I've been working on some new gallery pieces. Some are acrylic on heavy paper, and some I'm drawing with pastel and pencil, some acrylic, directly onto archival prints of my abstracts. These are online now, and for sale I might add.
I'm starting some new illustration portfolio pieces today. I've put so much energy into my illustration portfolio this past year, and with my new reps, I feel really good about the direction I'm going. Someone recently said to me, 'You never seem to be down about your work...'. Ah, well, so not true. I actually do get quite hurt, not for me, but for my work, when I see other illustrators getting juicy jobs. It's like my work is an actually being, and I want it to get noticed. It's probably how a mother must feel when she sends her 10 year old off to school on the first fall day of the semester - you want everyone you know to understand the qualities of that creature, and see how wonderful they are.
When I look through my online illustration portfolio, I really like it. When I look at work of other illustrators I admire, I feel inspired to do more, be better, learn, expand, try. But I can't lie, sometimes, I get really down, and I question why I'm not hired for a job when someone else is. I wonder if anyone is out there. August can be brutal on one's artistic ego. A lot of it is I took a brief hiatus in the last couple years from promoting my illustration so I could focus on the move and the farm and gallery work. It takes time to re-build, re-focus, and I feel my work is so much stronger than it was in 1996, or even 2005. I'm so lucky to have been picked up by Morgan Gaynin. And I get very cranky when I do see illustrators that are very busy complaining about it on their blogs - um, you know the Apifera code - 'no time for whining'.
I'm a grounded old gal. But when you work alone all day on your art, no matter how confidant, or happy you are, it can feel really frustrating when the phone's not ringing. I've been a full time freelancer since 1996, and I've learned to keep going through the slow times, and focus on the fact that this is what I want to do in life. I've never thought otherwise. I've also learned that when it is slow with 'real' jobs, there are things percolating job-and-art wise that I don't even know about.
