Tag: industrious illustrating

Industrious Illustrating #54 – Progress Pictures

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This week’s column is a day late because I’ve been tabling at Isshocon, a new 3-day anime convention located near us in Novi Michigan! So far it’s been going fairly well considering that it only has fewer than two thousand attendees — I’ve made more money than at Motor City Comic Con Fall for a much less expensive table, though my work is much better geared to anime conventions. Here’s a picture of my table:

The main topic of this week’s column is going over some work-in-progress pictures from my recent drawings, which has been on my mind because the application for Fanime Con (a large anime convention that happens in San Jose, CA on Memorial Day weekend) required a signed work-in-progress picture to weed out AI “artists” and art thieves. I’m in a group chat with a bunch of other artists who sell at conventions and seeing everyone else’s progress pictures was really interesting for seeing how other artists work. I won’t use the work-in-progress images I used for my Fanime application to keep it private, so I’ll instead go over a chibi mecha design I drew last year with WIP screenshots I took during the process.

My typical digital working process starts with “blocking” out the drawing as a color sketch, working more on getting the general idea down rather than having perfect proportions or coloring.

As I work on this base colors sketch, I freely use the lasso tool and eraser to resize and edit parts I don’t like in addition to working more with the default oil paint brush tool I use for my work.

Once I have a baseline I’m happy with, I start doing lineart from the top to the bottom on another layer, working more on the rendering and polish as the lineart solidifies what I want the drawing to look like.

Compare with my finished drawing:

Would you guys like to see me do more breakdowns/work-in-progress sequences of my drawings in the future? I’d love to know if you do!

Industrious Illustrating #53 – Life Drawing 5

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Hello, and welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! This week’s update is a little brief, since I’m just recapping the trip I took to the La Brea Tar Pits Museum in Los Angeles over winter break. When I was there I took the opportunity to draw some of the fossil skeletons on display to better understand the construction of animal bodies, as I hadn’t seen some of these skeletons in real life before and I want to make more creature/scientific illustrations in the future.

Something interesting about my trip there was that there was a glass windowed viewing area to look at scientists at work cleaning fossils recovered from the “tar” pits (which are actually filled with liquid asphalt!), and there were a few informational plaques and displays sitting on the windowsill ranging from excavated bugs and microshells to stuffed animals of the animals most commonly found in La Brea. There was also a scientific illustrator on staff (who I assume drew the lovely drawings on some of the plaques) who was actively working on a scientific illustration on their iPad when I was visiting. I especially enjoyed the puppet of the now-deceased mountain lion P-35, as I’d just read about his story in the excellent book “Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet”.

All in all, my visit to the La Brea Tar Pits left me feeling more inspired and motivated than before. While I doubt I’ll pursue scientific illustration as a full-time career, I still want to explore different subject matter I find interesting as much as I can so that my work will be versatile and never grow stale or predictable. And of course, there’s no need to travel far from home to do so — even back in Ann Arbor there’s several resources such as the Natural History Museum, the Leslie Science & Nature Center, and the Creature Conservancy that all have skeletons or live animals on display to see and understand in real life.
That’s all for this week! What would you guys like to see me discuss next week? Let me know!

Industrious Illustrating #52 – Experimentation

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Hello, and welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! It’s now 2024, which opens up a lot of new possibilities and directions for the rest of the year. That means I want to highlight a few drawings I’ve made recently that are more experimental or different from what I usually draw.

This was more of a graphic design-esque drawing I made for some zippered coin purses that I ordered from a supplier during a sale depicting a plastic file, two different types of plastic nippers, and two hobby markers that would all be common tools for building model kits. I wanted to go for something simple yet bold, as my usual style focuses a lot on details and elaborate painting.

This, meanwhile, is a quick digital doodle of the cell towers disguised as palm trees that I saw all around the Los Angeles and Orange County areas when I was visiting family there over winter break. I wanted to convey the feeling of driving home after a long day and realizing something is slightly off with one of the freakishly tall palm trees lining the freeway. I also wanted to free myself from needing every drawing to be highly polished, so I set myself a time limit on this one and stopped drawing once the 20 minutes was up.

That’s all for this week, but I want to wrap things up with a quick question. What ways have you personally experimented with your artwork recently — and if not, how will you experiment with it in the future? I’d love to hear about it!

Industrious Illustrating #51 – 2023 in Review

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Happy holidays! I’ve been alternating between seeing my family, vacationing, and making art during break. Something I wanted to share with you guys before the end of the year is my 2023 art summary:

Template made by @Taxkha on Twitter/X

I tried to pick from a variety of art styles/subjects I drew this year to represent how I’ve progressed as an artist, as well as how my thoughts have continued over the course of the year across each month. It’s pretty obvious that I’ve been drawing a lot of mecha lately, so I’ll likely set aside some time to draw humans and furries next year more often.

Some notes: I had the hardest time picking out a single piece in July, August, October, and December to represent my art progress, as I had so many good pieces to pick from for those months. Meanwhile, February, March, September, and November were relatively easy to pick from as I hadn’t finished as many pieces. Not coincidentally, those were also mostly the months where I was starting new semesters of college and therefore had less spare time/energy to spend on my artwork. And in November’s case, I had two cons back to back that month and also had to deal with semester project deadlines creeping closer ahead of the end of the semester.

In terms of what I want to do next year art-wise, I do want to keep giving my follower/customer/client base what they want — which is largely fanart and acrylic charms — and make great sales online and at conventions, but I also want to do more original art and make my portfolio more solid to apply for well-paying art or design gigs. There’s only so much time I have in the day and year to make both of these aims happen, of course, but I am enrolled in a scientific illustration class next semester to make the second aim more achievable. I’ll likely be posting assignments from that class next semester as I try to strike a balance in this column between art business topics and talking about my art practice itself.

That’s all for this week, and I wish all of you a happy and restful holiday season!

Industrious Illustrating #50 – Autumn of Artwork

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Hello! It’s been a while since my last post — I ended up more busy with finals than I expected, and then I threw myself into making more artwork right after I finished my last final project. This entire semester I’ve been writing how-to guides and overviews of art business-related topics, but I think it’s about time I went back to talking about my own artwork for column #50!

Since I didn’t take any art classes this semester (unless you count Intro to UX), all my artwork from this semester is personal work or commissions rather than academic work. Most of this artwork was specifically for prints and small merchandise that I could sell at conventions, sometimes of original ideas (e.g. a fat squirrel wood pin) but mostly fanart of existing media properties. Because of how much of my time was taken up by programming/website design classes, I didn’t make as many fully rendered paintings as I would’ve liked and focused more on simplified artwork that I could finish in one or two sittings. I think it says a lot that my artwork output from November to today (mid-December) looks something like this:

Even then, I’m still overall proud of how much progress I made this semester both in terms of developing my art abilities and my business. I think my rendering has made significant and visible leaps above my artwork from last year, for one thing, and I’m getting better at making my artwork look more appealing from a design standpoint.

I’d like to highlight that the one original character piece I drew this semester (besides artwork for Flamechaser that I’m not posting publicly yet) was this piece I drew for Digipaint’s Fall 2023 zine “Dreams and Nightmares”, which will be printed next semester:

It features Wenet Tozawa (purple-haired girl) and Rashida Kuromiya (pink-haired girl) intertwining their fingers through a plane of water. This piece is supposed to represent the feeling of seeing a familiar face in a dream and reaching out toward them.

I personally really enjoy drawing my OCs and would like to make more artwork of them, but I also want to make a lot of new merchandise designs before the convention season hits again next year, and my energy and time are both very limited… I applied to a bunch of major conventions happening next spring/summer, so I’ll probably be discussing anime convention application results next semester!

I may or may not be making more posts over winter break — it really depends on whether or not I have anything to talk about. If I don’t, I’ll still be posting next semester anyway, so see you guys soon!

Industrious Illustrating #48 – November Conventions Recap

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My Motor City Comic Con Fall 2023 table

Welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! Last weekend I was selling at Motor City Comic Con Fall 2023 in the Artist Alley, which ended up being a lot slower sales-wise and traffic-wise than Youmacon was the previous weekend but still an okay profit. I think that my stuff just isn’t as popular with the comic con crowd, which makes sense since almost everything I draw fanart of is a Japanese or East Asian media property (even including Armored Core). Weirdly enough my Pacific Rim print sold way better at Youmacon than at Motor City, but I think that can also be attributed to Motor City Comic Con’s fall show having lower attendance and buying interest overall than either Youmacon the weekend before. I still hope that I can try spring MC3 in May next year since I’ve heard it’s much better attended than the fall show, but I don’t plan on doing the fall show again since it didn’t really feel worth my time or the table cost.

Something I’ve definitely noticed is that selling big-ticket items (large prints, specialty prints, deskmats) has helped increase my revenue and profits at conventions. My profits at MC3 were salvaged by several people making large purchases of multiple prints or items, and a significant chunk of my far better than expected profits at Youmacon was also people making large purchases of deskmats or multiple items at once. There’s only so many days in a convention weekend, which means that making more money means making more sales or making larger sales. Because my products are mostly for a specific niche (mecha art) rather than a broadly appealing mass market, I can’t count on making more sales at every event. However, I can count on making my art and offerings good enough to encourage larger purchases per interested customer that are worth as much as or more than several smaller purchases. That’s just my personal business strategy, though — other artists may find greater success selling lots of small cheap items that add up into good profits.

In terms of future conventions, I received acceptances for two early 2024 cons within the last few days — Anime Milwaukee and Katsucon (Washington D.C. area) — which means I will finally be branching out from Michigan/Ohio cons and traveling further away to get my work in front of more people who haven’t seen it before. This also means that a bunch of the money I just earned at Youmacon and MC3 is immediately getting reinvested back into the business since I have to book hotel rooms and transportation to get to these cons, which goes to show the importance of making a profit rather than merely breaking even. Without making a profit off of these past few cons and my online sales, I wouldn’t have enough money to both pay off personal expenses and grow my business at the same time.

Anyway, I won’t have any more cons until January, so I probably won’t be talking much more about conventions until then and I’ll focus on other art and art business-related topics. Next week I’ll discuss different ways to make prints (at-home printing, outsourcing, etc.) including a few on-campus or local options for UMich students!