What a square adoption

I was working on this illustration way back in February when my computer fell apart on me and I was left without Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop.  I had to wait until the computer came back from the shop and I could see whether or not any of my files were salvageable.

The computer decided it wasn't on it's last leg, and I upgraded to CS5...and then I forgot about this illustration.  I'm currently updating my website (www.isaacmarzioli.com) and I discovered it again while going through my files.  I didn't have a background on it, and while i originally was going to have them in front of a supermarket, I went with a more whimsical background.  I almost drew eyes in on the hills, but everyone is doing that these days, so I refrained.

I did the illustration to commemorate our adopting two little kittens from Forgotten Animals of LA.  They're a fantastic organization that goes in and rescues strays and finds homes for needy animals.  And what's nice is that they have huge hearts and really care about what they do.  They even take in sick animals that the owners have given up on and get them treated.

Our two cats are the ones in front - they're twins. 

Mario plays the Wii

I've been holding off buying a Wii because I knew I'd get addicted.  Sadly that resolve to stay away came to an end when I was offered one for free.  So what was I supposed to do but take it?  That was a month ago, and I've been playing Mario Kart ever since.  Its an obsession that just got worse this morning when I finally hooked the Wii up to the internet.

At work someone e-mailed us that there's an art gallery called "Super Iam8-bit" with artwork based on the old 80's video games.  So all of that inspired me to paint this.  I drew a rough in photoshop, cleaned it up on a separate layer, and then colored it.

Of course, I look more like this playing video games:

IF: Gesture

Originally I wasn't going to do a drawing for this week because all I could think of when I thought of the Illustration Friday topic of 'Gesture' was this:

And I couldn't have my cute little characters flipping the birds - although when I first started out my brother and I had a comic strip and something similar to this was our first gag - a penguin standing on an iceberg flipping off a flock of birds as they flew by.  Juvenile, but it cracked us up.

Anyway - I originally drew the hand, but decided it was better to 'blur' it out...as we all know what she's doing.  And Adelia (the character above) is really too classy for such things.

I then thought about scanning in some old gesture drawings:

I still ended up quickly drawing this gesture drawing of a snooty waiter, but then it clicked and I started a revision of an old Adelia illustration:

I'm having to completely redraw Adelia as I want her to look younger and cuter (so I'm making the eyes bigger and lowering them on her face - and the squaremania characters went through a big change from where they started as her side kicks...But this, if finished, would make a better drawing for Illustration Friday - a kind gesture of cupcakes.

Dreamstime - I love living in the city

I think this is something that's nice about life in the city - those moments of peace and tranquility that parks can bring.  Because of all the people and traffic and noise, it's nice to be able to escape into these little oasis of nature.

I did this simple illustration for Dreamstime.  They're a microstock agency that holds a monthly contest.  This month it's "I love living in the city" - and all the images submitted relate to that in some way.  I wanted to do an illustration in photoshop and have it be a little rough and simple with bright colors.  I probably should have added a couple of cars, but I thought this was good enough.  I just submitted it, so we'll see if they think it's good enough to compete!

IF: Stay

This week's Illustration Friday topic is "Stay."

This is a rough I did in Adobe Illustrator

Then I added a new layer and redrew and colored it:

I decided to do the entire drawing in Adobe Illustrator so I could upload it to the microstock sites I sell art on.

What are microstock sites?

Shutterstock is the best of the best - as far as return on the time invested.  I've been on the site for over 2 years now and I've always made more than $100 a month - and most months I don't even upload any new images!  You start by uploading 10 images for them to review (they have to be high quality photographs or vector art).  Once that's approved you can start uploading any and all images you want to sell!

Dreamstime: This site doesn't sell nearly as many images as Shutterstock, but what it lacks on volume it makes up for in the amount each sale is worth.  And they run monthly contests for illustrators and photographers, much like Illustration Friday, only instead of just showcasing your work, you can also potentially win money.

Istockphoto:  This site is one of the classiest sites, but since the sales have slowed in recent months, it's not at the top of my list.  Each sale is around $3 and they really scrutinize each illustration.  I have over 700 images on Shutterstock, but only 112 on Istockphoto (because the cheaper stuff gets turned down).  The other thing too is that Istockphoto doesn't have a referral program.  If you sign up by clicking on one of these links, I'll get a taste of your success - and it's not money that comes out of your royalties, but extra icing on top!  It's tasty for all involved.  Except Istockphoto.  They don't care about referrals or people.

There are many more sites, but those are the top three.

Dreamstime Illustration/photography Contest for July

I did this illustration for the Dreamstime contest this month:

It's a bit of a departure for the style I usually use...

The contest this month is about the 'love of the city'.  I thought it was a sarcastic contest topic at first, and all I could think of was people sitting in traffic, or pigeon filth and rats...but apparently there's some people out there that dig the big city...and they wanted images to prove it.  So I did a stylized cityscape in the background and filled it in with a bunch of stylized characters walking in the foreground.

Microstock report for June 2011

This last month I was able to work on a couple of new illustrations.  They were really quick and small, but it was nice to upload something after a few months with no new images.  Some of them sold on Shutterstock, but so far they really haven't taken (at least not yet):

 It was a series of variations on these two kids (smiling, arms open, handing each other gifts).  I thought they were cute.  When I have time, I'll probably try and draw some more with these characters.

Anyway - on to the report!

Shutterstock continues to pull in more than a hundred dollars a month.  In June we had our first EL of the year - that's an extended license and it sold for $28.  So while we had some microstock sites netting less, Shutterstock stays pretty consistent.  It helps also to have a referral who is currently more successful than our own site because we get 3 cents for every download he gets (we made $15.63 from that alone, which, if you think about it, means he had over 500 sales/downloads for the month while we had 286).

The EL was the entire sign language alphabet

A huge upset came in the form of Dreamstime which finally made more money than Istockphoto.  Sadly it means that Istock is losing steam these last few months and Dreamstime is staying fairly consistent.  Dreamstime also had two really big sales (one for $9 and another for 5.50) at the end which helped push it over $40 for the month.

All the other sites continued to make their pennies, but every bit counts!  And they're really just sitting around slowly collecting money, so I like to keep them around.  I have a couple of new files in the works, so we'll see if next month works out any better!

And if you want to start selling your own artwork on these sites - sign up through one of my links!  You have to upload a couple of files which they'll decide whether or not you're good enough, and then you can just start uploading to your heart's content!  It might sound daunting, but it's rather easy.  And vector files sell better than regular files, so warm up those illustrator skills!

Happy Adelia

This is one of the first new cleaned up versions of Adelia - with her new look (it's really just a revision of where her eyes and nose sit on her face).

IF: Launch - Angry Birds: Adelia the Adelie Penguin edition...

I drew this over the weekend for Illustration Friday's Launch...and I liked it enough to finish it up.  I cleaned it up in Illustrator and colored it in Photoshop.

I've been addicted to Angry Birds since Thanksgiving - I'm currently trying to get 3 stars on all the levels (I have one left!)...and then I'll move on to Angry Birds Rio (my wife is already half way through).

When I thought of Launch I immediately thought of the slingshot launching birds at little green pigs.  I didn't want to just draw the game, but have one of my characters get in on the action.  I created Adelia back in 2006 and I recently brought her back (which just means I started drawing her again)...so little Adelia the Adelie Penguin is getting in on the pig popping action.  I like to think that Adelia would be one of the little blue birds that work best on breaking the ice blocks.

Adelia's back!

I'm happy to announce the relaunching of Adelia! 

Adelia was one of the first character designs I did after college (back when I was only drawing to fulfill the requirements of the homework assignment).  This is what she originally looked like:

This was from 2006 - and at the time I was doing a series of realistic watercolor penguin illustrations.  I titled it Pinguino because I wanted a cuter word for Penguin (this is Italian), and her name came from accidently titling the Adelie penguin with an 'a' instead of an 'e' at the end...it sounded like the perfect name for a little girl penguin.  And the more I drew her, the more cartoony she became - and the toes (which look a little creepy on a penguin) changed to basic webbed feet and her nose became more upturned.

I'm currently going through my old images and seeing which ones I can salvage.  It turns out that most of them are off model from the way I want her to look now - so I'm using a lot of them as templates for pose, but nothing more.

Also, last month I was doing a bit of research for a project I was working on for Nick Jr, and found a small rule about drawing a child's head.  To make a character look younger or sweeter or cuter, just drop their eyes below the middle point of the head.  All of my previous Adelia illustrations had her eyes sitting on the middle line and sometimes above!  So I had to rectify that, and quickly!

IF: Launching a penguin

I heard so much about this game called Angry Birds last year.  Conan was talking about it on the Tonight Show (during the 15 minutes he ran that show), Adam Carolla's boy wanted to actually be an angry bird for halloween.  Some time around Thanksgiving of 2010 I decided to download it onto my phone and I've been addicted ever since.

Now what does any of that have to do with Illustration Friday's theme this week of 'Launch?'  Well,  I immediately thought of a bird being launched out of a slingshot.

But I wanted to draw my character Adelia.

Adelia is a penguin character I drew several years ago when I was trying to break into children's books...I ended up giving up on the idea in favor of other projects...but I dusted her off this week and decided to update her a bit and give her another go - but this time as a licensed character.  It's tough to get something like that off the ground, but I think she has a lot of potential.

Adelia Cleanup (illustrator lines)

Stylized version of those same two characters...

I did a version that was very cutesy (in the previous post) and this version was trying for that same thing with a simple design and Japanese Kawaii aesthetic.  This drawing I did in Adobe Illustrator and uploaded to the microstock illustration sites.

To potentially make them more attractive to microstock buyers, I added the thought balloons so they could add their own caption or use them for whatever message they wanted.   They were accepted on Shutterstock a couple of days ago and have already sold 4 times, and are still queuing up on the other sites...so we'll see!

New project...

I'm working on a new project that's due tomorrow - these are the two main characters:

Microstock report for May 2011

So this was another month where we didn't pay any attention to our microstock sites - but still made a few dollars:

Shutterstock accounted for 50% of the total stock sales revenue.  That one seems to be pretty steady while all of the other sites are slowing down...still selling, but slowing down.

I'd like to spend some time creating new illustrations, so hopefully I'll be able to get to that this week (while I have some vacation time)....but I have some other projects to work on (we always seem to have something), so we'll see if anything gets posted.

Girl on Bike revision

This is the rough revision of the girl on a bike drawing:

There were a few things I thought I could add to better round out the drawing.  I also wanted to use this as a test for the brand new red pencil refills I just got (I usually use blue, so it's nice to have the variety.

Also - I wanted to add some wonkiness to the tires (as they were just round circles in the original drawing)...and in Illustrator I can just copy and paste the front tire to the back, so I didn't bother drawing them both in.

Microstock Report for April 2011

I can't believe it's already may!  This marks the second month into our 3rd year of selling microstock.  I should check to see how much we've made collectively up until this point...but in any case - here's the information about April:

Everything took a downward tumble this last month - which is weird because April has usually been one of our better months...One part might be the fact that we haven't been adding new files/illustrations to our microstock portfolios...so we'll see if we can't change that in the coming months...

Shutterstock stayed on top...

123RF made a push into the top 4...which marks the first time it's been that high on the chart.  The listing of 'all other stock' includes freshstock, veer, and whatever stockxpert turned into.

Still, as I always say - it's nice that we haven't done any, or that much, work and we're still pulling in about 300 dollars a month!

This is the one file I added this month:

if: Bicycle

I did this for a project that still has yet to be published (but should be soon...).

iF: Duet

This is a quick sketch of a little duet:

The panda is singing his little heart out...

Microstock Report for March 2011

This is our microstock report for March of 2011.

Shutterstock had the biggest upturn this past month.  For the last few months it seemed to be hanging around the $120 mark...and then suddenly the ODs (about $3 downloads) and even one EL (a $28 sale) rolled in.  So we ended up with $172 exactly for the month.  This site is also the only one where I have a referral also making money...referrals are nice because they get their money...and because you referred them, you get three cents for every one of their downloads.

Istockphoto continued it's run as the second biggest money maker - there were a few months where this site also topped the hundred dollar mark...but it's settled into the 70-80 dollar range...and that's where it's stayed.  On this site baseball caps and the chocolate covered strawberry are illustrations that sell well each month.

Dreamstime took a big drop off from the month previous.  But $30 is about the range that I expect from this site.  What's weird is that we had almost 13 more downloads this month, but each one sold for less...

And then there's Vectorstock.  It has the second most downloads per month next to Shutterstock (although we usually average around 300 downloads on Shutterstock - Vectorstock usually comes in second with around 50 downloads...but in March we had 80 downloads!).

Squaremania: Sad Panda

I did this in photoshop using a wacom tablet.  Just as I finished I wondered why I just used the cintiq as a screen instead of drawing on it...