Here are my 2 favorite at the moment. ! )

Thanks everyone for the nice comments. I am glad to be at SVS with all of you. I look forward to seeing what we all do in 2019.

That is a good goal. I would add that since you are already doing full images, that you should enter contests, and get critiques on your portfolio as the year goes on.

My goals for this year are:

• to finish and submit my book dummy to an agent.
• submit to art reps
• begin a youtube channel
• write a short story (600 words) each month
• Do a social media project.
• upgrade my website.

It asks you if you’re a student, and it didn’t ask anything else. I then was billed as a student. Idk, my wife set it up however, that is what she said she did without much difficulty.

I got the Adobe student price by citing SVS. I probably should have made a post about it. But yea, it worked.

@evilrobot thanks for sharing this dude! Thanks everyone on these forums, you all helped me a ton over the last couple years.

@Sarah-LuAnn My brother in law who uses InDesign everyday at his job came by and walked me through it. After having him walk me through it, I thought this would be a great class at SVS, and funny enough a few weeks before I had gotten to talk to @Will-Terry at Designer Con, and my brother in law got to meet him as well. I would love to see if they could get him to do a class for SVS on it, because it streamlines the process so much, and is the perfect sidekick for illustrators.

@burvantill I had an agent reach out too me last April wanting to see if I had any manuscripts in the works, and at the time I was too busy with other things, and so am not just finishing it up. I hope to have it sent by the end of this week. If this doesn’t work out, I will move onto getting an art rep, and spending more time on my writing on the side.

I never realized how much work goes into a book dummy. If I would have known, idk how I would have approached it differently. I started at the beginning of September, hoping it would take me a few weeks, but if I could suggest a few things after going through all of this, here are my tips:

1- learn Indesign!!!! Wow, how have I not used this from the beginning to layout my book dummy? I got a good grasp of it towards the end of this process, and it has just made everything much easier. It isn't a hard program to learn, but it can seem that way when you first start using it.

2- Get your page turns down from the beginning! I can't tell you how much time was wasted on drawing out a complete book, and then realizing a page turn doesn't work, and then having to cut images and text just so the page turn hits correctly. Dropping an image shifts everything, potentially ruining all of your other page turns. I have found that my original idea was easily ruined by not considering this right at the beginning. I started trying to make fixes which were not at the same level creatively because my mindset was to make it fit, rather than writing the best story possible. This feels like writing music with pictures, and getting the tempo down in the beginning is what makes it 100 times easier.

3- Plan other projects to do while working on your dummy. I was dumb, and thought this would be easy. I had a somewhat soft deadline which I missed, and it completely stopped me from working on anything for my social media for almost three months. This was a bad idea. I am glad that this is finally just about done (gosh I hope) so I can get back to some projects I have planned.

4 - share your work with others, because a very obvious issue might not leap out at you, and most likely it won't if it's your own project. I have had numerous people look over my work, or give me advice on where I am missing the mark.

5 - At least try to do a book dummy once, so you can get the feel of the whole process, as well as know what not to do on your next project.

Now my phone is ringing, and I have to go drive 30 minutes in the rain, even though I was putting the finishing touches on this atm (ugh)

Awesome work everybody!!!

@missmushy you have to treat it like an oil painting. You slowly build up color over the value. It is a slow process, but it produces very nice results.