Another belated update

Jeez, I'm becoming terrible with this...  For the record I have been working on my figures and hands.  Unfortunately, being involved in a business startup takes a lot of your time.  It's very hard to sit and do sketches of hands at your desk when you're worried about month end and money coming in.  I'm spending so much time on invoices, admin and trying to keep all this shit organized that I'm struggling to balance building my portfolio and improving my skills.

Lately I've been getting more involved with my company website www.twostones.co.za and it's been quite interesting.  We (me and my business partner Chris) spent a long time initially uploading images, setting up pages and galleries and just basically trying to make a presentable website.  But as we've moved along and gotten more comfortable about getting a certain amount of work per month our focus has shifted to getting more work (we're surviving month to month but it's not like we're living the dream).  So we're moving into marketing ourselves seriously now.  Personally, I think starting a business involves surviving (whichever way you can) while setting up maintainable business systems that will help your business grow.  That means getting all the admin organized (our hope is to get a database system to handle much of this for us) and setting up marketing strategies and implementing them (in our case cold calls, e-mail lists and our website).  We're getting the cold calls organized (albeit slowly, mainly because who likes cold calling?) and slowly building mail lists.  But our website and social media is going to be very important.  Facebook seems to be the equivalent of sending out a press release to your friends.  The great thing about it is it is very easy to generate interest in your business amongst your friends and family while directing traffic to your website.  SEO (search engine optimization) plays a big part in it too, Our hope being that if our site is placed well we can get an edge on other design companies and freelancers who use a website but haven't bothered to set it up right.  We'll take any advantage we can get.

On a more artistic note, I recently had a piece accepted for a show in China.  It's a really interesting concept and I'm stoked an image was selected.  A lot of my work in my portfolio is geared towards editorial and children's illustration.  It's quite simple, with flat colours, simple linework and simple cell shading.  I'm very influenced by comics and guys like Frank Stockton and Tomer Hanuka.  And while these pieces are certainly more simplified and don't really resemble their work, I think that comic influence always sort of shines through.  That said, I'm also a huge fan of Dave McKean and Andrew Jones.  I like incorporating textures and unusual effects into my work and the piece that is being displayed in China is very much a digital painting that uses textures and unusual effects (hopefully to good effect).  The piece is titled "Return" and I hope you enjoy it...