Finished ACEO Lilac!
ACEO Lilac is finished and posted at eBay with my usual minimum bid of $9.95, it will hopefully get bid up by someone because it would be a steal at that price for 11 hours of work on the thing. It's one of my best colored pencil pieces. I'm going to list it only this once, I think. If it doesn't sell, it's going in the front of my album.
After a long discussion with kkitten42 this morning, I think I'm going to be starting some new projects. She suggested doing my colored pencils book as a workbook rather than just an instruction volume, and liked my idea of doing art instruction videos. We've been making plans and discussing possibilities. She's still working on various websites for me and HeraldoftheAbyss and her own sites, so I may be getting mine soon.
She pointed out that with Google Adwords, I could be getting income like my eHow income, but proportionally more by just having ad-supported daily free content. This could rock. I'm doing great at eHow, but if I can get that kind of traffic on my own site it'll blossom into something that could move me closer to self sufficiency. I will link to my website as soon as it's done. We're still working on what to use for a domain name, but it'll have "robertsloan2" in it and something about art and something about instruction and writing.
One page of it will be devoted to daily art articles, both art instruction and things like product reviews or profiles of various artists I'm fond of. On that order, I'm going to start writing to companies like Schminke and so on, the places that I haven't tried their products because I can't afford them, and ask them to send me review samples. Then I'll post the reviews on my new site and have a steady stream of free art toys coming in now and then. A lot of watercolor companies do discount trial sets of either mixing primaries or Ultramarine, so you can get a feel for their paint's individual unique properties from the binder and manufacturing processes.
This could result in the need to do ultramarine monochrome full sheet watercolor paintings to use it all, but that could be fun.
I've already done both art and writing today! I did my monthly newsletter article for ACEO Magazine and sent it in, on color mixing. Yellow and green make mud. It has some examples in a JPG that I sent with it for an illustration, but I didn't tie it to a specific ACEO this time. I might on the one for the next issue, there's an issue coming up and I need to do both a collector article and an artist article for it soon. I might profile John Houle for it, since I just got my Mountain Spirit ACEO from him. It's even more beautiful in person. It is incredible. That cougar makes eye contact and draws me into his world, so precise, so rich and living and beautiful in graphite.
And soon, I will have The Kill and Archaeopteryx in my room too! I can't believe it, after I waited so long, it's coming so soon! I know both of those big pieces are going to be so much grander in person than seen on a tiny little laptop screen.
I'm getting intrigued by that workbook concept. I work on my art instruction books often, just haven't posted any of the content or word counts anywhere -- it's very image-heavy writing, and some of it, the meat of it, has to be done as step by step specific projects. I may be doing some more full burnish colored pencils realism as I start building up the projects for All The Colors. But I also need to research the Munsell color mixing system too, so that I can give that at least a page and maybe give Prismacolor names for the specific hues in the system. If that information isn't there in the Color Drawing textbook I got... ought to check that.