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.
Busy man! I'm dying to see that beer label (cool sketch too by the way).
ReplyDeleteBy the way great pencil :)
ReplyDeleteIs that a Columbus brew that one could sample when in town for Origins? Enjoy the down time, though its probably already passed.
ReplyDeleteHa! 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!
ReplyDeleteThe 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.
Awesome sketch. Wow, that is a crazy sounding schedule; a lot of illustrations for a few weeks.
ReplyDelete