“Congratulations, your image has been approved and will be available online soon. Please note that it may take up to 24-48 hours for the image to show up in all areas of the website.”

I gasped “OMG” and my boyfriend got concerned and asked me “what’s going on!?”. I told him what happened and he said “many more to come!” (he is such a sweet, encouraging boyfriend!). I was telling him how I was feeling discouraged because “so many” of my submissions were recently rejected. He asked me how many and I said “4…or 5″. He of course rolled his eyes. I need to keep trying!

Here is the chess board pattern I submitted to dreamstime that got accepted in 2 days! If you’d like to purchase it please click on the image.

Illustrator Chess Board Pattern

Now need to practice illustrator more and more an more to get more and more and more published on microstock site! This is my first big step to the journey to become a freelance illustrator

fluid - Illustration Friday Feb 17 2012

The fluid is crying because it’s getting sucked by a paper towel! Oh no!

My rejected 3D cupcake

Happy Valentine’s Day! Here’s a cupcake for you…
I woke up this morning with a rejection email from dreamstime for this 3D cupcake. I thought it was pretty cool cupcake but they said

Reason: – Poor execution, please pay more attention to the details. For illustrations, please look for: poorly traced/auto-traced and scanned images, noise and innacurate texturing on 3D renders, too simplistic works, faceted curves, aliased/jagged lines, open paths (vectors), noise/distorted pixels on various textures and images used within the illustration, moiree due to downsampling. For collages, please improve the technical execution (distorted pixels, noise, blendings, etc) in order to best serve the concept of the image.

Hmm my guess is that they don’t really like lines that aren’t totally symmetrical or smooth? Looking at istockphoto’s experts’ drawings and tutorials I think their shapes are mostly derived from pre-defined Illustrator shapes so they have a much cleaner look.  I’m such a newbie so I appreciate any feedback. Maybe I should join one of the microstock forum to get other people’s opinion.

Anyway, I won’t give up! I already learned a lot this morning (by putting one hour before I’m heading to my 9-5 job) by performing this awesome tutorial about drawing simple faces by bortonia.  Here’s the end product,

The face I drew from Bortonia's awesome tutorial

feel free to use them as I’ll link it to the free download section.  I also linked the above rejected cupcake AI file as well! If you use it please kindly let me know, that’s all I ask because it will keep me motivated!

As per my 2012 goal I will continue my creative process – so I can become a freelance illustrator!

(1) Earn $1000 / month from my illustrations / creative stuff
I brainstormed and these are the potential income streams:

- Custom cartoon service
- Logo Design
- Banner Design (like from guru.com)
- Caricature / Mascot service
- vector art from stock sites
- Blogging – earn money from affiliate programs (like ToonBoom) & google adsense
- photoshop services
- zazzl

That’s 8 income streams, so approximatey I need to earn $125 from each category. That doesn’t seem too bad.

(2) Complete one portfolio worthy illustration/cartoon/mascot/caricature/funny jokes per day.

I really need to practice Illustrator & photoshop for this. I really like theoatmeal – it’s the kind of site I’d like to create.

That’s it! That doesn’t sound too overwhelming?

banner for my foodblog site

Basically, the quick fix is to to first choose File > Document setup, and specify a much smaller Width and Height for your artboard (something like 1200×1200 for example).

RIP Whitney Houston

When I was growing up, in elementary school Whitney Houston was the choice of music in our school dances (OK you can probably guess my age lol). I love her songs! The movie Bodyguard was really good too – super romantic! A lot of my friends are posting RIP comments on facebook.
Instead of a RIP comment, I drew a caricature of Whitney. 48 years old is so young.

I think I mastered more illustrator techniques in the last 2 weeks than in the Illustrator course I took in art school. It’s only my fault since I didn’t pay attention in class.  My teacher even reached out to me to tell me she barely passed me and that I better re-study if I ever want to get into the graphic design field.  After class I never reviewed. No wonder it’s been almost 7 years since I took the course, I’m working at a totally different field.

Well now it’s time to master this baby! yeah! I read Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
and now I fully understand the importance of practice. One of the most striking theory he writes is that every expert has at least worked 10,000 hours to master the particular expertise. One of the study introduced in this book talks about how the researchers couldn’t find any ‘naturals’ experts who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any “grinds”, people who work harder than everyone else, t just didn’t have what it takes to break the top ranks. The people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder. The magic number – 10,000 hours.

I always thought I was a “natural artist” – my parents were very encouraging too, but for some reason I thought because I was a natural I didn’t really have to work hard to become a cartoonist. Well, I’m in my mid-30s and cartooning is still not my day job . This book gave me an “a-ha” moment. I never really practised art!! I would just do it for fun. That is also a good thing, but to become a true expert, I really need to practice more. I’m not sure how many hours I have under my belt, but for the last 2 weeks I started using toggl, a time logging website and I’m logging every hour.

So I finally started practising Illustrator, as you saw in my hamburger post. Since then I also completed this excellent tutorial by Colorburned.com.

Here’s my end product! As you can see I changed the logo to a cupcake logo lol.

Endproduct from the Mascot Tutorial by Colorburned

Me using the WACOM tablet - illustration using Adobe Illustrator

I now have 34 hours under my belt. My goal is to earn a living from my creative freelance endeavours. Wish me luck and any suggestions are welcome!

Anyway here’s my creation:

dance bootcamp cartoon

It took me about 1.5 hours to use this. It’s a pretty straightforward tool but I took a bit of time getting used to it. It’s a bit different from painter essential but as I get used to the comic boom I may be able to produce cartoon efficiently. It has lots of libraries like the bubbles and also the background, as shown in this cartoon.

BTW I wasn’t the one raising the arm instead of the leg lol.

Shameless promotion: if you’d like a one panel cartoon I’m happy to draw for you so contact me!

Here is my end product – a yummy looking cheeseburger

Cheeseburger using Illustrator - using tips by Andrea

Adobe Illustrator Course around Vancouver

BCIT Adobe Illustrator Course – I have taken this course before (6 years ago! yikes) and the instructor was really good. I would take the Feb 24th one but the only thing is it’s offered on Friday night. I sometimes have to work late Fridays so it won’t work well with my schedule.

Langara College – I heard good things about Langara, too bad the class just started. I hope the next one is coming soon.

Vancouver Community College – I’ve never taken a course here but it looks like it’s one of the cheapest @ $350. I missed the cutoff again. Dang.

Emily Carr – is the “art school” of Vancouver! They are offering the illustrator class for a cheaper price tag, @ $375. I again missed the cut off and the next one is not until June

So it looks like I should keep an eye out on Langara & VCC for the next cohort.  If you know of any other colleges, please let me know!