I’ve been slacking again on updating this thing – my apologies. Life has taken us by storm, and my wife and I have been busy with a variety of different things. My birthday came and went on August 13th, and as a wedding gift we headed to IKEA to get some furnishings for our apartment. I’m typing this from a new work desk, with plenty of surface space to spread out all my art supplies, paints, knick-knacks, and laptop. Next to me is a new bookcase; I finally have my reference books within arm’s reach for easy reading in case I need to look something up. We also have a few items in the living room that look really great. IKEA is an easy and fairly affordable option for making your apartment look nice on a budget.
I’m working still on illustration, and was lucky enough to receive an Amazon gift card for my birthday. It promptly went into purchasing some new art reference books – James Gurney’s two books, Color and Light and Imaginary Realism, as well as a few picture books, for inspiration. I found out that two of the hosts of the WIP Podcast actually live here in Atlanta, which is all the more reason to improve my art skills.
Etsy has revamped its search results to focus on relevancy instead of recent listings, meaning that it’s now possible to find items you’re looking for based on descriptions, tags, and titles, rather than inputting a search term and having the first six pages of listings be the most recently renewed items that fall under that heading. To that end, I’ve done some reworking of my tags and titles, and am hoping to see an increase in traffic based on relevancy.
I also have a Back to School sale going on currently. Use code BACK2SCHOOL for 15% off – I figure that school starting up again is a good reason to get a reward once the house is empty of kids. My shop can be found at http://www.greyedout.etsy.com – the sale will most likely run until around September 10th.
Current projects, both personal and work-related, include a leather Moleskine cover, a few monster skull illustrations, and some figure drawings for myself that should help with painting and technique.
The monster skull is based off a hyena, with the proportions and teeth somewhat skewed… I sprayed it with a matte coating earlier, and am planning on doing some light acrylic washes on top for color. A preview:
thekiltedgerman 