s4ndm4n's blog

s4ndm4n's Top 10 Artists: #10

Favorite Artist #10: Aimee Major 

A girl, her pencils and imagination = success!

Aimee Major has been an artist that influenced my art in a powerful way early in my serious art journey. Her art has been in the style of Disney characters, Warner Brothers and other animation-driven work. Although I cannot recall exactly when I first started following her progress, I can say that it was prior to much of her professional work today and I do believe she was still a college student when I fell in love with her characters, humor and story telling through her gift of drawing and painting.

She has shown a lot of passion for the Japanese cartoons or anime and comics (manga) and it does come through in her work although her characters are definitely uniquely her own.

You can find Aimee's work on her deviantArt page or her site AimeeMajor.com

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Sketch by s4ndm4n #2: Monkey skater

This is a character design that is strongly influenced by Francisco Herrera's style.  Although much of his work is a little on the "hot" side and not appropriate for the little ones, he is an extremely talented artist that I admire and respect.  What I love the most about his style is his extreme angles and ability to create very expressive characters not only in their faces but in their entirety.  Without even seeing an animated version of his work, you can get a feel of "movement" an emotions from his work.  I've been able to create characters in still poses for quite some time but its time now for me to push myself to inject some more life into them.  Thanks to Herrera, I think that's happening with my work. Tell me what you think! 

MonkeyDoWmark

Sorry for the horrible scan.  The board was larger than the scanner/printer and creating the need for a dual scan and not only that, the lighting ended up weird :)  

New sketch by s4ndm4n (me): A Bunny Bomber

Back on track with my art, in fact seems like I'm in hyper-drive mode.. lol.  What does that mean?  My visions of new ideas won't stop, I'm up later than's best for me, most nights due to this and the ideas are seemingly pouring out of me, although that's not to say I think my ideas are wonderful, just that they are coming out of my head!  ha.  Let me know if you like any of the postings I put up.. and hopefully this level of creativity is sustainable! :D  

Til next time peeps! 

BunnyBomberWmark

DeviantART adds drawing tools using HTML 5

This, in my opinion is some of the coolest new additions to cloud computing.  Sure the office apps in the cloud are a dime a dozen today and storing your document, photos and data in the cloud is yesterday's news, but this changes everything.  For me anyway.  NOW I'm seeing the possibilities of cloud computing. What is it?  DefiantART's new HTML5 - driven drawing applilcation right in their site.  Read more here  

New royalty free site for graphic artists and photographers: Graphic Leftovers

Sorry its been forever since I've posted anything related to... well, anything really.  It's been hard to justify some of the energy I used to put into blogging daily even though I know once I get into it, I really enjoy it and honestly, I've missed it a lot. 

Well today I feel compelled to post something that I found that I thought might be very valuable to all the artists I know that are in my neighborhood.  At least, the ones that like to keep up a stock art portfolio online like I do, such as one like my own on istockphoto .  Granted I make a  very small, but regular income from it.  The only reason it is so small is my own fault, I am very casual about it and haven't added new items to the collection often enough like some of my friends such as Kenn Wislander here. 

The newest site is called Graphic Leftovers, and the reason it is intriguing to me, is because I am interested in how their payouts work.  On the surface it looks very lucrative:

A microstock site for designers by designers
That's right, we're designers too! So we know first hand, that being fairly compensated for your creativity and hard work is very important. That is why we offer 52% commissions on all sales. No earning tiers or download levels to achieve, just 52% all the time. We want you to earn more and earn faster!

I like that idea.  Its worth checking out IMO, and that's exactly what I'm doing with some of my new artwork that I'll be doing in the near future.  I recommend at least checking them out too!  You can do so by clicking here or enter the url
http://graphicleftovers.com

I'll post my thoughts soon.  Til next time!