Just wanted to share some good news. I got my first major art show in London. A limited edition print The Tip of Atlantis has been selected for The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition next month. Thanks to @Jake-Parker @Lee-White and @Will-Terry for giving such excellent illustration lessons. You guys rock! All have helped me tenfold improve my drawing skills. I went back, redrew and improved my final piece that got selected. And thanks to my fellow SVS students on here that offer great advice and support in the forums.

It's my favorite all-time art show, that I've been trying to get into for a few years. Never give up on your dreams. Be stubborn and carry on when being told that you'll never make it as an artist.

SNEAK PEAK:

It got framed an hour before I had to hand it over to the RA so I only have a photo of the Artpakk bag. :smiling_face_with_open_mouth_smiling_eyes: Top tip, don't leave framing to the last week for a show entry - give it at least 10 days to 3 weeks. Unless you can frame it yourself.

The art has a hidden Mermaid in it, so I'm happy it got selected in Mermay!

If there is anyone from SVS in London during the Summer and fancy a trip to the Royal Academy, give me a shout. The show runs Monday 10 June to Monday 12 August.

My favorite place to hang out at night. Brick Lane in London. Where Dr Jekyll buys his bagels.

1984 by George Orwell. Been reading this book over the last couple of weeks. A life changing book when I read it as a teenager and still just as relevant today. Would love to make a graphic novel of 1984 set in an alternate dimension.

@Chip-Valecek for me, this is a good one for a self-portrait!

Before

After

Took on-board what @Lee-White said about my penguin scene. I appreciate and agreed with the feedback.

Made my protagonist penguin a bit more flamboyant. He's of the Macaroni ilk. Spearheading the deep ocean dive I can feel his leadership qualities (His co-stars are based on Adelie penguins). They both hang out in Antarctic waters.

I think I got carried away with drawing penguins that it was hard to lose characters. I wanted them to all get equal billing. But that made me lose sight of the story of building tension and focus for the Moment Before brief.

Happy to hear any further comments. Have others made changes to their work after listening to the feedback?

Tick Tock. Am I OK?
The tracks in the snow were unlike anything Will had ever seen before.

So I'm making a Chinese Water Dragon mixed media artwork for Slowvember. No backing out now.
I thought I'd start posting and try to keep it to weekly updates. I don't want to slack off.
It's my biggest creation to be made on a wooden panel, as it was originally meant to be a mural a few years ago.
It got cancelled due to the venue backing out when I presented the cost!
The Dragon is going on a 140 cm x 70 cm panoramic plywood panel with a metal frame that prevents the wood from warping.
The poplar plywood is primed with Golden GAC 100 to help seal the wood.

So far I have sprayed the surface using a primer layer with Signal white Molotow Belton spray paint.
But I wanted a textured under-painting so I brushed on a titanium white Non-absorbent acrylic primer (by Michael Harding).
I did leave it outside to dry but it rained and messed it up a bit! : SO.. I gave it another coat.

For me because its a large surface I thought I'd do a smaller painting first. A cross section of just the dragons head.
Always best to do a test painting I reckon. I've ended up going for 2 tests.
One finished in black ink and white paint. Now working on one in colour to match the copic marker colours and acrylics I'm using on the final piece.

I used frisk trace down to draw the dragon head onto the surface as this doesn't leave any residue when inking/painting over the top.
I make it pretty quick and rough (from a digital printed to scale sketch).
First time I messed up as I did it in graphite and this smudged loads and was difficult to paint over the top.
Best option was in red as it's easy to spot when the blues go down and easy to paint over with lighter colours.

So this is where I'm at. Here's some of my other tools with the colours I'm using.
I like these pump action brushes even though they clog up quickly, the nibs are cheap and come in a variety of shapes and sizes.
I use the refills as this saves money. Just hoping they play well with the Copic markers as I haven't tried them together before. I like to experiment!

Hope to have something a bit more substantial by the end of the week.

In Isolation, I have mostly been watching old films and TV shows. Then drawing pixel art all night long. The 8-bit lifestyle.
"I Can't Get No Isolation" featuring Pixel Kong.

I was just learning some stuff on blender and this tool came up for quickly putting reference images in order.
I'm using it to make mood boards and put my thumbnails together from my sketch book.
I thought other artists would find this useful. I've been trying to organise my ref photos, as they are all over the place! It's called PureRef on windows, linux and mac. I love simple software like this. It just does one thing.
They let you choose what to pay.

https://www.pureref.com/

@Lee-White I managed 48 thumbnails on poking a collapsed drunk Cyclops in the eye with a shard of his shepherd's staff.
Buzzing. Top tips.

@BradAYoo I'm glad you found it useful. I definitely want to see improvements on energy consumption and it's worth looking at all sides of the debate. And to learn about the various platforms and tech I think a good blogger is the Digital Art Collector - https://digitalartcollector.com/nft-fear-uncertainty-and-doubt/
with regards to NFT's in general with why they exist and advice on what's going to help artist's to last, it's worth listening to The Outer Realm (by Second Realm) podcast with Gary Vaynerchuk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLwq2Nufcgg on spotify too.

@kylebeaudette btw I think your work would be great as NFT art. Smart contracts and digital tokens aren't going away, its an integral part of web 3. Worth setting up a shop collection on opensea.io - I would defo buy an NFT off you, if you minted any!

If you wait till later this year to mint on Ethereum chain, they are implementing staking technology that reduces the energy consumption by 99.98%.

@kylebeaudette People can mint on Tezos and they are already on a system called proof of stake. Which is no different than uploading an image to the internet. Every digital artist is guilty of that!

Just wondering where the information on the environmental damage of NFT's comes from?

I've seen a few data reports and would like to see what other information has been going around. The research I have from years working in the crypto industry doesn't show NFT's to have had any impact on crypto-mining. I was a crypto-miner in 2017 to 2018 but they are bringing it to what's known as the ice age to make it more difficult to mine to curtail wasted energy and switch to something called proof of stake (uses a lot less energy). Blocks get mined regardless of whether someone mints one NFT or a thousand of them. So artists using the network or boycotting it wont make any difference because that isn't how it works - each block is the same size and gets mined regardless of what's in it. There's a brilliant visualiser of how transactions and mining interact at txstreet.com

Global Bitcoin mining takes up around the equivalent of people with games consoles playing on their console for 4 hours a day. Ether mining uses less than half the power of bitcoin mining and has the same carbon footprint as YouTube. 51% of Bitcoin mining takes place in Sichuan in China and 90% of that is hydro-power by using the River Yangtze. They are ending using coal at the end of April in Mongolia (or so they say!) So on average its about 73-74% renewable energy at source. The report is on coinshares research site. I have a pdf if anyone is interested (bit dry).

So yes it does use a lot of energy to mine crypto but nowhere near as much as other industries artists are involved in such as selling physical art, digital downloads, computer games or printing books and distributing them around the world via planes, trains and automobiles.

Full disclosure: I do make NFT art and make money in the crypto industry so I want to defend it from being demonized. I'm constantly looking for ways to improve the NFT industry and finding ways to stop needlessly wasting energy. I hope upgrades in July that Ethereum will have made leaps and bound in reducing energy waste. Also, there are other platforms like TEZOS that mint NFT's a different way.

I'm a digital artist and want to do it efficiently but also want to make art I can sell online and receive payment instantly and securely and get secondary market royalties paid directly into my wallet without chasing people up. Selling NFT's helps me do that. Not everyone it seems wants to right click save! There are people who want to pay too. Like digital patrons, plus secondary market sales are lucrative for them as well. Art goes in cycles but the tech is new and probably here to stay like when the MP3 disrupted the music industry. I got into it with investing in NFT concert tickets as the company wants to get rid of ticket touts! And so far they have been successful with all the concerts they have ticketed.

Here is a good write up that questions the online debate about NFT's and I think puts things into perspective - https://sterlingcrispin.blogspot.com/

@miranda-hoover banks can dodgy with international exchange rates. Plus there's often fees to pay to change from one currency into another.

@miranda-hoover It's probably to do with the buy/sell spread on currency exchange according to their bank. Basically, what they buy at and what they sell at are two different prices.

Another option is to get paid into your paypal account and ask them to cover the difference when you exchange the money into $. I did that for a podcast I was doing for a US company. I told them what it cost in the exchange and they topped me up. I was doing it dollars into pounds.

@carolinebautista For reference, here is the license page for New York Public Library with prices for usage - https://www.nypl.org/help/get-what-you-need/photographic-services/obtaining-images

@carolinebautista I've sold photos on stock sites and it averages about £3 ($4.20) per picture to license commercially. If you were using a photo of mine for reference and emailed me to ask I wouldn't charge anything. You're making an artistic transformation so I wouldn't want to charge for that.

It's inside a public building though and if you were selling it commercially then it would be a license/permission from the location and perhaps the photographer. But I wouldn't consider it for this illustration because you have transformed into your own background by adding other elements, colour change and removing details like the signs/flag, stone pattern and inscriptions.

@xin-li brilliant news. Totally deserve it! Quality art.

@NessIllustration But I think a tattoo can become part of someone's identity. The skin is the biggest organ on the human body. It's alive. Tattoo ink is injected into that organ and becomes a part of it.

Like Mike Tyson's face tattoo was in a lawsuit after the Hangover movie used it on a characters face in the film. There are sportsmen who get image rights in computer games and their tattoos become an aspect of their likeness. If their tattoo wasn't included in the game some of those people wouldn't be recognised.

Not saying the person who has the tattoo on their body should be in this lawsuit but they could be affected in the future by the results of this case.

Tattoo copyright cases:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/tattoo-artist-looks-show-value-625509
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=0530aa49-8fd3-403f-ae8b-8f4decaed7bc