Yes absolutely. Maybe it also relates to "mastery" or at least competence with both an art medium and an art process we have chosen. I feel most comfortable with the ugly look if I have done the process in a familiar medium and I know where the piece is currently in development. I personally don't feel like I have a chosen medium or mediums that I know well enough yet; maybe once I learn more, the skills will carry me through the ugly phase more easily. But there will always be drafting / sketching ideas in order to explore all the options or compositions, and that part will never need to look good or finished.

I love #3 because it's easily relatable for many people young and old, but you can still be so creative with the kids' fantasy of various types of forts and their spirit of adventure while still at home over summer. I think you might be able to do a lot with the composition and different objects in the room that tell the story, too. Best of luck!

To Submit or Not to Submit

I'm trying to decide if I should submit this piece to Leanin' Tree by July 17th (or not). I thought I may as well include y'all in my mental dilemma because you might be interested in licensing to greeting card companies, too, and this may help you. (If you want to submit to Leanin' Tree, you must carefully follow their submission guidelines and calendar of submission themes, found on their website at www.LeaninTree.com)

On the one hand, by selling my designs on greeting cards I had printed by MOO (yes, like the sound a cow makes ) for a few years at about 10 regional retailers (but I'm down to 5 now due to stores closing) such as bookstores and grocery stores, I've earned over $5,000. My best-selling card designs have earned about $500 so far. If I were to print this design locally, for Halloween 2019 I would earn about $60 or more, after expenses were taken out. Some retailers pay me immediately when cards are put on shelves, regardless of sales.

On the other hand, I could submit this Halloween design on July 17, wait 4-8 weeks to hear back from Leanin' Tree (or most likely not hear back, after which time the guidelines said to assume it's not going to happen). If they want my design, I would sign a license agreement. Then the card might be changed or redesigned by other artists and given text or borders. By Halloween season of 2020, the company would have printed and distributed this card to retailers nationwide. Usually royalties are paid quarterly or at least after sales occur. Halloween falls into the 4th Quarter. Checks arrive typically within 30 days after the quarter ends. So IF Leanin' Tree wants to license the Pumpkinman design, I may receive a royalty check for (probably, based on research) 2-5% of sales, if sales do occur. No sales, no royalties. So I may or may not receive a check of an unknown amount in January 2021....long time from now. I don't know how to estimate what range I could earn from Leanin' Tree, without more information like how many of this design they would print and distribute.

The main reasons I want to license with Leanin' Tree are:

• I have loved Leanin' Tree cards since I was a child, I've even saved many of the cards I received. They are my Disney of greeting cards and it would just be cool to see my art on their cards.

• I live in a tiny house and want to explore licensing to companies with nationwide distribution rather than printing, storing, distributing cards from a (small) home.

• I have no guess, but maybe I could earn more money if I licensed my artwork...I came to this conclusion after taking SVS class on licensing, taught by the amazing Guy Francis. But I saw some greeting card artists only get like $20-50 per card design.

The reasons I hesitate to pursue licensing is because I won't be able to earn any money from this design until 2021! And the design may be changed in a way that I don't want to be associated with it (changes may be great improvements, but in various ways discussed on SVS we know it can also be bad).

Should I submit this design to Leanin' Tree and try to license, or stick to selling it on my local cards???
Edit: I just submitted it, actually. I am having "cold feet" or something, but it's done now. I will let you all know how it goes if I do hear anything. Ultimately I decided that, even if I don't earn anything, it is totally worth it for the learning experience and in case it also helps anyone here on the forums!

@Joni-Nemeth yes but I only learned through online research so far, not personal experience. I learned that Leanin' Tree greeting cards only pays royalties to artists, no advance payment as far as I can find. Luckily, no work-for-hire stuff. However, they may or may not have different payment structures for long-time artists who have licensed many designs to Leanin' Tree with high sales. I'm not sure. Based on that research, they don't take copyright (the artist keeps it). The company gets a license to use it on products. I emailed Leanin' Tree and learned that they welcome submissions that have been previously licensed or printed, as long as those images are yours, and are not currently under a license with a competing company. Which was awesome to learn!

I'll make another post in this thread about my mental dilemma regarding licensing...

Here's the final version I'm submitting to Leanin' Tree, unless you all have feedback about something I should change. This piece isn't my best work but it's been the most time-consuming single piece I've worked on. I started thumbnail sketches for it in 2018. Whew!

I want it to feel like we're out in the graveyard with a flashlight and come upon a scene humans aren't supposed to see. As though this magical, Nightmare Before Christmas Halloween version of Frosty the Snowman put out Trick-or-Treat candy for animals who befriend it; we're not sure its alive, could be just fireflies in its head and a bag of candy left for kids. Yet that squirrel in the pointy hat...and the fact that the right twig is unnaturally higher, holding up the crow instead of sagging down. Hopefully a bit mysterious! Or at least cute enough to buy off a card rack.

THANK YOU everyone for giving great feedback! I'm learning a lot at SVS.
-Amanda

Yeah I just got an email invite saying I registered. I feel dumb asking, but, did I register for something? Maybe I forgot. Busy working. What is the critique arena?

Edit: the latest version! It's funny, I just saw some of the recent comments @KathrynAdebayo @BichonBistro and they were so spot-on that I'd already added more shadows earlier today having had the same thoughts! Or actually, since I don't really do digital art, what I ended up figuring out how to do (in order to "get my moon and sky back" from the original drawing, @demotlj ) is take one of the darker scans, layer it behind this lighter scan layer, and erase the top layer in various key areas to reveal darker shadows. The richness of the sky and the moon texture is visible now, I'm very happy about that.

The eyes, however, are all digital inside - just some firefly effects which I also added to the nose and mouth. Does that look ok? I'm trying to get the pumpkinman to feel alive and in relationship to the animals rather than staring at us viewers.

Thanks everyone for the feedback. How's this version? Better?

@BichonBistro I've seen your work before! Really like the dogs. Happy to have another greeting card person at SVS - we should chat sometime I hope Leanin' Tree will like the design. It's my first attempt at licensing.

I live in a rural area of Northwest Arkansas, south of Missouri (USA). This is a cool thread!

THIS! Exactly everything you said in your post @ShannonBiondi - I have been worrying about these same points. We transitioned into an off-grid tiny house (which turned out to be broken in multiple ways, so we are still fixing various parts) and life became chaos. I keep feeling like if I practice, it needs to be the kind of practice that gets me closer to my drawing goals, not the kind of practice that just teaches me how to draw badly something unrelated to my career path. Maybe your PDF is just what I need for more structure and to feel I'm on the right track! Thank You!

You know what's funny? I worry about these things, but some of my greeting card designs (which I consider rather random and unfocused or showing poor skills) actually sell well. I put about 4 hours into a 2014 card design drawn while I had a headache and rushed to finish; the shadows are off, the bunny's fur isn't crisp because my pencils were dull, the elipse shapes are wrong etc etc Like Will Terry says, once you send it out into the universe you can't take it back even if I want to, haha! Yet this card keeps selling and selling...and I have to keep restocking it at retailers at their request... Makes me wonder how to define success. Always pondering whether to put my sub-par work out there now, or wait until I learn more and can draw even better.

Here's a photo of my sketchbook - currently I'm studying Botanical Illustration in colored pencil, and doing one drawing every day in July. The first was an orange day lily using a reference photo I took in a field of flowers. July 2nd (today) was "Dancing Cherries" from a tutorial by Ann Swan. Generally to do a good drawing in realism, I should spend a week on it (or longer). But this is just to practice daily discipline, so the challenge is to draw these faster but not uglier, and to still learn how to create better drawings, which is working for me in this challenge. Yay!