Beginnings - Part 3 - Balancing Acts

A continuation of -this post- from several months ago.

I've been meaning to get back to this topic for months now, but just haven't found the spare time. Adjusting to being a mother as well as squeezing painting time in hasn't left me with quite as much ~other~ time, like rambling in here.

So anyway, I left off last time at where I got my first few illustration jobs. Parallel to that however I was doing something else as well, which I think separates me a little from my other artist peers. Most of the other artists I know seem to fall into those who mainly make their living doing work for publication/commissions/illustration or working for a large game or movie company doing concepts or in-house art; and those artists who don't bother with the entertainment market and instead focus purely on licensing and print sales. Basically artwork that is dictated by someone else's needs and designs, vs. your own artwork which you then need to find a way to market and sell (if you intend to make a living out of it). Somehow I managed to land straddling in between with one foot on either side.

With the former, your self-marketing approach is to focus on the art directors. The ADs and their companies worry about the publicity and distribution of their products (featuring your artwork). However, landing the jobs and keeping your pipeline full is your responsibility. It can get tiring tracking the various jobs and commissions and making sure your schedule is not over (or under) booked, and keeping yourself on track and not procrastinating. Also your art becomes focused on realizing other peoples' concepts.

The latter model gives artistic freedom (of a sort). You're free to draw and paint whatever your heart desires; as long as you can figure a way to make it something your audience will want to hang on their wall. If you're fortunate, you can find that audience; and then things become a balance of staying true to your own artistic vision while resisting the temptation to just create "easy to sell" art. The key is to love what you are creating. If you ever feel pressured, unhappy, or forced to do subject matter then it is time to re-examine why you're doing it in the first place. If I didn't love painting what I paint...I might as well go back to getting a programming job. The down-side of this business model is that it's time intensive. You become a retailer of your own artwork: maintaining a website shop, traveling to shows to sell, dealing with shipping and licensing, etc.

Being in between these two has let me enjoy illustrating for publication the subject matter that I actually want to do. I don't have to maintain a constant packed commission pipeline because the other part of my business gives me the freedom to choose the jobs that really appeal to me. This results in me producing better artwork. Subject matter that you connect to is always going to inspire the creation process so much more.

A rather long aside, but to get back to my original tale about how I managed to find this path:
Parallel to sending out my portfolio to art directors of various game companies, I started my website. I also started posting artwork on Elfwood, which was only a couple years old at that time. I donated some artwork for Thomas to use on the web design, and for that favor I got links from the front page of the site to my gallery, and from there to my website. That was the beginning stream of traffic I had directed to Shadowscapes.com. Now there are many other gallery options as well - Epilogue, DeviantArt, GFXartist, etc, from which to gather traffic. This is good and bad I think. More options as an artist. But more options dilutes the viewers as well. I think that the successful results I saw were due in part to the limited websites of this sort, which focused attention. Similarly when I began to post prints to Ebay, the smaller size of it in 1999 meant my listings weren't just floundering under everything else.

I get asked by young artists how to establish themselves. I'm afraid there's no easy answer; my own path has been meandering and a result of serendipitous timing and emerging markets on the internet. I think that each artist has to find their own way - and in part the artwork itself dictates how that will happen. Even at the same place and same time, someone with a different style and voice would have to go about it in another fashion.

Two and a half years into my "two year post college plan" I found myself still in my software job. By this time however I had stretched out various tendrils in several directions. I was getting regular commission work from various game publishers, and I had a reasonable revenue stream coming from my website and ebay. It was hard to think of quitting software though. Health insurance, stable predictable job, stock options! But then some calamitous events in my personal life triggered me into finally quitting software and stepping into what seemed terribly scary - self employment, in 2001. I actually resisted completely severing all ties at first and managed to get Plumtree Software to agree to give me an extended leave of absence. However, I never returned.

For the first few years I did a whole lot of commission/game work. There's a sparkle and excitement to seeing your work in print. After a while though, that sparkle wore off and I realized that though being in print was a thrill, doing artwork that had meaning to me, AND that could be in print was even more amazing. At that point I started being more picky about what jobs I took on, deciding that it was better to dedicate my resources to personal work in between commissioned projects, and only taking on the jobs that really called to me.

... Perhaps to be continued again sometime in the (near) future. Any topics in particular you'd like to hear about? Please let me know!

Beginnings - Part 2 - Burning the Midnight Oil

A continuation of -this post- from several weeks ago.

In 1998 I started working full time as a software engineer at Plumtree Software, in San Francisco. So the funny thing about me and software is, that I didn't actually hate it. There's a part of my brain that really enjoys problem solving. In a way, I look at art and the creation of a painting the same way. Composition and color are all part of a puzzle that you piece together organically. I had a blast living in San Francisco as well, and the office was six blocks walking distance from my apartment. Which meant minimal "commute" time, so that I could do other things (i.e. paint).

I did initially consider going to the Academy of Art in SF, instead of taking a programming job. It would be a chance to take art classes that wouldn't sneer at anything that looked remotely representational; since they did have an illustration department. But when I realized that route would put me in debt about the same amount my starting programming salary would give me...I decided instead to go with programming.

Rather than a compromise to my goals, I formulated what I wanted to achieve in the next two years (which would be the time I would otherwise spend in a Masters program at the Academy of Art). Two years to get a serious portfolio together, start approaching publishers, get my website together, attend conventions, and market market market myself.

Well that was the plan. And it did kind of happen like that, more or less.

At the time, most of my portfolio consisted of digital art. I got really excited about working digitally during college. And actually I really cringe at the sight of some of that older work now. It's a testament to what daily practice for 10+ years can do when I look at the old-art and the now-art. Anyway, I went to the bookstores and game stores and browsed through all the role playing game books and anything else that looked of the sort I would like to do. I wrote down the publishers names. Went home and investigated them on the internet to find their submission guidelines. When there were no guidelines to be found easily, I would call and ask for the art director, or for information about art submissions. I aimed pretty high initially, and among the first few publishers I contacted was Wizards of the Coast.

The art director of Magic: the Gathering actually got back to me. I still remember how dazed I was when I got a response. He told me (...wait for it...) that it looked pretty good, BUT (...and you'll never guess what the "but" was...) he didn't really use digital art. "Try working in some traditional medium and come back to me in a few months with your portfolio again," he told me. Yeah, pretty funny now to think that digital wasn't really an acceptable medium huh?

So while the rest of the illustration community has gone from traditional mediums -> digital over the past decade, that is the story of how I did the direct opposite and went from digital -> watercolor (and have never regretted)!

Anyway, I really wanted to do some M:tG cards, and his response had been very encouraging. That week when my uncle Horatio Law was visiting and we went gallery-hopping through SF, there was one artist in a little gallery that caught my eye - Daniel Merriam. I was immediately captured by the brilliant jewel-tones of his watercolors. I had never imagined that watercolors could be so vibrant and beautiful. And remember I hadn't even been allowed to consider watercolors as an option during my Berkeley days.

That night I realized my preferred technique with acrylics (many glazed layers) was actually much more suited to watercolors, so I pulled out some old paints and did this piece over the next few nights. "Dreamcatchers" - I worked with basically only two colors; I figured I'd keep things simple after not having ever considered watercolors as a viable option all these years.

I was pretty happy with the results. In fact, over the next few months I fell in love with watercolors, and started doing fewer and fewer digital paintings in favor of watercolors.

By the way, all this was happening while I was working super long-hour weeks at Plumtree Software. Basically I would codecodecode all day, then go home and paint between 2-4 hours every night. Somehow I had time for a boyfriend (he was a software consultant...he worked longer hours than me!) and flamenco 3-4 days a week. Honestly I don't know how I did it. It makes me exhausted just to remember it now. But I had that two-year deadline I had set for myself and I really wanted to meet that goal.

So after a few months of watercolors and a few acrylics, I sent in a new portfolio to WotC again. The AD told me he was happy to hear from me, and by the way, "We do accept digital paintings now too." (Doh! Though as I said, no regrets!) And then he assigned me three cards to do. I was skipping for joy that day.

I eventually did some artwork for Forgotten Realms as well, and art directors from some of the other companies I had written to and mailed my portfolios out to also started getting back to me. One company that approached me through my website (I'll get to that in my next posting on this topic) had a new game concept ChessMage. They commissioned a few pieces, and wanted to debut their concept at GenCon. They wanted me to appear with them at GenCon, and it sounded like a perfect opportunity to me. That year I went to GenCon for the first time, and in between wandering around wide-eyed at this HUGE convention (compared to the tiny 2000 attendee one I had gone to locally) I did actually manage to show my portfolio to numerous other art directors and get work out of the trip. Alas ChessMage did not live on, but they did have a very interesting concept that I've seen played out among many bigger ccg companies in the intervening years.

.to be continued.

Perseid meteor shower to watch right now!

(Part 3 - Continuation of this thread can be found -here-)

Beginnings - Learned? Self-taught?

The question is often posed whether I studied art somewhere or was self-taught (and if the former, what suggestions and recommendations I can offer). The answer to that always seems rather complicated. I took many art classes all my life, whenever the opportunity presented itself. If I had the option for an ~art class~ or ~something else~ I invariably chose the art. Electives throughout middle and high school. Summer courses. And when I was at University of California in Berkeley from 1994-1998 studying Computer Science, I did also snag an art degree as well (more on that later).

So I've always had a creative background and exercised my drawing and painting skills. I feel that all of that laid the groundwork for basic concepts that I take for granted these days - like color theory, blending, perspective, composition. If it wasn't exactly focused or intense studies of any of these, it was at the very least an understanding and integration of the vocabulary of art into the way that I think. You don't ever think about learning to speak your first language - it just happens as you develop; I feel that way about art and how the concepts of color and light are simply a part of how I think.

My painting style today was not the result of any dedicated course of study, nor reference to technique books. I never sat down and specifically took any class on watercolors or illustration. In this way I do feel that I am self-taught. But to use that term "self taught" seems to deny the wealth of disparate experiences and backdrop of artistic expression that guided me to evolve and grow as an artist.

I was at University of California in Berkeley from 1994-1998, studying Computer Science and doubling in Art. I'm frequently asked by students if they should consider going to Berkeley for Art. I didn't even go to Berkeley for art. I went there for their wonderful Computer Science program because at that time I had every intention of following a sensible career course and entering the workforce as a software programmer. I had been convinced by the time I entered college by various high school career advisers that making a living with art was a hopeless endeavor. My choice of school was purely to get myself an education with good career options (also I did grow up with a computer-geek father, and so I actually do enjoy programming). Art would be side hobby.As I mentioned earlier though, I was always picking up art classes on the side when opportunities arose. I began taking so many art electives that I eventually decided to simply double major.

What kind of art classes were these though? Certainly nothing of the sort you would expect from seeing my art these days. I spent those four years smashing bottles and gluing them back together, throwing paint and drips onto canvases, digging through junkyards to put together found-object art installations.... It amazed (and saddened) me to find how quickly freshmen learned to look at any work that was remotely representational and say with a faint sneer to their voice, "It looks illustrational." (Which was the worst possible thing imaginable!) I found it ironic that in the name of being open-minded and accepting of all forms of Art, they immediately shut out so many possibilities, and closed their thoughts to a whole arena of expression. I was disappointed, but determined to make the most of the experience, and not to close my mind to these more abstract forms of art. I threw myself (and my paints) wholeheartedly into it. (Incidentally, we were not allowed to use watercolors in any of the classes. It was deemed "an illustrator's medium").

And then in my spare time at night after my assignments were done, I did illustrations ("illustrational!!!!") for various Fanzines. I can't even remember the names of all of the fanzines any longer, except for one Moonlight Masquerade. They were distributed by snail mail. No ezines yet in those days. Labors of love!

That whole experience has shaped my opinion of art school. I believe that the most vital key to making your way into the world as an artist is not found in any class. I'll grant that there are many classes and schools out there that are vastly different from my personal experience; but courses can't put the drive to create art in your heart. And daily practice - forcing your eyes to see and your hands to understand how to make that translation from eye to mind to paper, is better than any teacher.

Even as my Berkeley graduation date approached, I still thought that I would be a software programmer, art hobbyist; but I distinctly remember when that changed in my head. I had just returned from a career fair, talking with recruiters from all kinds of tech companies. This was at the height of the dot-com BOOM! Programmers were in such high demand that some companies were offering bonuses to students to leave their studies and just come to work now. I had many promising leads.

All that evening I found I was inexplicably depressed. I couldn't understand the cause of it, for my prospects were looking fairly good. It was only when I realized that though I did enjoy programming, I did not want to do it for a living; that I wanted to draw and paint. Art was vital to my happiness and I couldn't conceive of it being secondary any longer. With that realization I took a few days to weigh my options and finally formulated a plan. I would take a software position, and the relative comfort and security of that job would allow me to have the funds to pursue art. It would afford time to put together a portfolio and seriously explore avenues. I had only begun to go to some of the local smaller conventions. I wanted to travel further afield to some of the larger shows I had heard of (GenCon! Dragoncon! Comic-Con!) The programming knowledge came in handy in that I was able to get started right away with writing my own website. Nifty programs that helped non-programmers create webpages were another thing that didn't really exist yet at the time.

.to be continued. Getting towards the midnight hour!

(Part 2 - Continuation of this thread can be found -here-)