theispot.com and "save for web" solutions

I have a portfolio on theispot.com now - www.theispot.com/artist/jforson. I spent today setting it up, resizing images etc. Hopefully I won't get lost in the mix. One thing I noticed about the site, like most illustration venues, my work doesn't seem to fit the mold. I'm not sure if that's good or bad. On one hand I think it's good. It could mean that my work is original and breaks from the conventional. On the other hand it could mean I have a style that doesn't attract clients. I think a lot of illustrators compromise their artistic integrity in order to have a more salable service, and attract those ever lucrative advertising budgets. I'm not willing to go there just yet. Maybe when I have kids to feed or something, but for now I'd rather do work I'm proud of.

Something I've been irritated with for a few years has been how my images look when I save them for the web. I spend a lot of time getting them just how I want in Photoshop, then I save for web, and suddenly they look washed out and dead! I thought this was just because they were being compressed, and that was the nature of the beast, so I would up the contrast and saturation before saving them for web to counter this phenomenon. Well, yesterday I did some digging, and found out that there IS a solution! It has to do with the color profile, something I knew nothing about until I read this creativepro.com article. I read it, I tried it, it worked beautifully. I love finding the answer to an annoying problem!

Back in business

I've been out for a little while because my Grandpa passed away, and I had to go back to my home town. Now that I've returned to San Francisco I'm working on getting back up to speed. Today I joined theispot.com. I've got to format 24 illustrations to fit their specs, but I'll be displaying my stuff soon. Being a member of this site was recommended to me by some of my peers, but I've been putting it off until I was sure that it was worth it. Oddly, the biggest job I had this year came from theispot.com, even though I wasn't a member. I got the job because somebody wanted to contract a friend of mine off the site, but he was too busy (with a different job he got from there) so he passed the client my information, and I got the job! This speaks well for the theispot. If you think about it, it makes sense. Say you want to hire an illustrator, but you don't know of one, or they aren't available, what do you do? You can't google "an illustrator who I like" or just "illustrator" and go through the thousands of pages one-by-one, so you need to find a place with a lot of talent you can sift through. Why this simple idea never dawned on me is a mystery. Maybe because I follow art and illustration so closely, it's hard for me to look at it like a potential client. I can hardly imagine not knowing a single illustrator, but there's people out there like that who need a person with drawing talents.

Also, thanks to booooooom.com for showing my work. I got quite a spike in my site traffic today!

***Sorry if this post is odd. I'm having an allergic reaction to gluten, and I had to take a Benadryl.***

Show recap

What a relief to be done! It was awesome, and I met some nice people. If you're in SF, it will be up until March 21st. Artwork is for sale online though Doublepunch: http://doublepunch.bigcartel.com/

Lots of photos from the show are on Fecal Face:
http://www.fecalface.com/SF/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1850&Itemid=90

I'll post more as I find them.

Haven't been able to post what I've been working on lately because it's secret. Details sometime in the future. Projects you have to keeps under wraps frustrating like that.

Disgrace & Embrace tonight at Doublepuch

The show is installed and everything is lookin nice. Here's some photos ryan took of the installing process. http://www.doublepunch.com/?p=1475. Come out tonight if you can! 7 till late. There are paintings, sketches, and prints for sale. I'm excited!

In other news I got a blank skate deck from the Montana Skatepark Association and I'm going to be working on that soon. I haven't painted a deck in many years. Looking forward to it.

Alright, I gotta get pretty and go to the show!

Shadow Boy

Sometimes paintings do not go the way you hope. This was one of those paintings. Although it can be frustrating, I know that it's where I learn the most, and it shows that I'm pushing myself out of my comfort zone. That's how we grow! The main hangup with this one is the glowing and soft blurs I wanted. It's so easy to do in photoshop, but that doesn't help me since the goal for all my work is to be able to show it in a gallery, even if it's an illustration like this one. Besides that, I think that it's always better to do as much as you can by hand. I've been trying and failing to achieve a foggy haunted effect for months. When I was painting San Francisco houses with women I wanted to paint the ever-present fog, but it's difficult to do in acrylic. I finally understand out how to do it from studying Eric Fortune and Sam Weber, but that's something I'll be working on in the coming months. Too late for this piece. I got some soft edges with the spraypaint I used in the background, but I got lucky with the overspray, and some parts had to be painted over. Too unpredictable, and painting over it can be tricky. I posted the original scan of the painting, and then the final after I worked on it in PS. In this case I had to repair it in PS, and that's never good.


A few months ago I was contacted by a writer named Stiles White who has a blog called Six Word Tales. Basically, he writes stories that are six words long, and has an illustrator make an image for it. I would normally turn down things like this, but he lets the artists "do their thing" and I actually really like the tales. I read a bunch of them, and felt my creativity firing up! That doesn't happen a lot, so I decided to pursue it. The final words are not settled, but I was going off of "They finally captured the shadow boy." Fun stuff!

Hope some of this makes sense. I've been sick the last few days and I'm kinda loopy.

Work for Disgrace & Embrace

I've got to install the show on Thursday, so it looks like this is going to to the show as I've still got to frame the sketches. Doublepunch is a small gallery space, so I'm hoping this will be the right amount of paintings for it. I did a Munny because Doublepunch is half toy store after all, but I don't know if I'll be able to show it due to a conflict of interest that I didn't foresee. Word to the wise: Don't expect to get a lot of work done during the holidays. I'm not even a heavily festive person, but I still lost many working hours to family obligations and Christmas shopping. Creativity is like a train that takes a long time to get up to speed, so having to stop and start over and over is very disruptive.

The painting in the top left might be unfamiliar, I've been toying with it for a couple months because it wasn't coming together and I have yet to scan it. I think I'll do that now actually....

bright raven

This is what I've been working on today. Same idea as the last 2, just a fun little painting.

I listened to the Sidebar interview with my favorite illustrator Sam Weber today. Check that out:http://www.sidebarnation.com/my_weblog/2010/01/sam-weber.html