Getting Out There and Pounding the Virtual Pavement

I finally hit that point that many people dread, the cusp of college graduation when the people who were previously students go out and make their way in the world. The hardest thing for me by far is thinking "I have these skills, I have all these ideas, now what do I do?" But I have also kind of gotten over it. I've had my time to fret and fear but now I just want to work.

I know the best way to gain recognition and fans as an artist is to post often and post good work. The work that doesn't have to be groundbreaking but it does have to catch attention. A lot of webcomics start out as a neat concept and the artist gradually improves their craft. Looking at the first and last page of a web comic, no matter how skilled the artist was when they began, always shows the drastic changes an artist undergoes through time. Still, there has to be more subtlety to it than throwing noodles at a wall. Surely there are effective methods to promote yourself and improve  the reach of the work,

I talked with someone from Career Development, and the biggest piece of advice they gave me is that modeling yourself after someone successful almost always works. Then the question becomes who to model. Every artist is unique in their own way. Every creator is a specially made cocktail of influences and techniques and themes. So before I start throwing my art at the wall, I'm going to throw my voice at the wall.

I'm going to talk to various creator about how they rose to where they are. The main criteria is that they are seemingly a self-sufficient creator. This does not exclude creators in groups. The spirit of the law is that they have content that stands on it's own. That they post the content to somewhere and then people come to view it, So I don't mind talking to groups or channels. If somebody made really great work and built a fanbase and then got brought into Hiveworks or some other comics group, that's fair game.

With that in mind I have made a list. It runs from comics creators on small facebook pages to youtubers with hundreds of thousands of subscribers to people that work for channels but create really unique, stand alone work, I'm publishing this list ahead of time, but it depends entirely on the goodwill of these people to answer. Some of the people I'm going to talk to are actually entertainment sites. I almost didn't add these, but then realized that the perspective of somebody who exclusively promotes and comments on media would be really valuable to taking myself out of the artist role for a bit.

When I'm done I'm going to edit down all the notes into a list of advice and techniques. This will be helpful for me because it will make me sort through all the information I find and also may help others. Wish me luck out there!

PS: Most of these are either on facebook or have a facebook page. If they don't have a facebook page, they are on youtube.

List of Peeps:
Sad Ghost Club
NHOJ Comics
Things in Squares
Kaijira's Pixel Art
https://www.facebook.com/pixelartmosaic/?ref=br_rs
@PixelArtMosaic
How to be a great game master
museum of NES art
https://www.facebook.com/metrospect/?ref=pyml_chaining
8 bit stories
the sad ghost club

Safely Endangered
Mr. Lovenstein
Jake Likes Onions
War and Peas
Death Bulge

Catsuka
Taste of Cinema
Open Culture
Good Films make your life better
Music and Art from Mars

The Nerdwriter
Justin McElroy via Facebook.
Armored Skeptic
Shoe0nHead
Cryaotic
Above Average
Mark Crilley

Swords & Sworcery

Digital Masterwork

Some Masterworks

This is the result of my painting teaching me how to paint digitally. Next step is building my compositions.

digital painting portraits

4 portraits posted chronologically

Figure Drawing for Digital Painting

My figure drawing for digital painting. They run from longest draw time to shortest

Toy Paintings for Digital Painting

Digital Painting Work
It's here all right, these are the toys.

Evgeny Parfenov's Work

Evgeny Parfenov

When looking at digital artists it can be intimidating because the internet is so full of great digital artists. More than traditional artists they live in that crowded space. What made Parfenov catch my eye is their geometry. I love constructing organic forms out of hard man-made shapes. Here are a few of his works:

This piece extends and squares someone's neck. It exaggerates the figure in a specific way that maintains personhood but also takes the person out of the organic realm.

This piece inverts the interest of the last piece. Rather than make a person less like a person, it personifies a location. The visual interest is still drawn to the treatment of the face.

I picked this third piece because the shapes are more varied than the mostly rectangular shapes of previous pieces. The choice in shape and how they interact to construct the form are balanced so that it is a strong portrait while also being abstracted.

Illustration 4

Another Year, another round of Documentation/Posting to this blog. Instead of trying to be fancy and make multiple posts I'm just gonna go ahead and make one big post.

I was being really experimental with this. It looks cool but suffered in readability. Some day I'll have both *sheds tear*

I wanted to try my process again but color it (circuses are colorful, right?) 

This one was lot of fun. Photoshop is a lot of fun for political cartoons

 Historical comic about madam curie. Could've spent more time for sure

 Comic cover for before the lobotomy. I think my work is starting to have good parts, just not cohesion. I should try working with traditional media like charcoal and ink wash more.

final project. not as impressive as I'd like it to be but I feel like it's an optimistic 

step in the right direction.