The state of politics today

I was looking forward to voting in this year's election - only to see what ended up happening...is it even worth voting for the primaries?  I signed up as a Republican, so that was my first mistake - the contest was already decided by primary time...and it looks like the Democrats are practically squared away too.  I'll vote in the actual election, so that'll be fun....or horrible.

But it'll be interesting!

Microstock Report for June 2012

Here's the microstock report for June, 2012:

It was a best month ever for 123rf!  After about two years on this site (which is the same as most of the other sites) we're still getting downloads...which amounted to $36.64 - and it snuck past BigStockPhoto on the lifetime earnings (the chart above doesn't reflect this because I already saved the jpg before I switched them around.

Shutterstock still remains the only site to consistently earn above $100 every month.  We've also been on this site for over two years and there's only been one month that we didn't meet the payout amount (which is a hundred).  It's crazy to have the same images on every site (mostly) and somehow Shutterstock outpaces everyone else - even if they combined their totals! 

I didn't have time to add any new stock images this month, but it still kept pace with the previous month...we'll see if July brings us any more time to create new illustrations...

Pixel Art Pets

I've switched gears a little bit in they style of stock illustrations I'm doing.  I've always enjoyed pixel art (or at least had an appreciation for it) since the time of the original Nintendo video games.  You have a very limited palette in which to convey your illustration.

I started with a page of fruit:

and then I moved on to pets.  First i drew a puppy:

And then drew this picture of a kitten based on Raimi, our little runt of a cat:

Eaten: Blob vinyl toy design #2 vector style

I already posted this drawing yesterday. But this version is the illustrator (vector) version. If one is to send designs to a company, it's probably best to have the lines as crisp and clean as possible. This, of course has all sorts of highlights on it, so it too wouldn't work, but I wanted to give the illustrator version some depth, and also make it look like plastic.



I have also been looking at my watercolor versions and really felt they needed some sort of color behind them. So this kind of fixes that problem as well as (kind of) tying it in to the other drawings I'm currently doing - the little kid entertainment icons.