Squaremania: Kittens for Adoption

This is a piece I've been working on for the last couple of weeks...I did the drawing about a month ago, and used this three day president's day weekend to finally finish it.

This last month my wife and I adopted two kittens from Forgotten Animals of Los Angeles.  They're a terrific agency that rescues strays and finds loving families for them.  What's nice about FALA is that they take the time to find good people to match to the animals.

Since then I've added kittens to my cast of characters for Squaremania.  I wanted to do an illustration of these kittens and this is what I came up with:

 

The two kittens in the front, the twins, are based on the ones we adopted.  They also had two brothers (the grey kitten and the orange kitten in the back of the box) who were adopted just today.

I do the cleanup in Adobe illustrator.   Then I paste it into photoshop (keeping the vector lines in tact) and when the painting is done I go back to illustrator to 'self color' the lines.

And these are the combined color layers in Adobe Photoshop.  There will end up being one more layer when I add the background into it...so far it's just the characters (and they're floating on a blank whiteness...):

Squaremania: Lil Sweaty Panda

I did a version of this where the panda is just jumping into a game of hopscotch...but then the topic of Illustration friday, this week, was sweater...so I just had to make a revision so I could post it:

I changed the hopscotch squares into a sidewalk and extended it across the length of the hill and added a headband and wristbands to show how dedicated the panda is to exercise.  He doesn't wear clothes, but he wants to keep the sweat contained as much as possible - and judging by the looks of it, he's quite the sweater and the gear is not doing a good enough job.

Squaremania - lil' Panda's big jump

I've been too busy at Nickelodeon with work and at home with the brand new kittens that I haven't been able to draw as much as I would want.   I struggled to free up some free time, but was able to draw this and finish it in the last couple of days. 

I started with this rough drawing in Adobe Photoshop (drawn very rough with a wacom tablet):

Then I cleaned it up in Adobe Illustrator:

And this is the final color (adobe photoshop):

Helping Grandma into traffic

A person gets to a point in their life when they are self sufficient. Then, at some point it all reverses and they need help doing everything.

They even need a little jerk kid to help 'em across the street.  The only bad thing is that they're crossing against the light...little granny put her trust in the wrong kid.

 

I did this illustration for Dreamstime, a microstock illustration/photograph site.  They do an image contest every month based on a theme - this month is 'Help'.

Microstock Report for January 2011

This is the first Microstock report for the new year...and it's doing quite well as apposed to last month:

Shutterstock continues to account for 41% of our entire earnings.  And we actually had several of our illustrations taken out.  I while ago I was doing a series of celebrity illustrations (one of George Clooney, Natalie Portman, Diablo Cody, and Zach Braff)...and since that went nowhere, I put them on the microstock sites.  They should have been only available for editorial licenses...but after almost two years online they were all pulled from the site...citing possible copyright infringement.  And it's not like they illustrations were, but Shutterstock likes to be careful...and it doesn't matter that much because they weren't big sellers anyway.  But that's what accounts for the portfolio going from 702 to 700.

Istockphoto sold a lot less this last month...it's been very spotty as of late...I feel that with baseball season coming back it should start doing much better.  I have a series of baseball caps that sell very well during the spring months.

Dreamstime made a strong showing of it this month...and I'm hoping for even more in the coming months as I'm going to try my hardest to make time for their new contests as they come up.  I have one illustration already approved for this month's contest (the fireman, which I posted last week on this blog) and another one that's still a rough drawing.

The rest of the sites were alright.  Vectorstock sells decently considering it's a smaller site with less customers.  And, as I said before, it's nice to continue to make over $200 each month without having to spend much, if any, time creating new illustrations for these sites...I mean, more money could be had if I spent more time at it, but making money and spending no time sounds pretty good too...