Challenges and Contests to improve your skills!

"We all have 10,000 bad drawings in us so the sooner you get them out the better!" - Walt Stanchfield

If you're an artist their is a 90% chance you've heard this before in school, from other artists, in many many many art books... it's everywhere. It's true. Not everything you draw is going  to be your masterpiece. Not everything your favorite artist ever drew was a masterpiece. It takes work to get to be a great artist, it takes practice.

Contests and Challenges are a great way to hone your illustrative skill!

They're also a pretty good way to network. I recently read that the difference between a starving artist and a paid artist most often isn't artistic skill, but networking ability. We all know it's true. You can sit here and post the best art in the world to your blog, deviantart gallery or facebook page and never get a single commissions or visits. If people can't find you, they'll never hire you.

One place to get your artwork seen is "Illustration Friday." It is fairly well known, and has a huge variety of illustrators that participate. It also hosts an illustration forum for creative inspiration and camaraderie!  Speaking of inspiration, you'll definitely find a lot of it if you browse previous weeks!

Anyways, my first actual entry (done on time) is up! The theme for this week is "Silent." When I mentioned this to my friend, his first thought was "Silence is Golden, Duct tape is Silver." Well that was all it took, I couldn't resist a more... frightening take. I hope you all enjoy Silence!

A new site to find a challenge!

Just a small post to update you guys on a find I just made. I'm probably a bit late to the party and half of you already know about this little gem, but just in case you don't!

Illustration Friday!

I discovered this site last night as they were wrapping up their weekly challenge with the theme 'stripes'. Unfortunately, I discovered it an hour before it ended, and so was not able to formally enter it, but I still cooked up a fun Illustration!



This also represents one of my new vector illustrations. This was created in Illustrator in probably 4 hours, I'm just learning! About a half hour of that was in Photoshop inking the original for live trace ;)

The next one (announced today) is silent! You will see an illustration for that in a later blog.
I've completed this, My illustration for silent!

Learning Vector for Stock Illustration

I've signed up to sell illustrations with iStockPhoto. This of course means I will have to switch over to Illustrator because they require vector and the filetype to be ai. This means learning a whole new workflow! I'll admit this seems rather daunting, and Illustrator is no breeze to learn. However I'm plugging through a lot of tutorials and I think I'll have the hang of it soon.

Reasons I chose iStockPhoto

• They have been around a while and I don't see them going anywhere in the near future.
• Someone I respect and admire has already chosen to sell designs there.
• After asking around they seem to be honest and reliable.

Signing up

To sign up for iStockPhoto you must pass their test. It's a pretty simple readthrough, if a little long, but important. You read through it and you answer the questions. You can have the page open on another tab if you need and look up the answers directly. They want to make sure you know the info. If you don't, and you upload something incorrectly, they'll reject it.

After passing the test you then have to submit THREE examples. I've made two of my 3, but they want to see very different styles, so you should put careful thought and consideration into it.

Vector Gator Love

Here is one of my examples

I'd love any critiques you guys have!