Christmas Panda unfinished

This is the first pass of color for the Panda.  the little squares on the side are my color palette that I put together in Adobe Illustrator before I started painting.

So far I've just dropped in the color everywhere and have only finished the santa hat and the panda's eyes.

September 2010 Microstock report

This is the microstock report for the month of September of 2010.

It's been a nice source of extra cash each month...last year around this time we were really trying to develop the microstock illustration portfolios on the different sites, but most recently (almost all year) other illustration projects have taken our focus and interest.  That means that the portfolios, which were growing by tens of uploads a month (on average) have shrunk to just a couple, and only if there's time, and only if the uploads are really easy to draw, clean up and color in Adobe Illustrator.

Even without much care Shutterstock continues to rise above $100 each month.  That's important as $100 is the payout minimum for a month.  We haven't had an EL in a couple of months, but we continue to get regular downloads per day (between 2 and 25) and 8 ODs ($2.26 downloads).  I've been focusing on putting my illustrations for Squaremania on products, but I was able to adapt some of those templates to upload to the stock sites (the pencils and cards, and this weekend I'm going to upload the backpack templates).

Istockphoto is a big second on the list.  While we don't get a payout every month, it is fairly consistent.  But unlike Shutterstock, the illustrations that are downloaded are at a slower rate, but each one sells for more (which almost makes up for it, but not quite because of the small portfolio size).

Dreamstime was really slow this month.  There was a huge run of downloads at the end of the month (within the last week) to raise the total to $17, but it was rather a disappointment considering it's the third largest microstock company.

Vectorstock has turned into a very consistent earner.  While the downloads are only about 1-5 a day, there always seems to be something selling on the site.  And slowly, but surely we're heading towards our next raise (a couple of months ago we finally crossed $100 total for the site, and while it took a year, it meant that the downloads are now worth 30 cents as apposed to 25 cents.)

I've decided to start including the various other sites that I've either recently signed up for (Veer and Stockfresh) and an older one (Thinkstock).  Thinkstock gives a big lump sum randomly during the month (on Aug 26th it was $3.25 for 13 downloads) and this month it was $8.25 for 33 downloads.  Stockfresh has yet to yield any monies, but the site is from the creators of Stockxpert, so I expect it to happen soon enough.  And Veer got me to sign up earlier this summer with promises to pay for any files they accepted (the offer is now over), and since then we have had one sale for $7.00.

The other sites are kind of disappointing and make it hard to want to spend the time to upload new images...but I'm going to keep chugging along, because you never know what image people might come across and want to download lots of.

Christmas Panda

Here's the clean-up and a quick color job of the Panda at Christmas.

I'm going to revise a little bit more and then color it for real in photoshop.

Squaremania Christmas Panda rough

If you have a facebook account, you'll have seen all sorts of people put up "christmas countdown clocks."  It seems rather unnecessary considering we all know when Christmas is, AND it's we still have two major holidays in the way (halloween counts, and columbus day...heh...actually i think we're not supposed to recognize that one anymore...so then there's thanksgiving).  But even as big as those holidays are (but not columbus day, that's a racist holiday or something...) Christmas looms even larger on the horizon.

Everybody say hello to Christmas...it'll be here before you know it...at least that's what the retailers would have us believe...

Christmas Stinks!

See, cause it's a skunk...

It seems a little old fashioned to stand on the corner ringing the bell...I remember seeing guys dressed as santa outside every supermarket or mall jingling and jangling.  But I can't recall seeing anyone in recent years...that also might be because it's a little old fashioned to step outside one's house and away from one's computer to buy Christmas presents.

 original color

I did a rough sketch and then cleaned it up (inked it) in Adobe Illustrator...and then decided to just throw some color on it.  It probably needs some revisions but I thought I'd put it up - the finished version (complete with photoshop color) will follow soon.

Christmas is coming!

How sad that we have to start thinking of Christmas already!  Gotta get a head start on the presents.  Gotta clear a space for the tree.  And so on.  But it does make for some cute squaremania pictures!

Here's one now (just a quick little illustration):

Christmas is coming, be afraid...

Frankie Stein sketches

I'm working on a new project - I've been neglecting the blog a bit, but only because I've been doing a lot of sketching lately, and not so much finished illustrations.

Here are a couple of illustrations involving little Frankie Stein.

I've pretty much got his character down, and need to work on the supporting cast of characters...and that should take a while as there are a lot of little characters...

Squaremania on more (mock up) products!

So the last couple days of my hiatus are over...and this is what I've been working on:

There are a bunch of things I created in Adobe Illustrator (such as tags, backpacks and pencils) and then cut, pasted, and cropped my illustrations into and onto them.  I also visited my niece and nephew last weekend and they were excited about pencil toppers (for some reason)...so I added a couple of those to my (mock up) merchandise.

Here's one more that's finished:

You can see more on my website - www.isaacmarzioli.com - I still need to work on getting a few more up and also on putting a variety of other types of merchandise up.

squaremania on products!

I figured that since it was back to school time I would work on this first:

I'm working on getting my characters licensed - I'm doing some mock ups to help potential clients and agents see how Squaremania looks on products.  I drew the pencil in Adobe Illustrator (i did a basic pencil outline  and then a series of color gradients...for the metal color at the bottom I created a small shape and flipped it so the gradient would create a pattern that went one direction and then the opposite direction) and then pasted in the characters and cropped them to the right size and look.  I also changed had to select each character individually and change it's opacity to multiply so it, in effect, erases the white boxes around them (that you would get from pasting a photoshop file into illustrator).

Those characters are isolated from this illustration that I mocked up on a backpack:

This one ends up looking a little more cartoony - but I didn't want to spend the time making the backpack looking realistic when you could get the point without spending all that extra time...

microstock report for August 2010

This month was a little bit down in some places, but big in others...

Shutterstock rebounded from a slow July to once again take first place (which it's been every month since we started Stock illustrations).

In second was Istockphoto with $79, but we finally broke 100 images.  This is the site where you want to have more illustrations on because they sell very well, but they are also very critical and turn away quite a lot.  But once you get them up, it's worth it!

Dreamstime almost lost out to VectorStock this month.  I couldn't believe how few sales we had on Dreamstime.  But this month they did their contest with a subject matter that most of us illustrators didn't think we could be a part of...so I really didn't add any new images this month.

VectorStock has come on pretty strong (for being one of the bottom feeders for so long).  It's had a best month ever - and can be counted on to have at least one sale a day.  We also just recently got a raise on the site (from 25 cents a download to 30 cents)...so that definitely helped.

And the rest were pretty standard - Fotolia and Bigstockphoto both just inched into double digits and Crestock pulled in the rear with 75 cents.  Ridiculous.  Crestock also took almost 5 months to approve the last nine images I uploaded to the site (which is a big reason why I stopped uploading).

All in all - it was still another $300 haul in Microstock.  That's pretty low, but since I've been on hiatus I've been focusing on licensing for real and not this small time stock image licensing (and it's only small time because I'm not investing more time into it).  But it's nice to still be pulling in as much money considering we really haven't added anything to our portfolios, and the images are still getting downloaded.  And I added a couple of new stock sites that still haven't recorded sales, but I have images on them!  Veer and Stockfresh...so we'll see how they do in the coming months....

IF: An Atmosphere of cute

The atmosphere around here is relief.  I've been working on finishing this project for the last three weeks and I'm finally done.  There are some loose ends to tie up (I just revised the parade illustration and need to recolor it), but it's all up and ready to be viewed.

I've been drawing the characters for just over a year...they started out as the sidekicks to another character I draw, but then they really felt like they deserved their own world.

Anyway - we'll see where it goes...

Squaremania: It's finally coming together

I want to say that this will clinch it - but I think I have a couple more things to do before I can submit this stuff to licensing scrutiny...

These are the first four characters...I have about 44 more characters running behind them...

This is the cleanup of all the characters together...I'm getting towards the back, so it's almost done...

it's just silly cute!

I did a series of these with the panda and the skunk...but this is one of the best...

There's this guy on an illustration board I'm on (where we critique each other's childrens book drawings and paintings) named Steve Harpster who does the most amazing eyes.  Just by studying his technique, I've been able to make the eyes that I paint (in photoshop) look a hell of a lot better than they did just a year ago...and I thought those were pretty well done...I'm still learning, but I love how dimensional the eyes look now.

Panda in an egg

I'm finishing up some stuff in a series - I already did the skunk in an egg - and this is the panda in an egg:

Tusken Raider Baseball...and caged

My softball team had our playoff game last night (we lost) - I revised this illustration to hopefully spur us to victory - but apparently Sand People with baseball bats inspires no one.

Then I thought this looks like a guy who belongs behind bars:

 The Tusken Raider was painted in photoshop, and the cage was drawn and colored in illustrator.  He was originally going to be in a cage on the ground, but someone of his character needed to be suspended from above in a dark dark room, so he can't hurt anyone anymore.

IF: Caged - behind bars...

Sure I'm going with the very obvious interpretation of this week's Illustration Friday - but it's fun to see cute animals looking so pathetic behind bars....that's why zoos are so popular.

I was actually working on a different project with this character and thought his pose would be good to add some bars to.

IF: artificial...

Something that sells well on stock image sites are realistic looking vectors.  The artificial reality is quite good for the buyers as, unlike the real thing, it allows for scaling (without losing image quality) and they're easily edited.  So far we've created realistic baseball caps, desserts (like one of our most popular pieces, a realistic chocolate covered strawberry),

and yesterday i finally got around to creating an artificial corkboard:

What's nice about this is that I can use this piece, and add more paper or different types of paper or even add words to add a variety of different stock image choices for perspective buyers.
You can find these and many more on stock image sites such as shutterstock, istockphoto, dreamstime, and fotolia.

And it's nice to do these every once in a while because they're completely different from the children's book illustration stuff I usually do.

revisiting old characters

I'm putting together a new project - but its making me revisit older illustrations and revising them.  This is the first one I just finished - I wanted to do two versions and I needed them isolated on white - so I took out the background and redrew the eyes for the second version.



The one on the left is how I feel about running...and the elephant on the right is where I wish I could get.




Anyway - these are done....and I'm moving on.

Microstock Report for July 2010

It was a bit of an off month for microstock.  There were a couple of reasons though - most people agree that the summer months are very slim (just like the bit of time right after Christmas)...so it's to be expected to have a drop off from the spring numbers.  We made almost $400 last month (which was still a little bit down from the month before) and for July we only pulled in $323.

But I'm not terribly disappointed because the second reason is that we really didn't invest any time into uploading new images.  And you HAVE to upload new images consistently if you want to see your numbers go up.

Our number one site since we started this whole stock image venture is Shutterstock.  What's nice is that we've passed another 'raise' on this site - after you make a total of $500 lifetime on Shutterstock, you go from making 25 cents an image to 33 cents - and in July we crossed $3000 which means we now make 36 cents an image.  It doesn't sound like a lot - but it adds up since we average somewhere between 350-500 image downloads per month.

Second on the list, once again - is the powerhouse of Istockphoto.  It's a site that should be a bigger seller, but we just don't have enough images on it.  And I submitted several new images (the same ones I submitted to the other sites) and they were declined.  It's the struggle one goes through to work with Istockphoto...but its definitely worth it.

Dreamstime was our 3rd place finisher (yet again).  The top three seem to always fall in line.  What's nice is that Dreamstime finally had some life this month and recorded a respectable number for the first time in a few months.  $40 still isn't where I want it to be, but it's getting there.  As the portfolio grows, so will the numbers.

Fotolia surprised me with a 4th place finish - it's the second month in a row that recorded decent numbers (decent for Fotolia).  I used to be able to count on this site, but have been very disappointed in the last year or so.  And since this is where our second highest portfolio is (with almost 300 images), we should definitely be getting more downloads.

The rest of the field is pretty small potatoes.  Vectorstock looks like it'll regularly come in with double digits in earnings...but the rest is just too hit and miss.  I signed up for a new site called StockFresh - it's by the same people that created Stockxpert (which they then sold, and it was subsequently shut down)....so we'll see if anything happens there.  Oh - and I also signed up for Veer - they offered some duckets to just upload images, so I made about $11 putting about 40 images up on that site - and while there have been a couple hundred views, there has yet to be a sale...but the site just relaunched, so, while I don't know what to expect...it should sell something soon.

Marshmallow reality

I posted an image a few months ago of the dog and cat character in a trunk shaped plane flying towards the sun as they held their marshmallows out to be toasted.  The idea was that this ridiculous concept was their imagination - and the below illustration is the reality.  But while both drawings have the characters doing something silly, why wouldn't you want to go to a real source of heat (like the Sun) instead of using artificial means to achieve a tasty toasted marshmallow?

First off - here was the original drawing:

Then I cleaned it up in Adobe Illustrator:

And after that I imported the lines into Photoshop (pasting it so I could choose to keep the vector lines intact).  I colored the piece in Photoshop and when I finished I used 'edit content' to take the illustration back into Illustrator to self color the lines.