My blog site is not immensely popular, but it has it’s moments. I average about 15K-20K hits a month. There are spikes of course. Every once in a while, somebody with middle eastern connections will trip across the editorial cartoon I did of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This will cause a flurry of comments, which I ignore. (I shut down the comment thread for this blog post a year ago; out of sheer boredom.) Of course the comments and the hits bring relevance to the post in Google’s eyes, which position it higher in the search engine. This means more eyes see it, which feeds its relevance. Again, those who see it, almost without exception, send links of it to their militant friends, which Google watches. Some of these people will post the article, or the caricature link inside a web forum, which will also cause a flurry of inbound links and then subsequent outbound moves to other relevant sites. All of which reflects positively on the page which they just left. (Mine.)

I sometimes wonder if those who are so militantly apposed to the cartoon (going on three years old) realize that they make it popular by visiting it and commenting on it? If you want to kill something on the web, ignore it. It will get buried under a mountain of apathy and nobody will see it. The more you rubberneck a particular post, the more other people will slow down to look at what you are looking at. It is a simple fact. Congrats to Google for quantifying this quirk of human nature into the most powerful search algorithm in the world.

However, this past month Mahmoud took a back seat to a new key-word rising star on my blog. This magic phrase is “bubble butt.” I mean really? How disappointing this hit must be for the ardent connoisseur of bubble butt when he(?) arrives at my post to see the G-rated rant about my anatomical drawing issues. It makes me chuckle a bit to be honest.

People all over the world are searching for criticlal relevant information, and the nexus is Mahmoud Bubble Butt. There’s a cartoon in there someplace. But the mental image is far to powerful to reproduce. Sometimes it is better not to draw what you see in your minds eye. Sometimes it is better to just let go.

Somebody asked (emailed) me what do I do to keep myself in business? In this market, it is is tough. You are linked with your pool of clients and their failures are you failures to a certain degree. When a client goes under I feel it. I am a small shop, I can’t not feel it. However, there are five things that I try and keep consistent that I believe contribute to the over all health of my business. (This applies to my illustration as well as advertising clients.)

Be service oriented: Treat yourself like a plumber with a pen. People come to you to get a service performed; to fix their visual communication pipes. They come to you because you are the expert. If they could have done the job themselves, they would have. Treat your clients with respect, listen to their ideas, and foster an attitude of service. It will win the client’s loyalty and keeps them coming back.

Be approachable: An air of superior aloofness may foster an image of artistic aptitude, but being a friendly, approachable, down to earth person of character is something that you can take to the bank. Unfortunately, art programs often don’t teach this positive skill set. A lot of artistic types are loners, and not apt at being overly sociable. This may cause an outward appearance of aloofness, when you are in reality standing behind a protective wall. As much as I sympathize with this, it is bad business. Do your best to be open and approachable. Your clients will find it refreshing and frankly it is a lot more fun to be around.

Be deadline focused: An acceptable job done “on time” is worth more than a stellar job handed in late. This is a carry-over from my work in publishing and illustration but it applies to advertising too. More often than not you are not the only person in a workflow. Copywriters, editors, printers, designers, illustrators, photographers, publishers, distributors, are all in the boat with you. A small delay on your part can equal thousands of dollars in overruns for your client and cause problems for the others who are depending on you to do your part professionally. This is no excuse to do mediocre work. Do the absolute best you possibly can, within the established deadline.

Be flexible: Stuff changes. Clients ideas evolve. Better ideas sometime take a while to incubate. For whatever reason, the work that you do and the reputation that you secure will hinge greatly on your ability to adapt to what the client wants today not what the brief outlined two weeks ago.

Be grateful: I worked for a number of years as an in-house artist and art director. I also worked day-labor for a few years before that. Sitting on my backside while I attempt creative greatness is the best job ever. Doing it for myself, on my own time on under my one direction and schedule is about as good as it gets. I have know some great art directors and creative directors at some high powered agencies and companies. Without fail, all of them have said that despite the downsides of begin self employed (there a a few) nothing beats owning a small to mid-sized shop under your control picking and choosing the work you want to do.

I have freelanced bas relief sculpting models for many years to various Mints around the country. Within that time the process of creating sculpted models has remained pretty much the same. You use clay, you make plaster casts, you detail the casts, you pull a positive and send it off to an engraver who reduces the model onto the face of a die. Since going digital with my illustration efforts I have wondered how long it would take for the 3D realm to catch up.

Of course, there is a very vibrant and rich set of 3D tools out there. Maya, Blender, Zbrush, But most of these tools are made for animators and movie-type character production. The tools in general are hard to use and with minor exceptions they are not very intuitive for your average clay-guy to grasp.

I found a new tool yesterday called Mudbox made by Autodesk, that really made me sit up and take notice. I have used Sketchbook Pro (from Autodesk) for years. It also has a very intuitive interface that leans on a graphic tablet for what it does best. Mudbox also works with a graphic tablet and a mouse, and I found it very close to my actual analog working method — with an undo key. This little nose sample took me 30 minutes. It’s not ground breaking, but the proof is not in this end product, the proof is in the tool set that got me to this end product. It was very intuitive for me. I think with an investment of some time I could really break through into some digital bas relief sculpting. The real problem of course is what do you do with it then? Can you export it out to a die engraver? What is the interface for that?

So many questions. But for the first time I can actually see it happening in the near future.

I’ve been wanting to post this for a while. It is one in a series of sponsorship ads that we will be running on Idaho Public Television. This was cool because I was able to tap into my brother’s extensive talents in video production, give him a script, supply the graphical elements and then have us both put it together via an iChat video conference. (He is in New York.) You gotta love the flexibility of using the net to do work.

YOUTUBE LINK!

School is out. This last couple of weeks has been intense, but I made it though. I honestly thought of not returning next year to teach. The time commitment is immense. I like the teaching, however, and it forces me to get out of the house and into the community and stops me from becoming a basement troll. (My studio is in the basement of my house; a side benefit of having a lot of clients that reside outside my state.)

This week I am doing some catching up on misc work and little projects that have been slipping into the cracks. There is a lot to do, but If I set up this week correctly, the rest of the week (summer) will be smooth and efficient.

In this vein, I am posting a brief project rundown of the Budget Storage phonebook ad. This includes where we started, where we ended up and what where my thoughts along the way. I won’t be doing this with all my projects, but I thought it would be good for a select few to be used as reference for my class.

Clicking on the thumbnail will bring you to the graphic. In Firefox and Safari you will get a magnifying glass icon to zoom in and out.

As always, feel free to comment as you see necessary.

I am currently creating a small illustration of a woman holding back a tide of crap from falling out her closet door. The client is a wonderful woman who owns a series of storage facilities (amongst other things). I sought to tone down the overt femininity of this character (read: not draw a bikini model) in an effort to be politically correct. This was my first mistake. I clothed her in baggy clothes, I de-emphasized certain parts of anatomy and I added a little age to the features. Nothing was drastic, but she did look a bit “manly.” When asked if I could make her more feminine in form I said “sure.” So I tucked the shirt in, broadened the hips, pumped up the chest, and dropped about 10 years from her age. I also fixed a number of other issues, but in the process, somewhere, somehow, I gave her bubble butt. I would really like to find a middle ground here.

I almost forgot to post a reminder about my latest Artiste Gullible Installment. Part Sketchbook and part writer’s journal, this diversion of mine has taken a back seat lately as I attempt to keep up with an absolutely nasty school schedule and tight studio hours. (Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know you are tired of hearing about it.)

So here is a thumbnail, and you can see the whole thing at Artiste Gullible’s Adventures in the Here and Now.

After an exhaustive test of Blogo (by Brainjuice software.) I have decided I LOVE it and purchased it today. (The timed trial ended.) I must say that the interface is as simple as it gets, and the desktop power is incredible. I am a pretty finicky guy when it comes to my blogs. I like to have the graphics, and thumbnails, and the content, and tags, and categories all working for me. Finding a desktop client to post my content from my desktop is an easy enough task. There are a lot of programs out there that accomplish this job. But finding a client that will allow me to post from my desktop, where I will have 100% confidence that what I posted will look like it is supposed to, and have all the necessary meta info at the same time, so that I do NOT need to redundantly re-visit my site to fix the things the desktop client got wrong; That is a truly gifted product.

An added bonus was the Twitter feature that is built into Blogo. Stay with me now, ’cause the geekery is going to get a bit thick. But I have a pretty active Facebook page. I use it for work, rambling and keeping up with colleagues as well as friends and family. I also have a twitter account that is mostly geared towards my Web Comic: Artist Gullible. I have recently discovered a Facebook app that reads selective Twitter posts and places them on my Facebook page, often killing two birds with one stone. This is cool, but to level up, I can now create a blog entry in Blogo, twitter about it from Blogo and Facebook will then pick up the twit and the link back to my original blog post. ALL WITHOUT LEAVING MY DESKTOP!

My geekery is now complete and I am actually being more productive doing it.

A long time ago I received a demo copy of Comic Life from Plasq software. It was one of those rare chunks of engineering where you could tell they had a lot of fun developing it, and it actually did something very unique, using a unique tool set, in a very simple but special way. As a long time creator of comics, I fell in love with it immediately. I could now create in Photoshop or Sketchbook Pro and drop it into Comic life to finish up the bothersome chore of paneling and lettering.

Recently, I discovered a new version of Comic Life called Comic Life Magiq. With the success of Comic Life under their belts, the developing team; drunk with code driven excess, jumped off the cliff of infallibility into user-interface hell.

The upgrade (a cross-grade — because they still offer the original version of Comic Life) is not without some great improvements. More balloon and frame control (curving tails) and support for Photoshop layers makes it interesting and worthwhile. But the user interface is confusing, self indulgent, and often leaves you with that ever so wonderful “WTF?” look on your face.

The bottom line; There are parts of me that really like what they have done with the software and there are parts of the software that I really HATE. Comic life is built around the idea that you can use iPhoto as an image source for a comic-book-style layout using your own creative dialog and questionable wit. CLM takes this one step further and gives you special effects and retouching controls for your photos. These however are built into an artist’s pallet screen dialog that sacrifices clarity for gee-whiz smoke and mirrors. Instead of clearly labeled controls, I have icons that again leave me guessing at what I am doing and where I am.

Since I draw my own content, and I own Photoshop, I find the new interface to be underwhelming.

For fun I used a half-finished editorial cartoon from last year as the basis of my test. I have been thinking of reviving this part of my creative expression for a while. Maybe even starting a depository for it using ComicPress under a subdomain.

I will be using CLM for the next week or so to create some comics. Maybe my viewpoint will change. Maybe the interface will grown on me. Maybe I will see the everlasting light of truth buried under a pink button. It could happen.

We will see.