Next Project

Okay people here is a chance for you to get a personalized piece of artwork from me.  Yep, that is exactly what I said.  I need to learn to draw people and turn around projects quicker so I am going to try a commission.  For a face portrait I will charge $25, for a whole body I will charge $50, and for an entire scene I will charge $100.  What I will need is a picture from you that you would like done, meaning you personally so I can avoid copyright issues, and an idea for what you want added like a sci-fi or fantasy look, background ideas, and some color interests.  For now I will be taking only one once I have finished the Rodeo project.  You can send your requests to my email at gkarlives@verizon.net and I will work out the details with you.  Remember, I will be posting the finished image on all my sites.  If this works out well, I will try more.  I look forward to hearing from you guys.

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Bump in the Road (from my Deviantart page)

Well folks, it looks like my first Kickstarter project Quiet Strength Kickstarter isn’t going to work.  There are only 12 days left and I still have only one backer so it looks like I am going to have to take some time and rethink how I approach this project.  I am taking some advice from the creator of my favorite tv show Babylon 5 by J M Straczynski and not being afraid to fail.  I have actually done this a lot in my life by pushing myself outside comfort zones even if it meant I could fail; however, I don’t believe I ever went into these situations with that in mind.  In most cases I have put myself under a lot of stress because I never felt like I could just walk away from the situations without serious consequences.

That is not the case here; however, I did really need this to succeed and I also had a lot of hope that it would.  In the end though, life will go on.  From here I will be looking at some information shared by smirtouille on her successful campaign and work on some projects that will hopefully enhance my next offering.  I will have to plan the advertising better (I used facebook ads but really did not know how it all worked) and organize the rewards from the start (added more as I looked at smirtouille’s campaign).  The largest part of my errors came from being very cautious on spending money initially since I am completely broke at the moment.  I had to be very tentative on what I spent because I was waiting to start my new job and have been accumulating bills.  I will have to look at ways to overcome this issue.

All in all, while the campaign has not worked out, it has been a learning experience that I do not intend to give up on.  So look for another campaign once I have worked through the mistakes of this one.  Thanks to all those that have liked my facebook page for this project and the one person who backed it.  Hopefully, as my blog continues to expand, I will have more interest accumulated in my creations to make the next project successful.

Boners as Far as the Eye Can See.

Here is one men don’t talk about.

Given the revelations of Fox News Culture, Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, Bill Crosby, Harvey Weinstein, and donald trump to name a few, I thought it appropriate to re-post one of my first entries into this blog back in June of 2012.  Can we have a discussion now?  This is an issue that men just do not deal with or if they do, they deal with it poorly by trying to be funny with it.  In truth, Americans like to think we deal with it my making it Taboo but in actuality we are making the problem, which branches out into other parts of our life as noted in the news, far worse.  Not talking about it to our children in schools and in church sets them up to fail in this area and leads to the situations we see in the news.  Stop hiding and deal with it.  Most of the problems America has now could be made better by facing the realities that so many want to close their eyes, ears, and minds to.  Not dealing with a problem doesn’t make it go away.

By the Horns (from my Patreon page)

 

I have been focusing on the rider and bull mostly at this point because the background has really clicked into place.  Interesting story about this and my last two paintings.  As I mentioned before, I am a slow, methodical painter who does not plan out a lot of aspects to the finished image from the beginning.  Unfortunately, many times I run into roadblocks when trying to fit one part of a painting into another.  From my first post about this painting you can see that I had the bull started and not much else because I still had no idea what I wanted for a background.  It had to be hellish of course, but how do you do that and make it believable that someone is riding a bucking bull through it.

Well, you can see that I had made a start on the upper half then hit a wall.  I could not see how to bring the floor out from the great background I had created.  I could not see how the two areas fit together, so I stopped.  I literally closed the file and quit painting.  Of course, this was also the time I was dealing with a ridiculous amount of stress from work, which may have been affecting my efforts.   The more pertinent fact though was a lack of professional training.  I never learned how to discipline myself to work on images, usually waiting for inspiration to drive me into a frenzy of creativity.

Then I lost my job and my way for a bit.  I had all kinds of time on my hands but no idea what to do with it.  Because I don’t have an entertainment package, I watch a lot of YouTube videos.  Luckily, I watched a video on, I think, the difference between professional and amateur writers.  The big difference the video pointed out is that professionals don’t sit and wait for inspiration.  If they are stuck, they still make themselves work on something for the project and trust that the process will help them find the inspiration.  In other words, they keep moving.  At this point I had three projects that had frozen up on me because they had overwhelmed me, Rodeo, Linear Thinkers in a Non-Linear Universe, and Termanicz.  All partially finished but out of ideas.  I decided to try the YouTube method out.

You can see that I have found some success.  Both Termanicz and Linear Thinkers in a Non-Linear Universe are done and I have made great strides on Rodeo.  I hope to continue in this vein so I can produce more quality work per year than I have ever done before.  So far, Rodeo is turning out way better than I imagined it could.  If you have trouble completing projects, consider trying this method and letting the process of working free up the inspiration.

Over the Hump Day (from my Patreon page)

 

Back to work riding the hump, … of a bull that is.  Finally getting back to work on my project titled “Rodeo”, which will be a combination of my artwork and a very short story.  Once I get everything settled with the painting, I will copy the story and place it into the image.  I look forward to reaching that point since this was the intention originally but my physical painting never did the idea justice so it languished until I thought about doing a digital painting.  So far, I am happy with the results.

Another Project Done

 

Finally took some time to finish this painting up and I will be uploading it this weekend to my Patreon page.

Update

This past year has been a challenge and growing experience for me. I launched my Patreon page late in 2015 and, while it has not taken off, it has helped me to significantly increase traffic to this blog. During this time I struggled to maintain my various accounts as I worked at an increasingly hostile job. A job I was recently let go from.

However, I did not allow the uncertainty of my new status to keep me from trying to achieve my goal of making an income from my creativity. As a result in addition to my Patreon page, I created a kickstarter campaign to bring prints of my work to a larger audience. This alone has been a learning experience with me discovering how to set up ads on Facebook to try to draw in traffic to my campaign.  

I also reached out to someone with a successful campaign for tips. Unfortunately, their advice was to drop the campaign for now. I did use ideas gleaned from their project to enhance what I was offering, but even if the campaign fails, I feel that I have gained knowledge that will help for the next effort.

Over the last four weeks of being off, I have taken time to focus on unfinished projects, while I waited for paperwork to clear for my new job. With one painting done I plan to get two more partial projects finished before moving into new ones. Hopefully, I will have some exciting stuff for you soon. If you can, please support my efforts anyway you can.