d r a g o n b o n e s    

In my quest to be a better portrait artist, I’ve been doing some 3 minute portraits. I’ve posted a few, and I plan to continue this little exercise as time goes by.

As with the previous posts about 3 minute portraits the idea is to try to capture the person’s likeness in just 3 minutes. Not an easy task by a long shot, but here’s my latest attempt.

For the reference photos I used, click here.

This session was done with pen and ink rather than my usual – Open Canvas. I do really enjoy drawing with ball point pen on printer paper held on a clipboard. I started doing that many years ago when I worked in a manufacturing plant. I’d keep the clipboard with me and draw on my breaks. I still really enjoy some of the images I did all those years ago – there’s just so much energy to that particular kind of sketch work.

Every now and again, I find myself with some free time.

No really. It’s rare, but it does happen.

When that happens, I like to offer up the opportunity for folks to pay what they want for commissions.

You did, in fact, read that correctly. Pay what you want. If that’s $1, then it’s $1. If that’s $5,000,000? Well, I’ll try really hard to make the art live up to the commission price.

How It Works

1. Confirm that my Commission status (on the right) is set to OPEN.
2. Confirm that the Pay What You Want option (PWYW) is also set to OPEN. (Please note: if this option is NOT set to open when you request the work, I reserve the right to refund your money. This likely means that time is tight, but not tight enough to close commissions completely.)
3. Use the Donate via Paypal button in the upper right corner of this page to send me your commission fee.
4. Contact me via my contact form. Let me know the following information via the form:
1. What you’re commissioning me to draw. Be as descriptive as possible! The more information you give me, the closer I can come to drawing what’s in your head.
2. How much you sent me for the commission, and what email address you sent it from. This is to help avoid any criss crossing for multiple commissions or commissioners.
5. I will email you to confirm that I have received both the information and the commission money. I will likely have a sketch attached to this email. If I plan on doing more work/revisions, I’ll ask you to confirm that I’m headed in the right direction based on the sketch. If I feel that the sketch is complete, I’ll let you know in this email.
6. I welcome your thoughts/comments/critiques.

Please Note: I reserve the right to do as much or as little as I feel is warranted by your commission fee. If you feel that my work is only worth $1 (or if that’s all you can spare) then you’re not likely to get an illustration that took me 15 hours to complete. I will, however, likely give you more than your money’s worth in general – I do have a reputation to uphold.

Let’s face it – in the world of professional illustration, time = money. It’s true in most professions, but when the work to create your product is work that you can’t delegate, you need as much time to produce as you can get your hands on. Many of us still have to do the rest of our ‘run the engine’ work on our own and that makes the time crunch even worse.

We Need to Work Faster

How do you make yourself more productive in less time? How do you make yourself more efficient? You work on speed. You work on understanding forms and figures and settings so that you can draw them faster.

Possibly the best tool that I’ve ever come across to help with this very thing are the tools made available by the awesome Kim at her website Pixelovely.com. She’s crafted a set of automated web tools for displaying photos of reference images for artists to work from – in a timed fashion.

Did I mention that she offers this to the public for free? (You can, and IMHO should donate to her via Paypal, but she doesn’t require it for the user of her site.)

Currently the tools allow you to use both human figures and a wide range of animals for reference material. Humans can be filtered by both gender and clothed or nude. Animals can be broken down by type (birds, canine, insects, etc). All of the above can be gone through in time increments of  30 seconds, 60 seconds, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, or 10 minutes for fast sketching. If you prefer to take your time and focus on quality over quantity? No problem. Kim’s got you covered by allowing you to ‘take a class’ and set the timer to 30 minutes, 1, 2, 3, or 6 hours.

Did I mention that it’s free?

How Photographers Can Help

Kim/Pixelovely really could use your help. She would like to expand the set of tools to include two new options – one for portraits, and one for hands/feet. Any of you who are willing to donate your existing photos (or some portion thereof) should contact her via her contact form and let her know!

She does give credit for every photo with a link to the site of your choice and you would have her (and my!) thanks. So you would receive a little publicity and some gratitude for work you’ve already done. Doesn’t seem like a terrible idea to me, and you would be helping artists everywhere get better at working faster. What a way to support your fellow artists! So if you’re a portrait or hand/foot photographer, please please please drop her a quick email and lend a hand.

I know I will be.

(Thank you!)

I’ve decided to participate in NanoWriMo again this year. It’s been a long time, and it’s probably well overdue. I enjoy writing in general, but I seem to have a bad habit of letting Life get in the way. As many of you who know me personally are aware, I often struggle to just keep up with all the art projects I want to do, and writing is at least one notch down the ladder from illustration, so yeah…

The Idea

I’m bending the rules a bit. The idea with Nano is to write a 50,000 word novel in one month’s time. I’m looking to do the same volume of writing, but in a different format – namely blog posts. I’ll be writing blog posts for Dragonbones.net and scheduling them to go out (at most) once per week. I figured that my poor site has been neglected over the years, and it’s time to fix that. I’m using Nano as the incentive to push through and create the posts that I keep meaning to write, but never get round to. I know that I’ve got plenty to share with folks, and it’s time for me to stop finding excuses not to.

The Format

I’m going to be creating posts for Dragonbones and refining those posts later to develop a book. Each post will center on one topic which I hope to cover in sufficient detail so I will have a strong foundation when I start to build out the book. I’ll eventually take what feedback I get from folks (via comments on this site and others) and rewrite (or flesh out) the posts, compile / edit / etc each of them and voila – the greatest art/illustration book ever written.

Ok, maybe not, but I’d like to think that it will at be well worthwhile.

Each of the posts will hover somewhere in the 500 – 1000 word limit. I think that anything less will feel like I haven’t covered the topic du jour well enough, and anything more will feel like I let myself run on.

I’ll cover things like art exercises, tricks of the trade, marketing for artists, and any other elements I can come up with or folks say that they would like to read.

That’s right – I said that I will take feedback – both on individual topics that I write about and on topics that folks would like to know more about. That’s where you come in.

Your Help

I’d loooove to get your thoughts on things. While I will only be releasing roughly 1 post per week on the site, I’ll be talking about new posts I want to do here and on my blog. I could really use your help via that feedback. Go ahead and let me know what you think – about any element of this project.

Think I’m rambling too much? Let me know.

Think I need a more diverse set of topics? Tell me.

Think I should never again put pen to paper? Well… you can tell me that, but I’m probably not likely to take your advice. If you’ve got some valid critiques though – I promise I’ll consider them. I’ll probably even reply.

Which brings up another point – I’m planning on being as interactive as I can be during this little fiesta. I can’t promise I’ll reply to everyone all the time, but I’ll get as close to that as my time will allow.

Well, it’s time to get started. Thanks for checking this out, and I look forward to your input!

In honor of the 4th of July: