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Answering a few of your questions
Happy Friday Creative Souls!
One of the most popular emails I get from all of you is how do you create art for licensing. I have done a couple of posts so you can get a peek behind the scenes of how I do it. (links at the end of this post). Here we are taking a peek behind the scenes of my "Shake a Tail Feather" collection. Please realize, there is no one way to do this! There are as many ways as their are artists. I know artist who paint complete paintings and do not set up mock ups or patterns. They may pull icons out of the finished painting. I personally like having a lot of icons (a single rooster is an 'icon') to create different image combinations with. So I will paint in steps, then scan in the art after each step. Example: Paint the rooster first, scan in the computer, paint the background, scan in the finished painting. Sometimes I just paint a background to use.
Another question is how much work do I need to have before I get into licensing?
Gosh, there isn't a magic number. You could be a stunning floral painter and only need just a couple of paintings that catches a manufacturer's eye. I lean towards having several images and/or collections. That to me says you are serious, have more than one image to sell/make money on. Everyone including you wants to make money from your art. I think I had around 12 art collections before I started approaching agents. I also set up an art licensing website. It was my personal comfort level.
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| Finishing touches in Photoshop |
Do I worry about not having just one style?
No :-) I primarily work in watercolor and acrylic. They dry fast! Some say I have a couple of styles. Some say that they can tell that all of it is my work. I like the idea of being able to offer a manufacturer a wider variety of art for their products.
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| Watercolor sample image |
What programs do you use?
I am a Photoshop girl!, since I create my art by hand (not on the computer). I scan it in to the computer at high resolution, so that the image can be around 36 or more inches at 300 dpi. I may work in Illustrator down the road, right now I use Illustrator for logo design, some t-shirt design etc. depending on what my client needs. I use InDesign for magazine layout, newsletters and it works great for billboards etc.
Sprinkled through this post I am showing you some in progress photos of how I paint the "icons" first. Above, I lightened the dark brown background to get a different feel/color to the painting.
• Find more painting steps in this post
here
• Find out about building a portfolio and what a collections means to me
here
• More behind the scenes photos, Patriotic collection
here
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| One of the Shake a Tail Feather portfolio pages. |
Thank you all for your social media shares and emails. The art licensing community is fabulous! Looking forward to hearing your comments about how you create art and licensing experiences.
