Kid in a Frog Hat

Why are kids in frog hats so cute?  And why are there so many hats out there (these days) that have animal faces?  They look horrible on regular people...just incredibly dorky - but you strap one of these on a little kid and suddenly even the ugly ones are sorta cute....

And then you get a hat on a cute kid and watch out!  You'll go home and punch your own kid for not trying hard enough.

I was drawing a lot of scary looking characters (a toy line I'm working on) and somehow this drawing found it's way into the mix.  I thought it'd be funny to create a line of cool toy monsters in those blind boxes (where you buy one in a toy line, but you don't know which one you'll get until you open the box)...and every once in a while you'll get this little girl toy which would be the completely opposite of every other toy.

One day that'll happen, and it'll be funny...unless you're the boy that opens the box...

Kid in frog hat head

I'm working some toy designs...this is one of the first thumbnails that I wanted to finish up:

I haven't finished coloring the body, but I'm currently working on it...

Scary designs!

I'm teaming up with a couple of other talented folks to create some vinyl toys.  This is one of my concepts that we're thinking about..

I transferred it (from Adobe Illustrator) to Photoshop to do a color version:

This is an illustration for the microstock site Dreamstime.

They do a monthly contest based on an idea.  Most of the submissions are photographs, but I always like to throw in an illustration to add some creativity to the whole thing.

Microstock report for September 2011

Another step backwards in the licensing world.  It's only microstock licensing, so no big worries.  We haven't put any new files into the sites this month (and really only two illustrations since spring)...so it's to be expected that there won't be big returns.  With that said we still are averaging above $200 a month without having to do any more work.

Shutterstock is the best microstock site out there.  From the very beginning (when we started in February of 2009) we uploaded 10 images and they immediately started making money...and it has stayed consistent ever since.  We've just crossed the $5,000 since our start with this site.

Istockphoto changed their rates for people who aren't exclusive with them and it's really hurt our numbers.  Istockphoto started to net over $100 a month for a time, but it now fails to bring in anything worth being proud of.

Dreamstime is a site that I was starting to think would pick way up.  They have a contest every month with a theme that you can upload to...and so any new illustrations usually went into that.  Not to win, but because each illustration would be worth more if downloaded.  Now the majority of our downloads on this site are from our contest illustrations, but they're still not selling too frequently and Dreamstime still finishes behind Istock...

Everything else stays in the $10-$25 range for the other sites...they're small, but you can usually count on them to bring in some loose change.

I signed up with two new stock sites a few months ago - Veer and Stockfresh.  Neither one is selling terribly well...we've had a total of two sales on Stockfresh and are averaging one download per month from Veer...so I lump them into the same category with Thinkstock (another site that doesn't produce much) and together they combined for $13.80 in sales.

So that wraps it up!  Go sign up with Shutterstock, it's worth the time!