My Day of Fame Times 2

Well, as you may know, yesterday was my 24 hours of fame on Ript Apparel. The Pirates of the Black Lagoon was on sale, and though I don’t yet know how well I did, I think I did fairly OK. I received a lot of great comments with exception to 1 person who identified one of the photo references I used to create the drawing and accused me of cheating. I will address this concern at the end of this post. First though, I have some other business I am itching to tell my readers about!

When I woke up this morning, the first thing I did was check my email to see if by chance a sales report had been issued yet on yesterday’s sale. Instead of receiving this report, I got another pleasant surprise. More than a dozen great comments about my Cloud Toys tee for sale on Redbubble.com! I wondered what the hell was going on and found out that Redbubble.com ran my Cloud Tees shirt on their homepage yesterday! This is a great honor. According to Redbubble.com, all featured designs are hand selected and chosen by their art directors. The notification email that they sent me, which I really had to dig in my spam folder for, stated that I was picked because one of their art directors thinks this tee is great. They also said that less than 3 shirts in 3000 will be picked and featured! This is a great honor. Even though to date, none of these shirts has sold, this is still a thrill and a chance to network with other great artists.

Among the comments was a demand for more art from me. I have a few projects I’ve since given up on that can be tweaked and sold so I will do just that and build up my store front. As always, all my shirts available for purchase will be located on the bar on the right of this screen. I will also be adding another page to my site, a store front.

Now, regarding the tracing accusation that occurred yesterday, I will explain. As an illustrator, I often use reference photos so I can know what I’m drawing. Usually, I will use several photos from lots of different angles and lighting conditions so I can take what I want from each one and make it my own. In the case of yesterday’s shirt, I had a few reference photos. I did, however, fall in love with one in particular. I loved the angle of the octopus and the placement of it’s tentacles. I used this as my main reference and in retrospect, followed it too closely. To be called a cheater and be defamed in front of everyone on my day in the sun is embarrassing and horrific. I spoke on this subject head on and will not make this same mistake again. I stand by that I am not guilty of tracing, but I am guilty of following a reference photo far too closely. If you flip through my gallery, which according to my stats doesn’t get the kind of traffic I wish it were, you would see that I support original ideas without need to copy and trace. Drawing would be too boring if it were just tracing. Besides, for me, the creation of that octopus was more about the technique involved than the actual image. I should have kept that in mind.

Well, as always, thank you for your support and for reading. If you’re new to my sketchbook, then please stick around. I promise I have a lot of great art on the way. I have 3 projects in my mind right now that I will be working on tonight and tomorrow. With any luck, I can post sketches then. Thanks and have a good weekend!