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| Pushing the boundaries: doing a few commissions in other styles to push my skills further. Here, Bettie Page and Kissy Suzuki. |
Wow, it’s
been a while since I wrote a post here! I took a long break, since mid-December
last year, due to a long holiday trip and an extra busy beginning of year.
2013, here I go!
So far this
year I have done 6 Black & White illustrations
for Grace Draven’s upcoming book, a retelling of the classical “Beauty and the Beast”
and have 6 more to go. Have done a couple of interviews, very cool ones for IT’SART (click here and read it) and CG ARENA (coming soon, but you’ll find it here).
I’ve done also a tutorial/making of for CG ARENA e-mag, based on a work called “The
Green Man, which I developed for this tutorial.
Have done a very different
work, in a cute/caticature-like style for Mad Artist Publishing’s BOND book.
Cool huh? And have also done a Bettie Page commission for Falcata Times, in a
more cartoony style (soon you wull see it there too!). Noooo, I am not abandoning Fantasy, I am just pushing my
boundaries, so that’s why I did these last two mentioned works ;)
On top of
that, have been organizing and recruiting artists for a series of video
workshops: IT’S ART FANTASY WORKSHOP – taking place during the year of 2013,
with 13 themes into Fantasy Art! More info about it coming soon!
Now, let’s
take the subject of this post. I am
always thinking of ways to improve and have a website/portfolio which works for
me. I have tried several layouts before, after a while I switched to Blogger: I
have started a blog and set it to be my portfolio. So when people entered www.isissousadesigner.com (before)
they in fact were seeing my BLOGGER site. I thought it was very handy, I found
a layout I customized and seemed to be right for me. I kept it for a year or
so.
Since I
started a website, back in 2010, I’ve been DAILY checking and monitoring my
visitors. I learned very much with this habit, such as which images people like
more when they visit my site, which page they are more interested in, where do
they come from, where did they find the link for my site, etc. These are all important data to help you take
your site/portfolio in the right direction.
In the beginning
of 2012, I published a work on this Blogger portfolio called “A FantasyPortrait of Sir Isaac Newton”. The piece
called a lot of attention, both in my site and my other online galleries. Somehow,
after a while, I was receiving a huge traffic of visitors coming from Google
Search, all of them looking for “Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton, Newton, etc.”
At first I thought it was cool, because I thought some of these visitors looking
for images of this great scientist would also be interested in my work and
eventually that my commissions could grow.
The Google
Search traffic increased very much within the months, at a point that it
started to “suck”! It wasn’t cool anymore! I found out NONE of those visitors
searching for Isaac Newton had given me a single commission, feedback or
anything back. More than that: they were in the way of me seeing the good,
healthy traffic on my stats service. So I took a decision: to take the blog
down and make a new website for my portfolio, more industry oriented. I’m still
working on it, but I see the changes are for the better.
Talking
about changes… I’ve been also thinking about better content for this blog,
since its start. “Why not share some of my mistakes, hints and growth as artist”
I asked myself lately… So since TODAY this blog is called “Artist in progress”
and I hope to make substantial articles about my difficulties, my ups and
downs, visions and improvement as artist. I think sharing this experience as
well as adding other interesting content such as great news and interviews may
help aspirants and also may be interesting for those who have been long down
the road!
Stay
inspired!
