Well, I had a sit down with the web designer on Saturday, and I only had one day to get a whole lot of information. He showed me the planned layout for the site, and we ran through how to create the pages for all the paintings. After showing me a few run-throughs, I had to do a few myself and I have spent the last 4 nights uploading edited photos and content. I kind of have a lot of work prepared so it’s mostly been just resizing and adding watermarks to the designers’ templates.

During the day I have been mounting and framing an example of each print so I can get a product shot of it, and been working with a local printer getting a selection of pencil drawing prints mounted onto board, called Block Mounting. A style of presentation I really like suits the Japanese flavor of the drawings I think. I got these done at 7×10 inches, although the original drawings were A2 I like the smaller presentation. They are like little books.

It’s been a very busy couple of days, I’m keen to get this site up asap, so now the bulk of the work is done I just have to run a few lookovers and check for mistakes and she is good to go live.

Very excited. Been wanting to get this done for a long time, but I guess it took the time it took and it’s kind of nice I can present all my work in one go. Some prints go back to 2006. There is even one drawing I did when I was 16 yrs old!  It’s difficult to explain but the idea that these images can now actually provide me with a possible income is amazing. The crops sown over these last few years can finally be harvested! That was my goal back in 2006, if I was to continue doing Art it had to be full time and therefore it had to become an income to sustain itself & me.  With the conception of the prints and the webpage, I think we are finally on the right path.

Learning a bit more of Photoshop has been great too, I wouldn’t say I have mastered it by a long shot but I have a hugely improved grasp of what to do compared to last week. Creating these angled product shots has been one of my biggest glories, I can improve them big time (my focus is not too sharp), but to have the understanding of how to make them is huge for me! So very pleased.

As I left the studio this evening I had just framed up a couple of prints I have not seen in a frame before. The mount looks great, but once you get a frame around the picture it really finishes the image off so well.  So that’s me wrapping up for the night. 00.15hrs and tomorrow we do a final check.

And my most recent painting has been this massive rain/snow affair. I wanted to do a pretty heavy snow effect over a Japanese-style maple tree, but the acrylics and inks were not giving me the effect I got previously with Oil, so I ran with the look I was getting, and as it developed the picture became rainier looking. When it came to inking in the foliage I quickly avoided making it look overly leaf-like compared to the previous picture. This one seemed to want to be more angular. With the sharp rain lines cutting up the shapes I tried to keep the whole piece sharp which worked well on the overall appearance and still allowed me to create a foliage appearance but in a new way. The painting does have a total manga vibe and I am pretty pleased with it. Again new ideas I can develop… but this one did take a long time to ink up and I went through a horrific number of pens. I wonder how to get a sponsorship from a pen brand…

I shall get this photographed right shortly, but this will give you a general idea. There is a lot of detail in there!