With one more completed illustration, my Friendly Monsters dummy is complete! Just in time for the #pbpitch party on twitter tomorrow... nothing may come of it, but then again, something might!

I left the text/speech bubbles off of this one. What do YOU think they are saying?

Theres someone I'd like you to meet--or should I say, someones.

These are the friendly monsters! (If you follow my instagram, you've already met them :-) They star in my latest picture book dummy. This is one of those ideas that hit at 4am (I was up thanks to a hungry baby) and just WOULDN'T LEAVE ME ALONE until I put it on paper. I jotted down a few lines and then was finally able to get a bit of sleep.

The first draft came out pretty easily. I let it sit, did some edits, and then I sent it off to a few different friends (and the 12x12 community) to get feedback. I love having different places to get feedback from, because I feel that when I just get it from one critique group they hear the first person's comments and then everyone just ends up agreeing with that person--not always, but fairly frequently. I like having different places to get feedback so people are thinking up their comments independently--I feel they're more helpful that way.

I don't know where I first heard this thought on critique, but its something I generally live by: If one person tells you something, its an opinion and you can ignore it if you choose. If two or more tell you independently that it is a problem (not just critique group partners chiming in, people critiquing who don't have any access to the comments of the other) then it is something you need to take a look at.

In the case of this story, having multiple critiques... didn't backfire, per se, but it did give me directly contradicting advice. From one friend, "There is too much X! I think you should take out X completely." From another "The X is nice, but I think you need even MORE X."

Oh, the joys of navigating critiques. I've at least got plenty to think about with this story, and I'll do my best to be true to what I loved about that idea at 4am.

As far as the art goes, I'm trying a slightly different style here, and LOVING it. Seriously, why didn't I try working this way before! I'm still using my cutaway linocut vector process, but really minimizing the linework. Instead of starting with the lines and then filling in the shapes and colors, I'm starting with the big shapes and adding lines only where necessary to define the form. I'm using the shadow layer to create texture instead of the line layer as I usually do. I really like how it came out. I think I'll definitely still do linework-based illustrations, but I want to do more of this approach as well.

As usual, progress images of how this one came together. What do you think?

As you can probably see in the sidebar, I am now an INPRNT artist! Previously I had used Society 6, and I still like their variety of products and have my tshirts on in that shop. However, I had heard that INPRNT was a much more artist-friendly printing service, and so far I'm finding that to be true. The site is curated so only high quality work is shown, the uploading process is simple, and I have more control of pricing. I'm sold!

There are only a few pieces in the shop so far. If there is a piece you are interested in that isn't in the shop, let me know and we'll see if I can get the piece you want uploaded.

I really want to get a couple prints of my work to see the print quality for myself, but I want to have a location in mind for where I'll hang the piece, and I don't want to jump into that too soon because... we're thinking about moving! Not far, we're just thinking it might be time to be paying mortgage instead of rent ;-).

The internet is doing better today, so I'm posting the progress images of my "Luck Favors the Prepared" illustration. Maybe I'm the only one that enjoys clicking through these, but I think it's interesting to see the steps a piece goes through as it's completed.

You can see here that I fiddled with the color scheme as I worked--from the beginning I had purple, green, and gold in mind for it, but as I got further in I realized adding red and a grey-brown would help round out the color scheme. I'm happy with what I worked out with that.

Here, on Facebook, and on Instagram people expressed interest in this image and inquired about the possibility of getting a print of it. I'll admit, part of what I imagined when I had the idea for this piece was getting a print for my own wall! So, I have opened an account at INPRNT.com and made this image available: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/sarahluannperkins/luck-favors-the-prepared/

I'll be getting a few more pieces into the shop soon, but I started with this one since it's the one people were asking about.

I completed a new piece! This one was inspired by one of my favorite artists, James C. Christensen, who recently passed away. He often created images with elaborate ships, mixed scale, and clever sayings, often in Latin. So it was something of an exercise--not exactly a master copy, and not with the goal of being entirely in his style. I wanted something in my style, but inspired by his. I think I succeeded in that at least.

I have progress images (I always think those are fun to see, maybe nobody else does though) but that will have to wait until my internet is working better--its patchy right now for some reason.