Harry Potter rough drawing

I was one of the lucky few that was invited to experience Pottermore before they went live in October.

It's a pretty fun site - they're still working out a lot of kinks - the biggest being that the server isn't big enough to handle all the traffic just yet (so the site keeps kicking people out).  Anyway - it's quite nice to go through the books and further experience the world of Harry Potter.  The nicest thing is there are a lot of unpublished writings of J K Rowling about characters (and backstories), objects and scenes.

I was inspired to draw this (on a cintiq in photoshop):

 

And I guess it's not terribly accurate to the story...because Harry Potter was never in his cupboard under the stairs reading his Hogwarts acceptance letter...but I could clearly see it in my head and wanted to draw it...it seemed like a nice reveal - to have this kid who spent the first 10 years of his life in misery and to suddenly have that all flip to become the most popular kid in the entire (wizarding) world with the arrival of a single letter would be mind boggling.

Here's the Adobe Illustrator cleanup:

I was hoping to convey the mix of emotions that would hit Harry upon finishing the letter.

Squaremania: Pig color

I'm doing a series of illustration of each of the different Squaremania characters.  This is the little girl pig.  This is still considered a color rough because I did the whole thing in adobe illustrator.  I still need to finalize what the color combination will be and then color it (for real) in Photoshop.

Squaremania Roughs

I'm working out some of the characters - and in the process I want to spotlight them with their own illustration that spotlights their particular trait or something significant about them.  Here are two characters - a female panda and a little gal piggy.

microstock report for August 2011

 Shutterstock made a lot of cashola this last month.  It was a nice upswing from the last couple of horrible summer months.  They say that microstock sells poorly in the summer, so it's nice to pull out of that as we registered lows in Dreamstime and Istockphoto last month.

in August Shutterstock sold 2 ELs for us (that's a $28 license...as compared to the usual subscription downloads of 35 cents each or the ODs of $2.70).  With those two ELs Shutterstock powered our monthly earning back over $300.

Dreamstime and Istockphoto did the normal $40s in sales.  And everything else just puttered along as they've done since we joined their sites.

So far it's still a lot of fun to check the totals and see what's sold on a day to day basis.  It's nice that old images that were done a couple of years ago are still selling well...and that even though we're uploading few, if any, images each month we're still making money!  It could be more, but we haven't been investing the time.  You have to put in the work if you want to see results...

Squaremania: Rough drawing

This is a rough drawing I worked up in Adobe Photoshop.