Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Throwin' a bone.


Ugh, what a holiday season it was for me. I say "ugh" not as in it sucked but as in it was just a whole heck of a lot of work. Including non-freelance job projects, I had creative work going on right up until when i went to bed at 3:00 am Christmas eve!

Here's my laundry list of projects that I started and finished in the uncomfortably snug span of hours between Thanksgiving and Christmas:

*One D&D cover (and a none-too-easy one at that)
*Three Magic:The Gathering card paintings
*Five fairly intensive black-n-white pieces for an undisclosed M:tG project
*Scanned and laid out a book of my daughter's artwork (through Blurb.com) as a present for my wife
*Illustrated and designed a custom beer label
*Made an exotic tent-fort for my daughter for Christmas (with help from my wife's parents)

Somewhere in that mess I was able to go to a couple parties, drive to Cleveland to see Chris Cornell in concert, and get a few hours of sleep. Christmas day came along and I found I had no looming deadlines and nothing of immediate concern - what a joy to just be with my family and eat and not frazzle myself with the thought that "I need to get a certain amount of this or that done by the time I go to bed later than I should."

So goes the life of a freelancer, eh? It's all good though. All the projects were fun and worth it. I just wish there were like two more weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas is all!

So, as you can now see, squeezing in a draw-blog post was pretty far down my list of priorities for the past four or five weeks. Things have settled down now - but I find that I have a tremendous lack of anything worthwhile to post right now. No new sketchbook doodles and no preliminary drawings worth sharing. I had to go back dig up this (2.5 year old?) piece - a sketch I liked because of how snaky the girl's pose is and her accidentally cute profile. The painting turned out to be a mess though. So, here's a bone I'm throwing out until something better comes along.

Speaking of something better, I'm eyeing another guess-the-album-cover contest on the horizon. Aw yeah.


5 comments:

  1. Busy man! I'm dying to see that beer label (cool sketch too by the way).

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  2. By the way great pencil :)

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  3. Is that a Columbus brew that one could sample when in town for Origins? Enjoy the down time, though its probably already passed.

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  4. Ha! My down time is not having more than three projects going at one time - and the deadlines spaced by at least a week. I consider that heaven!

    The beer label is for a friend that brews his own beer. Good stuff - he bottles it up and everything. My wife and I thought his bottles could use some gussying up.

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  5. Awesome sketch. Wow, that is a crazy sounding schedule; a lot of illustrations for a few weeks.

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