I have worked up the third thumbnail into a sketch here, and I think you guys are right, this one includes more humour and emotion, What do you reckon? This or the last one?

Yes, me too, as you know! All depends on your market I guess! Who's the author?

Besides a few fantasy commissions, I am slowly struggling my way through this illustration this month:

Thanks guys! I was wondering if maybe the extreme discomfort of number 3 would make for a better themed submission I think I'll work up a sketch for that one too and see from there!

hey guys!
Thought I'd open a thread to go through my process for the july prompt this month. I have a lot of time to participate for the first time, so I want to try and work on this properly.
I've got a few thumbnails, and a rough value composition for one of the ideas so far.

My Idea is based on the hiking holidays my dad used to drag us on when we were kids. He had this old GPS that he used on the hikes, and sometimes the GPS and the map would disagree and we'd end up walking through thorns and mud for a mile before we realized we were on the wrong track. We'd be tired, cold and wet! Not a good time then, but I remember it fondly now of course!

Feedback is much appreciated! Is there another thumbnail that might have worked better? Should I go back to the drawing board on this?

I am very excited to see where this is going, might need to dig out that short story! Oooooooh.

@hannahmccaffery hey, thank you for that feedback and the encouragement! You're absolutely right, perspective is still one of my weaker points and I only recently really started to focus in on story telling, so I hope with some classes on SVS and some more focused portfolio pieces, I might be able to start improving on those!

@Lee-White woo! Thanks so much for the feedback and advise, really appreciate it. You're absolutely right, my work currently definitely leans towards adults. I'm still not sure chrildens books is the market for me. I might work on more child-suited pieces to see how I feel about them, but tempted to say my passions might be dragging me elsewhere!
With my current expenses, I should be fine for 7-9 months and after that time only have very low expenses, so once I get a parttime job as intended, I should be absolutely alright and able to focus on building a career

Thank you both super helpful, gave me loads to think about and I feel a bit more optimistic about my portfolio and start on this journey now! I'll not bother with online shops for now, it's good to know the kind of effort it takes to take it seriously. Hope the shop works out for you and pays tiself back soon @NessIllustration !

I'll go with wix for now to get my site properly online. That will make me feel more official I think :3

@ShannonBiondi Thank you! No offense taken at all, it can be difficult to pick which pieces are the best and portfolio worthy when you've been staring at them for a while, and there is some personal stories attached to some, so it's really helpful to have the lack-luster ones pointed out I removed a couple now to go back down to a nice square gallery, and fingers crossed i picked the worse quality ones. Hopefully better pieces will follow soon regardless!

I did wonder if wix was a good one to go with for the first year regarding hosting and domain, as I had also been looking at godaddy. Can you recommend just going with their basic premium plan?

Thanks for the website feedback again, really appreciate it.

@NessIllustration It's so cool this worked out for you! Though I've seen your graduation animation backgrounds and clearly you were pretty awesome from the start! it's daunting to message lots of game studios, but i guess it's just a case of sending lots of 'hey i'm looking for work'-kind of emails out there? So much research yet to do on studios that even work with or even specialize in 2D!

Would you recommend Etsy as an early-career endeavour?

Thanks so much for the encouragement guys, and the helpful advise!

@Coreyartus yeah totally! I am personally more than happy to work in various fields, as all of them sound to an extend fun to do. I'd be happy to make patterns and small illustrations for licensing for example, but Im worried my portfolio would get so dilluted by me trying all sorts of things that I'd ward of success for larger contracts. Hmm!

@NessIllustration thanks so much for commenting, keywords like that and direct career-approaches are SUPER helpful, i was struggling to find the right keywords to identify distributed development studios for example, so i am hoping this will give me some new pointers. I had wanted to get in touch with you sometime anyway as I had read you came from a similar background I'm super pleased to hear you've been able to support yourself of this, that's amazing! and exactly the kind of success story I needed to hear Did you know much about the bussiness side of freelancing when you started out?

In a few months time, I just need to cover around 900$ to live relatively comfortably, so I am really hoping that is an achievable goal for this year.