@NessIllustration @MichaelaH @chrisaakins Hey Gang, thank you all for taking the time to give feedback on this piece, I really appreciate it! I'll play around with some of these ideas and see where it takes the illustration

Hey everyone!

I wanted to share my revised illustration from May's Mermay Challenge. First image is the submitted image and the second is where the illustration is at now. The big take aways from the feedback was to vary up the sizes of objects, to use contrast to better direct the viewer, and make the mermaid's pose work in the scene.

I've been chipping away at this for the past month. The biggest struggle I ran into was the mermaid. Originally I wanted her to be escaping from the bowl, then realizing she was being watched. That wasn't reading to people and after exploring more options with that, I realized it wasn't going to work, escaping that way in this situation wouldn't make sense. After going through a ton of poses, I landed on one I think is working better.

Let me know if you think the size of the objects should be pushed more.

Thank you!

Hi @juliekitzes! you have some great work on here and it's awesome to see your interests cover a lot of areas of art. I've had to go through and am working through what I'm about to critique. A lot of my first thoughts when seeing your site were summed up perfectly by @NessIllustration, to add a bit of my own thoughts and experiences.

Over the past few months I've been going through a major retool of my style, my goals, and my portfolio, and I have to constantly remind myself that in addition to my own enjoyment in making the art, if I want to make a living from this, it has to meet what a client would want. From working with clients and listening to the SVS podcast, clients can be afraid we're going to screw things up. When I look at your portfolio, while there is great work in there, I wouldn't know what I would get from you if I were a client.

Some of the categories are much more related, but things like graphic design and the tattoo don't seem to fit as well if you wanted to do fine art or illustration, and vise versa. It's a real struggle to pick a lane. One thing that may work while you're working through this is completely separate websites, then people may not lose the link. Something like Julie Kitzes Illustration, Julie Kitzes Design, or Julie Kitzes Tattoos. I have a website for my illustration work and another for my day job as a production artist in advertisement, and I don't cross these streams.

One other suggestion, and this is difficult for basically everyone, you have to look at your work and make sure you're only putting forth your very best. If an image looks out of place and doesn't fit with the rest of your style, this may give a client a red flag. Smaller groups of strong images is better than a ton of work that doesn't all fit together. Thats where a blog can come in! You can share all kinds of stuff there and show other interests and experiments.

I hope this can help on some level and doesn't come across too harsh, I say this with the best of intentions. It's really tough out there and sometimes there are sacrifices. Ask yourself a lot of clear questions about what you want.

Hello, SVS Team, here's my submission!

@Heather-Boyd Thank you so much! I'd love to share. Haha, but sometimes they might make me look like a madman

@demotlj Thank you for the kind words

This is so awesome! I really like see how other people work and love sharing my process.

This piece originated from wanting to have two characters scoping out an alley. Then through exploring ideas turned to the woods, then hiding from someone. Eventually I had the idea of it being a giant crow. Next was to figure out where they would hide. I liked having the characters in the woods but, knew there was a way to up the danger so, I moved them to an open field. Looking to further this I thought it would be interesting to have their only cover by a group of cows that could move at any moment. Lastly I was looking for little story details to give them a reason for running from the crow, the green bag, and the holes in the crown to hint at whats in the bag.

Thumbnails

I wanted to have some understanding of crow and cow anatomy so I did a few sketches to give ideas on how to simplify.

Taking the piece to photoshop for the cleanup, value, and color test.

A big challenge was figuring out a pose for the kids. There was even more exploration than this in the digital file.

Final

I hope you enjoyed. I love talking about this stuff so ask away if there are any questions.

Hi everyone! I'm @norman_morana on instagram.

https://www.instagram.com/norman_morana/

Onwards!

@LisaF Hi Lisa, I've check all my mail boxes and I haven't received the link either. I am a newer subscriber, if that made any difference. Thank you!

@nyrrylcadiz Killer illustration! I love how my eye is lead around the scene.