I was able to take things a little easier this past week, although that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been keeping busy!
For starters, I accepted a part-time job as a painting instructor at the Bottle & Bottega in Park Ridge! Having extra money is always nice, and it’s also a new thing that I can add to my CV (which will be added after I’ve had my first instructing session)! I’m really excited to be starting this new venture, and I’m sure it’ll be a great learning experience!
Another new and definitely fascinating experience has been using Twitter! I sort of begrudgingly created a Twitter account when I was working on my Portfolio in college, but never really saw a reason to use it. A couple of weeks ago I knew that I needed to get myself on as many different social media sisters as possible to try and increase my visibility as the algorithms for Instagram had changed again, which caused me to see a decrease in all of my metrics. I never realized how artists were utilizing Twitter until then, and I actually found myself enjoying the platform quite a bit, even though their algorithms had also changed and their cropping butchers a lot of my art.
One thing that I definitely didn’t expect was getting some commissions from there!
I found out that there are quite a large number of people that tweet out that they need an artist or illustrator for various commissions, projects, jobs, etc. And I found myself with a few commissions just by responding to them!
@VeikkoVenemies on Twitter is a photographer who also does a lot of tech reviews on YouTube. He commissioned me to recreate his profile picture, which I ended up doing on Adobe Illustrator Draw on my iPad Pro. Here is the initial pencil sketch followed by the final image:
This initial sketch was done with the 6B pencil in Procreate just to block in colors and get an overall idea for the style I wanted to portray his profile picture in.
This is the final profile picture, which was created using Adobe Illustrator Draw as I wanted to use a vector style. I added a lot more details to the final product, and I’m very happy with the overall result! Thankfully, he was too!
I’m also working on a logo and business card design for @x_CurlyQ, who is a streamer on Twitch! Here are some in progress initial sketches for her, done in Procreate with the 6B Pencil:
Her pup Curly is super cute, so we toyed with the idea of having her holding a controller in her mouth! This was the very first concept I sketched out.
We then got the idea that maybe Curly could be handing her the controller, but it didn’t feel quite right.
This is the final sketch that has been approved, and will be turned into a vector logo for her! I’m really happy with this one! I think Curly is especially cute in this concept!
This experience has really enforced the fact that putting myself out there has been increasingly positive and rewarding! I highly recommend reaching out to people through your social media if you want to get your name and work out there! It’s definitely working for me! You just gotta keep trying!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a few other projects I need to work on…