It's been a while since I've posted in LJ, so I figured I'd make an obligatory post showing some in progress artwork. Life has been far from boring lately, but my livejournal has never been an accurate representation of my life as I've strived to keep my personal and public (internet) life seperate.

Tomorrow is the halfway deadline given to me by NorthLight Fine Art Books. I've gotten 170 out of 400 illustrations complete so between now and tomorrow morning I have to come up with the missing 30. This isn't as impossible as it sounds, because the how to draw dragons book has a lot of step by steps. The missing units include the Kirin unit, the western dragon unit, and talonlike claws. All of these are in some state of completion at the moment. The past few days I've been trying to stay on task and have been making artwork like a madwoman! I wish I could show it off, but that's the price that's paid when you work for another company. It's not my property and I can't display it for free, much as I'd like to. I can however show some of the finished projects going into the book, but not the step by steps, text, or guides that are the meat of the book.

Meanwhile I'm trying to get an affordable color artbook together of some of my dragons for visitors to purchase. If all works out, the book will be a full color, 35 page perfect bound (flat spine, not spiral or stapled) paperback edition that should sell for $15. This means you can have 30 prints for a reasonable price. Granted, the prints in the book will me slightly smaller and of a lesser quality then the prints available through the site. I expect to have it ready by the end of August. I need to finish formatting the images for the book and to order a sample for myself to do a quality control check. I'm going through a print on demand publisher, thus books are made as they are ordered and not in a massive quantitity beforehand. This means that I have a lot of control in the book itself since it's basically self published, but I want to make sure that a print on demand publisher can offer a good product. I don't want to sell something that I wouldn't want to by myself!

Anyway, onto the art stuff; it's what's fun about my LJ I guess ^^; Pictures speak louder then words. Here is the finished project illustration for the eastern dragon tutorial in my book. A few deviantart people saw this puppy early ;)


And here is the in progress western dragon final step for the book. You can't tell yet, but he is starting to lift up to greet a dawn. When finished, the dragon will be black with pink, orange, and yellows lineing his scales where the light from the sky is hitting him/her.


Sorry for all the watermarking on the in progress things. I've been having a whole slew of art theft lately. One person even had the gall to snatch out my in progress eastern dragon images from my forum and pretend that they were showing off their own progress in a different art forum. Since I did not belong to the forum they were posting in and they WERE showing the progress, I had a very hard time convincing people that they were the art theif and not me! I also had a couple of little twits entering my art into neopets art competitions (nothing new there), but one entered in NeonDragon itself and stole every picture of her along with my Dolosus puppets! My precious puppets!!! That's unforgiveable >.< A few more deviantart thefts, but nothing too big. Deviant is great for removing things in a timely manner.

Did I ever mention how I abhor art theives? I really don't get it. I know that they want to garner praise and attention, but how the heck can you get satisfaction about being praised for something you didn't do? *sigh* Oh well...