Ahoy! It's Friday again and this week I'm meeting my self-imposed deadline at a more respectable time than last with another fun-filled piece of children's book-type art! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... Tag! My tribute to what seems likely to be the first game of human civilization. Who among us doesn't love a good game of tag? (full disclosure: I actually didn't care for the game much myself between the spring of 1979 and the summer of 1981 as I was constantly "it" on account of my being an awkward lad with a big head and short legs making it nearly impossible for me to catch my opponents. Overcoming these obstacles, I did later regain my love of the chase.)
Based on another book concept that I have, this piece was a lot of fun to finally bring to life. Initially I didn't have any ideas for the finished look of the illustration but I knew I wanted it to be somewhat different from most of my other work. The one word that came to mind was "texture", so I tried to bring in more textures than I usually do. At my day job I've been doing more work with colored line work rather than black (for some reason people associate black lines with "cartoony" which apparently adults think is bad, even though we produce things for kids, who love cartoons. That's a whole 'nother post.) So I did it here and I really liked the result.
In other news, I spent a lot of this week trying to figure out my next promo mailer.I was planning on just putting together a small packet with a few color copies, maybe some postcards. Then I was listening to the fantastic Big Illustration Party Time podcast (hosted by Kevin Cross and Joshua Kemble) episode 39 in which the hosts, along with Thomas James of Escape from Illustration Island (an equally fantastic podcast that I have mentioned before) were discussing, among other things, possible alternative revenue streams for illustrators to pursue. Kevin Cross had mentioned the idea of printing up some quality art books that could be sold to fans but could also do double duty as a portfolio that could be sent to clients. This got me thinking about maybe doing something along those lines but on a smaller scale. So what I'm working on now is a small, printed book, digest sized with maybe four pages in it. While it would still be just a few samples it might be a more cohesive, well designed package as a book. That's the theory anyhow. I had hoped to have something to show, but I'm still designing it.
I'm thinking about doing them through maybe a print-on-demand outlet like Ka-Blam (as mentioned by Mr. Cross on BIPT) or finding somewhere I can do a short print run at a decent rate. If anyone who happens across this page has had good experiences with any of the various printing resources out there, feel free to drop me a line.
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