Saturday, December 4, 2010

...And another update! Also, great illustration tips series link.

It's about time I checked in here as well... I feel bad for my prolonged absence! Anyway, I wanted to share this in case anyone here doesn't follow Holli Conger's blog -- she's doing an "Illustration Tips" series every day this month of December and it's really good so far:

http://agirlwhocreates.com/

Since getting married in June, my husband and I sold our house and moved across the country to South Dakota! It's been some crazy months, heheh. Oh yes, and I took my husband's name so I'm in the process of re-inventing my art business under Carmen Medlin now instead of Carmen Keys. (Which means my portfolio website has changed to www.carmenmedlin.com!) It just felt better to me to do it that way, even though I know I have to re-market. Hopefully I've made it relatively easy to still find me if searching for my maiden name.
Most of the artwork I've been doing these days has been for licensing or commissions, so I haven't had much to critique lately. I'm not used to not being able to show very much work publicly, at least before it is released. I'm starting to look at doing more and more work digitally, especially since my husband just gave me Painter for a surprise (yay!). I have already transitioned into digital for the licensing work I'm doing and it's really helped with the revisions and such. Now, to learn how to use Painter for my other children's illustrations! I feel optimistic about the new direction and really getting my feet wet working with an art director.

5 comments:

Patti said...

Your website looks great. Checked out Holli's blog too. I love her work. Thanks for the tip. Would love to see some of your new licensing work.

Christy/Tiddly Inks Digitals said...

Hi Carmen!
Congrats on getting married (very belatedly LOL) and your new site looks great. It looks like the old one, but you did some updates, I think? I love it. Did you create your own portfolio site or is it from a site that allows portfolios? I am asking because I desperately need to create a portfolio site since losing mine this summer and I never rebuilt it. I have the design, just need to make it happen. Any advice or suggestions would be much appreciated. :)

Your work on the site is lovely and how nice that you can stay busy enough not to have work to critique. LOL
I don't know much about Painter, but I hear good things. I still have a lot to learn about Photoshop. LOL
Can't wait to see some of your new digital work. :)

Oh and thanks for sharing Holli's links...need to find time to go through and read them. :)

Carmen Medlin said...

Thanks Patti and Christy!
Christy, my web host is Cyberultra -- they just provide me the web space and my domain, and I built the website from scratch using a glorified version of Notepad (Crimson Editor), lol. But, I have used Dreamweaver in the past which can simplify things a lot. Making the gallery image javascript pop-ups I just went and looked at other people's websites that did that sort of thing and looked at the coding (in Firefox go under View->Page source) to try and piece it together. Eventually it worked, heh. I don't know if you like to mess with code, but there has to be some kind of portfolio/gallery software out there that would be relatively simple to install on a web host! I might like to find something like that myself just to make it faster/easier to update things. I'll be on the lookout.

Christy/Tiddly Inks Digitals said...

I use Dreamweaver to add stuff to my online store, but I barely know what code to change. LOL It is a miserable process and the thought of building my own site is too much right now.
I have googled stuff, but I haven't really dedicated the time to learn it...thanks for letting me know what you did. :) I will look more seriously at it after Christmas. :)

Anonymous said...

Wow. A lot going on in your life. I have my web site on the to-do list for a complete overhaul.

Anybody on Twitter, please join our chat Thursday's a 9PM #kidlitart

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