Art dumpedy dump...

I had a bunch of random drawings I thought I'd pop up here - just because they don't really belong on their own post and I wasn't really going to do anything with them anyway.  But maybe I'll post some to instagram?

 This was for our stock images site - I thought the idea of two knights facing off would look pretty awesome.  And I was right!

 This is for an undisclosed project I was working on late last year.  I did a version where the kids looked quite young, and they wanted them aged up a bit - so I redrew them as older versions.  I did several styles (with version 2 being my favorite), but they ended up not doing anything with the project, so these drawings just sit here on this blog not doing anything...

 Here's the kid version - they were deemed 'too junior' which could be a death sentence for a show trying to appeal to the older kid audience.

 I was drawing a kid, and this time for a junior show I was trying to develop, who would end up in a monsterous situation.  I wanted him to be as innocent as possible, and maybe have a hint of anime hair.

 Speaking of Monsterous - this was one attempt at the monster that finds the boy above.  As you can see, he's even cuter than the boy is.  Below is version two.  This is yet another project that we didn't get too far with.

 This is for Happy Pantry - Even Mona Lisa was a fan of our aprons.  They're still available on our website at www.happy-pantry.com - and only $29.99!  She's smiling because she's adorable in her new apron!

 At the time I drew this, I was developing a series of cute monster toys.  This was a stitched up doll.  I thought it was rather cute and slightly scary.

 Also for Happy Pantry - Peas on Mars.  Says it all.  It's terrible, and that's why it never made it past the rough drawing stage.

 I drew this shortly after I drew Leonardo deCappucino - I thought it would have been funny to have a silence of the hams...but also, possibly, a little too adult for the kids.  I originally drew his iconic mask as well, but Tracey vetoed that - this cutesy ham was my last ditched effort to get it made, but to no avail.  The boss said no.

And finally - here's the last picture in our art dump.  Another project we were developing - I think this is from 2010 or so, I wanted to have three kids that were kind of reminiscent of Edward Gory/Charles Addams characters and the feel that those guys put into their cartoon/comics.  I won't say much more than that as I still want to develop this into something...maybe...at some point.

My Alien of a toy

I designed this to be an alien creature who just ate a cute animal.  I wanted to make a whole series of them when I suddenly found that a movie called Aliens vs Monsters was coming out and they had a blob creature in it...and even in the promo that blob had something floating inside itself - it was a chair or something, but it was enough to make me change my entire concept.

As it is - I designed two different aliens - this is the first of them:

I didn't know how the toy would actually work.  I thought maybe there could be a seam under the lip of the eye, where you could lift it up and actually pull out the little dog who was lying on a shelf inside the blob.  Or it could just be a see through blob and you could never really get at the cute dead animal inside (or sleeping animal, if dead animals offend you).

Microstock report for December 2011

Decembers are usually a really bad month for stock licensing.  The holidays and vacations keep people from downloading.  This December brought a couple of days on Shutterstock where we didn't get any downloads, and while it was down from last month, it was still a fairly good month.

Shutterstock once again carried over 50 percent of the sales this month.  Bigstockphoto rallied after last month's disappointing fifty cents showing by coming in 3rd overall for December.  When we first started with Bigstockphoto we consistently had months like that (where regular $3 dowloads happened each week), but recently it's been a struggle to sell anything on that site.  Hopefully this is a sign of Bigstockphoto picking back up.

I decreased the sizes of a couple of portfolios because I had an illustration on several sites that I've decided to take in a different direction:

I drew this a few years ago with the idea to turn it into a vinyl toy.  I put that idea on hold for a while because I started pursuing other avenues - and recently I've teamed up with a couple of friends from work to create apps and vinyl toys.  This one eyed blob monster will be our first vinyl toy.

And what's interesting is just as I took this image off the stock illustration sites, I was suddenly contacted by someone that wanted to do an Ipad game with this character.  So I was able to negotiate a license with the person directly.  So this year could see this character with it's own toy AND game app!

In October, I found out that you could drag any picture into Google.com (in the image area) and it will do a search based on that image.  I found several of my stock illustrations being given away for free or being used by blogs illegally (or at least without any credit)...This year I'm going to start including a copyright on each image.  It's kind of lame, but it's a good way to ensure that people won't use these images without permission.