Squaremania: Panda Family

We're working on a project and this illustration is one of the first to come out of it.  It's an alternate version of a previous Panda Family piece where you only saw the backs of the parents...Anyway - i wanted to change it around so you could see the entire family.

I did all the lines in Adobe Illustrator, and colored it in Photoshop.

IF: Influence...za!

Illustration Friday's topic this week is Influence.  I did a piece already for that, but had another idea - it wasn't really the same word, but it sounded a lot like it!  Influenza!

It's like the Italian equivalent...only it means something completely different.  The idea stuck with me, so i had to draw it:

I also wanted to draw a different kind of stylized kid - usually I have really round cutesy faces...but that didn't seem like it would work for this illustration. 

And this is the cleaned up and colored (in Adobe Illustrator) version.  I might revise it to push the sickness a little more.  When I get sick, this is all I do - sit in bed and moan and whimper...but a cartoon character should have an ice pack on his head and maybe a thermometer in his mouth...and maybe some sweat from the fever.  So we'll see...

Squaremania: Peeking

I did a similar drawing previously...but This one is the panda as a baby that I'm developing for another illustration - I cropped the picture at the lower part of his eyes so that way it looked like he was peeking over something.

It was drawn by hand and then cleaned up and colored in Adobe Illustrator.

I thought of this as part of creating mock up pieces for licensing artwork.  A company slogan or logo could go below the panda...and how could those cute little eyes do anything but influence someone to purchase whatever the panda endorsed!  That's the idea anyway...

Squaremania: Panda on a square hill

This is the latest illustration for Squaremania.  I wanted a triumphant panda standing on a square hill.  I working on getting the whole world feeling like it belongs together by trying to incorporate a square motif.

I thought it'd be nice to add a couple of the other characters, so I went back in and quickly drew them on their own hills.

Wario time!

I just did a picture of Mario, but I couldn't stop there because he's boring.  Ever since Nintendo debuted Wario, I've been a big fan!  Especially for all the mario kart and mario party games.  He's terrific and we've had a successful partnership.

"I'muh Gonna Win!"

Mario Kart is an obsession, if there ever was one.  You  win all gold trophies in the easy level, then the medium, then hard...and then it opens up mirror mode where everything is backwards and you have to win gold there as well.  THEN (!) there's an online option where you can play against real people and you play random levels in hopes to finish in the top three to win points.  It's fantastic.

Microstock Report for July 2011

This month took another hit...a lot of our regular companies, like Dreamstime and Istockphoto, just did not sell.  Shutterstock remained consistent.

Also - two smaller companies that we upload illustrations to (Vectorstock and 123RF) have both done nicely the last few months - with 123RF having achieved our best month in sales for the site.

We uploaded several files to each of the sites, so it was nice to see a little spike in activity after that, but we're still missing that big illustration that'll jump start the selling back to where it was just over a year ago...