I am very tempted to draw Will Terry into this image......

Here it is! The art that will be going out on my cards this year!

A little background on the piece: I was lucky enough to witness a scene similar to this one a few weeks ago. Our local elk herd was coming down into the valley during a cold front that eventually turned into snow. The herd huddled up near the fence I was watching them from behind and the colors of the grass and mountains were so striking behind them, I just had to paint it. Have you ever seen animals like this up close in large numbers? It's so impressive!

If you'd like one, feel free to sign up at any level on my patreon by the 5th of December so I can get them all ordered and sent out in time for Christmas! It will come with a little handwritten note from me on the inside as well as a quick doodle.

Everyone's stuff looks so good! I found my india ink before I found my pens so I doodled up this guy. Dunno if this counts for inktober, everyone else is posting really refined penwork...but oh well, here it is!

My entry for the September contest - Everyone was shocked to see her come to school on a gryphon!

After thinking about it, I think my favorite piece this year was the one I did in March for Sterling Hundley's Live Ideation class here at SVS. I didn't get to go to art school, so working with someone like him was something very out of my reach. But because of SVS I was able to have a little slice of what that experience might've been like, and I learned so much in such a short amount of time.

Just wanted to post an update to say a big THANK YOU to everyone who responded and gave input to this thread. Because of your advice I was able to successfully negotiate a new contract in which I have rights to my artwork, and adjust the payment for the project to $6000, double what she originally offered me. I would not have had the direction to achieve that without your help, I am most grateful to you all.

Oh dear, haha. I'm going to have to practice and do something about this....great challenge Jake! I will be doing more, it was a good exercise. Hope it's okay if we hashtag multiple pictures. I intend to improve upon this first one.

Cool thread! I'd love a critique, if you need an image for a video please feel free to use this one. My instagram is Rainechaser, probably the best place for people to find me right now.

Concept: Rhys the gryphon has just landed on an unexplored island when suddenly two long shadows appear on the sands before him.

Hey all! I'm working on my piece for the Draw 50 Things challenge and here's the comp thumbnail that I've got right now:

I've been staring at it for a couple of hours now working on it and would love some input. I feel like it looks a bit dark at the moment, but that will be changing with color. Here's a quick thumb of my plans for the lighting/hues to illustrate kind of what I mean, though I'll still probably lighten it a bit underneath:

I am mostly concened that I am overlooking some proportion/perspective/tangent issue that I just can't see because I've been too close to it.

So instead of sleeping on it and looking at it tomorrow, I'm just gonna submit it here for you guys to tell me what you spot, haha.

Working on a piece for a recent book commission. Am still mostly at the thumbnail stage, just started the paintover, but figured I'd share since it's been a while since I've been around. Missed this place and the community, my life has just been nuts.

Concept is a creepy retelling of classic fairy tales. This one is a vampiric Red Riding Hood. This is my first time working with an author, it's been...interesting. But they approved the thumbnail, so I'm rolling with it, haha. Definitely some stuff that still needs fixing such as Red's arm and the placement of the cape which I'm not happy with. And still messing with lighting, but overall I'm moderately happy with it so far.

@LauraA Oh, that is interesting, I hadn't noticed the swirls, but you're right, I am drawn to more organic shapes and linework for sure. Thanks for pointing it out! That may be a visual theme I try to be more intentional about as I do thumbs for the new pieces.

And yes, the making-work-too-dark thing is something I am trying to be more intentional about as I push forward in this. I am actually currently in the process of lightening up many of the pieces here because, yeah, too much black, haha. Especially if I want to lean into the kidlit market for sure. I think it's probably because I am just drawn to that look personally. Hence my struggle with "do I want to do kidlit, or YA graphic novels?" Cause I feel like you can get away with more darks in a a GN.

I really appreciate the feedback! Next week I'm planning on really intensely doing some research and media studies to figure out what I want the focus/theme of my portfolio to look like. I've got a few ideas bouncing around, I just have to remember not to put too much pressure on myself since I'm at the stage of my career where I'm still finding my style/voice and my portfolio will probably change pretty regularly as I "get the bad work out," if you will, haha.

@Frost-Drive Thank you for your feedback! The ones you ranked higher are all currently going through a paintover process to touch up some lighting and anatomy issues as many of those pieces are a few years old at this point and I have grown a bit skill wise. Your rankings tell me I'm on the right track with keeping them though!

As for the alien bug machine image, I do love that one too, haha, and it's still on my website under a subsection. The reason I'm not including it in my main "portfolio" (i.e. the landing page of my website) is that I am trying to gear my portfolio toward kidlit/middle reader genres and that image feels more concept art-y to me.

Here is my own current portfolio (plus some extra images to fill space on the right column that aren’t in my portfolio, but are images I don’t totally hate):

I can see some of those themes echoed in my work, but I clearly have a long way to go. I definitely need to do more involved environments as most of my images are pretty figure heavy with simple backgrounds.

I've struggled for years trying to find my "style" and figuring out what my voice is with my work, and I think it shows. A lot of the feedback I've gotten from ADs and agents is that I have a great variety but not really what they are looking for or they say that I should narrow my focus. So I'm trying to do the latter, I feel like too much variety is probably leading them to question my ability to be consistent and that's not a doubt I want them to have.

Hey all! With one of my big goals for this year being to overhaul and unify my portfolio, I've finally gotten around to starting Lee's "Dream Portfolio" assignment and I was hoping to get some feedback.

So far, this is kind of where I'm at with mine. Pieces have been coming and going so it may change, but I figured it was unified enough that maybe I could move on to the next step in the process: feedback with peers.

So far the themes I'm seeing are strong light sources, an element of fantasy, and (generally) a quasi-realistic rendering style. I'd love to hear if anyone else sees something I'm missing.

(also, if you're getting weirdly non-kidlit vibes from some of these, welcome to my conundrum. I can't seem to decide whether I want to do kid lit, middle reader, fantasy, or graphic novels, ugh. It's a big problem in my portfolio and most of why I'm doing this. My hope is that I can take the elements in these images and shape them to whatever genre I end up leaning toward.)

Congratulations! That is awesome!

Movement looks good, and the tiger's face reads much better now. If you want to break up the white space on the bottom half of the image, I'd suggest doing the shading like you have in the second image, but in the lower right corner instead of right under the explosion, to do more for the light. Maybe even a little shading on the interior of the characters to increase the illusion of rim lighting. Something like this maybe:

Cute style! My only critique is that I find the tiger's face a little hard to read. I can make out the nose and eyes, but I'm having trouble telling whether those are teeth or tongue sticking out of the mouth line. Perhaps a little white space to separate the nose from the mouth might make it read better as a face? Though that could just be the character's design and constant look, so I may be way off base here, haha. Explosion and running from it all reads well though.

@Whitney-Simms Sorry, that image isn't loading for me for some reason, but I'll go look on his website.
And that's good to know! Stationary is one of the things I'm hoping to maybe get into on a small scale, might I pick your brain about that sometime? Or if you have any quick do's and don'ts, that would be swell too.

Thanks for the tips, all! It sounds like the Cannon Pixma Pro is the way everyone is leaning. I'll certainly look into it!

I am looking for advice from anyone who prints merchandise at home on a small to mid-sized scale for sale. I have looked around at printer options but am a bit overwhelmed. I know for prints I need something that uses archival paper/ink so it doesn't fade, but beyond that I'm at a bit of a loss.

The type of merchandise I am hoping to make would be stickers, prints, and postcards, mostly.
Not sure how realistic doing all of these things on one printer would be, but I've been saving up money and am close to ready to make that purchase.

I know @Jake-Parker mentioned that he uses, or used to use, an epsom of some sort, I believe a P5000, but he did mention recently on a podcast having issues with it. So I was wondering what everyone else out there uses to create quality merchandise.

I have looked up lists of printer options for these purposes, but the lists all differ and reviews are not from illustrators or people who show at conventions, so I was hoping to find more career-specific advice from folks around here.

Or, is it more economical to just continue to make orders through a print shop?