Though I have absolutely zero experience with vinyl toys, I couldn’t resist joining in when I heard the SCAD Illustration club was doing a Munny show. (Actually, I couldn’t resist when I heard that the Munnys were half off!) We are to paint a Munny and make a 12″ illustration to go along side it for a show.

The Munnys finally came in today and we had a super fun time trading the random accessories that came with them. I started out with a wrench, shuriken, beard, and lightning bolt… and ended up with a poop, another poop, another poop, and a teddy bear. Sweet!

I have no idea what to make, but have been trying to tell myself “No cats…no cats…no cats…no cats…!” How will I resist though, with three poops right there for a litter box? Hmmm..

Here he/she is in all his/her blank glory (and really awful lighting):

If you guys have any idea on what it should become feel free to comment!

A quick ink piece I did for my mom to give to her boyfriend for his birthday. It’s one of our dogs, Rocky, to go with a piece I did a few years ago of our OTHER dog, Nadia. He always looks extremely worried… when he’s not trying to do the nasty with Nadia. I wasn’t going to post it but then I thought it might be fun to post since it’s so ridiculously NOT what I usually do. I am now 100x more confident that I never want to be a pet portrait artist.

(Yes, that is his naughty bit. It wouldn’t be Rocky without giant balls!)

I’ve got another design up– please vote and comment! I reallllly want to have a shirt made, even if it is only one color. (Also there’s a more naughty design there you can vote for by viewing my other submissions at the site) Click the pic to go see:

Hooray for a sketch I am actually happy with! (And extreme pear-shaped bodies!) I said earlier that I wanted to do an editorial piece for my portfolio based on a magazine article I found. Well… I didn’t find a magazine article, but I think this piece could still make people think it might have been used in a magazine. (Society’s portrayal of women and the uh, double-standards of leg-shaving? Or something? Please?)

Anyway, I had originally drawn Medusa shaving for a Vector Illustration class skateboard design. But it sucked and I still liked the idea, so here goes try number two.

So this post has absolutely zero educational value, except perhaps to show what a nutcase I am.

In the dream…

I was coughing up a storm, obviously very sick, and this girl kept telling me to stop it because it was so annoying. But I kept coughing, and eventually little specks of blood spewed out with the spit. Then, a giant (like baseball sized) gob of bloody stuff shot out and stuck to the wall. (How it got out of my throat, I’ll never know.) So I scraped the bloody ball off the wall to show a doctor and started running around in a frantic search to locate a hospital.

The thing is, as I was running around, the blood started falling off the squishy gob. I looked down, and underneath the blood was….. a snowman head. Yeah, carrot and all.

Whaaaat???

Here are C and D of my ACEO animal alphabet! C is (Who could guess?!) Cat and D is Dog. Pretty mundane animals but you know I couldn’t pass up Cat and Dog was a good opportunity for butt-sniffin’. These can be purchased from my Etsy shop as well! They’re only 2.5″x3.5″ and the small space is a nice challenge in learning new techniques to increase painting speed.

“C is for Cat” Print Available

“D is for Dog” Print Available

Since my threadless frolic didn’t work out, I decided to take the design I had made for it and rework it for this totally NEW T-shirt submission site. I figure since this one is just getting started, I have more of a chance! They have a limit of 1 color so I had to realllllly rework the image. But I think it still works like this. I think it can go on basically any color shirt. Anyway, please vote and leave a comment!

Click here and you can sign up and vote for “Abstinence is Key!”

To try to get back on track, I’ve decided to do an ACEO (2.5×3.5 mini-art) for an animal of each letter of the alphabet! Just something to make sure I draw SOMETHING every day, and also fill up my Etsy shop. These are just for fun… I’m not really trying to make any profound statements. Just hoping people might want to collect them on Etsy, which you can by visiting my shop! I swear they won’t ALL be so vacant… but Axolotl’s and fruit bats both give off distinct “empty” vibes when I look at them.

A is for Axolotl – Original – Print

B is for Bat – Original – Print

I’ve been trying to think of new pieces for my portfolio, and have not been able to decide between doing what I love (children’s stories) to get an awesome and full children’s book portfolio, or doing what I am lacking in numbers (editorial.) I want to separate the sections of my portfolio so that the boobz aren’t on the same page as the kid stuff, but I’m worried it will look empty as I don’t have 100s of pieces yet.

Well, typing to myself has got me decided– I’ll try to do another editorial piece or two, so it WON’T look empty when I separate everything, and then I’ll work on some children’s stuff I’ve been wanting to do (Alice in Wonderland, and the Jungle Book… maybe the Jungle book first as ethnic boys are always a plus in portfolios)

Wow. Anyone who made it through that stream-of-consciousness heap shows perseverance! But it was helpful to me!

*scurries off to find a magazine article interesting enough to illustrate*

I’d like to paint a scene from each chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland… and I started kinda in the middle. (Couldn’t resist the Gryphon…)

“So they went up to the Mock Turtle, who looked at them with large eyes full of tears, but said nothing.

`This here young lady,’ said the Gryphon, `she wants for to know your history, she do.’

`I’ll tell it her,’ said the Mock Turtle in a deep, hollow tone: `sit down, both of you, and don’t speak a word till I’ve finished.’

So they sat down, and nobody spoke for some minutes. Alice thought to herself, `I don’t see how he can even finish, if he doesn’t begin.’ But she waited patiently.

`Once,’ said the Mock Turtle at last, with a deep sigh, `I was a real Turtle.”

-Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Always scouring the web for free ways to promote my web sites, I recently came across this link, netting people who sign up for Visa Business Networks $100 in Facebook Advertising Credit. Sweet! Considering I had nothing to lose, I decided to try using the money to make some Facebook Ads of my own.

Now, I had absolutely no idea how to use Facebook Ads, but I figured that messing around with it for a while might eventually give good results (especially since ad credits don’t feel like REAL money..). I decided to do two ads: One advertising my Portfolio website, and the other advertising my Etsy shop.

My Etsy Ad

I decided to create my first ad to advertise my Etsy shop. I chose a picture of my cutest item, a Kitty Girl doll, and since Facebook Ads allow awesomely specific targeting I decided to target my ad to women ages 18-30 who like “anime.” My logic was, anime chicks often like super cute things, so they might like my Kitty Girl dolls. Genius, correct?

Here’s the final ad. I decided to offer a discount to entice people into my Etsy lair:

Now, Facebook is considered by most to be one of the worst places possible for advertising. This is because people on Facebook are so absorbed in poking and slaying monsters that they don’t bother with the ads. I hoped, though, that with such targeted marketing anime chicks would still see that adorable little doll face and go ^_^ in joy, hopefully leading to a click. I was right! Overall, I got over 120 new clicks to my Etsy shop with the ad showing around 40,000 times. That might not sound like a lot, but it is a good percentage clickthough rating for an ad! I got a sale the next day in my shop as well, but they did not use my discount code so I have no idea if this sale came from the ad. For just using free credits, however, this is nice!

My Portfolio Ad

I also wanted to promote my web site. My web site front page is mostly just to show possible clients considering my work, so I wasn’t sure what I could do to entice people to actually DO something once they clicked through. This led me to start up a mailing list. Hopefully, if people clicked through the ad and liked what they saw, they could join my web site mailing list for updates and I would have some new names. So I added the mailing list (I picked Google Groups– feel free to join my list in the sidebar of this blog!) and mentioned it in the ad.

For this ad, I targeted it to men and women 22 and older who hold a position of “Art Director.” Art Director where? No idea! But I was hoping my ad would make it into view of someone looking to hire illustrators. Here’s the final ad. Since the images have to be tiny I tried to just choose a colorful cropping of a common subject–women:

I got less click-through on this one, but I was kind of expecting it as my targeted audience was much smaller. Still, I received over 50 new clicks in one day with the ad showing a bit over 30,000 times, and that’s 50 clicks I didn’t have before! Only one person joined my mailing list, but I am hoping that some art directors at least bookmarked my site.

My Conclusion

I think my ads were successful, at least for the couple days I had them running. Since I was just getting the hang of it, I used up more credits than I think would be necessary now– setting your bidding price and choosing between paying a cost per click or a cost per 1,000 shows is a game you need to get used to. At first I did cost per click, since I didn’t want to pay for the ad showing if nobody clicked, and I think that is good to start testing the waters. But eventually I noticed that I was getting multiple clicks per 1,000 views, and I think if I did it again I would pay for the views, hoping for the clicks, and pay less than half what I did. All in all though, Facebook Ads seem like a good avenue for certain marketing. I’m going to scrounge together some more free credit deals once mine are gone and keep on advertising!

FEBRUARY 8TH UPDATE: I’ve now had more time to play around with Facebook Ads, and my results are getting better and better. I now officially have at least one sale directly from the ad (the person applied the coupon code) and the new results for my most recent Etsy ad are 72,531 impressions, 147 clicks, total cost of $9.00 which is about 6 cents per click. Such an improvement from before when I was paying per click rather than per impression as I am now.  So far, definitely worth it!

(I put up an ad advertising a web host just to see about that, and so far there are NO clicks there. So I think people are much more likely to click on something like a cute product, than someone trying to sell you web space or other more boring ads. So paying per impression definitely only works in some circumstances!)