it was overlapping some of the rock background and not framed by one of the rocks), I also changed a bit about the carpet - moved it away from the wall, made the circles on the right hand side smaller, and made the pattern blend in more...I like the changes, and I think it's a stronger piece!