Summer is Here, Goodbye!

Hey!

It's been awhile since I've talked to you…

I haven't had much freelance work of late so I decided to enter a contest. It was by comic book colorist K Michael Russell.  The project was to color a comic strip that had already been penciled by someone else. (For those that do not know, me included not too long ago, comics are a collaborative project usually with a writer, a person that Pencils the original drawing, someone else who then Inks that drawing, and lastly a fourth person who Colors the page. I've never colored a comic like this before so I took his free webinar. It was actually very good I was surprised how much I learned and I recommend it to anyone wanting more information about technique, etc. Here is the link -> ComicColor.com

I used some of his techniques from the webinar and applied them to the comic strip. Overall, it took a long time, but I definitely feel like I learned a lot and honestly, I did expect to win his course.  First and Second place won the course while first place additionally won a critique.  There was a about 10 other artists  and the competition was very good.  I assumed that I had a leg up on everybody else considering my 4 years of Art School.

I was wrong.

It's always difficult putting yourself out there as an artist, creating new things and wondering what kind of feedback you're going to get.  Sometimes it’s crickets.
Sometimes it’s a thumbs up and sometimes it’s “I want that, sell it to me.”

I would think that at some point I would get used to the prospect of rejection, but it still stings.

I was certainly put in my place. I was knocked off the pedestal I’ve been on for a little while, lol. And it feels good. Now. It didn’t before. But it does now.

When I found out I “lost” I was a little depressed, quite honestly. I had a a couple days where I was kind of confused and didn't know where to go or what to do. Well I've decided to double down on my schooling and I enrolled in SVS. It's the [online] School of Visual Storytelling formed by Will Terry and Jake Parker whom I follow on YouTube and elsewhere. It is a pretty good deal as it's less than $15 a month for all the classes I can take.

Here’s the link to the Facebook post for the contest where you can see all of the entries including mine -->Contest Results

So the moral of the story is I'm going to take some time off of the blog and I may still edit a few videos (I have a huge backlog of footage…) but I'm going to try and concentrate on learning more about this craft we call illustration for the next month or two. So if you don't hear from me until then, don't get worried, I'll see you on the other side of Summer!

:)

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