Hey, gang!

Just wanted to write up a quick post to share some of the thoughts I’m having lately about refreshing my online presence a bit and putting more energy into my freelance illustration & design business. It’s nothing earth-shattering, for sure, but doing this periodically helps me to focus a bit.

One thing I definitely want to focus some time on is refreshing the PDXComicArts site and everything connected with it. The theme has never looked that great to me, so I want to look at changing that. Making it brighter? More colorful? Or less colorful? or just Differently Colorful? At one point I’d looked into adding a forum to the site, I might still like to do that. And looking at different social media sites to be cross-posting to, like Tumblr and Mastodon.

With my own site here, I started a theme for a Portfolio section here, something dark, subtle, and unobtrusive. The plan was to move all the content from my old online portfolio at behance.net and start updating it again with newer art.

Clearly I’ve been spending a lot of my free time working on my housebus, and that will absolutely continue. Part of me still kind of wants to try documenting the process on youtube or something like that, but I enjoy just taking pictures and blogging about it, rather than having to deal with editing a bunch of video. So, I think I’ll keep it as-is. But, I would like to make the pages dedicated to that project stand out among the site here a little better, so a minor theme tweak for housebus pages is in order.

As far as freelance work goes, I’ve been really happy with the work I’ve been able to do with Boss Fight Studios so far this last couple years, and I hope to continue being useful to that gang. I’d love to expand my client base a bit more, though, too. Work for some board game publishers, or do some book illustration. Definitely need to get that portfolio section up and running and looking sharp.

On the comics front, I applied for a table at my first convention in years! We’ll see if I get in, but if I do I’ll definitely be putting more energy into getting Ellie Connelly Chapter Two completed and published. And hopefully another minicomic or two. And maybe some quick print-and-play games I can have available.

For my etsy store, I’ve been surprised at how my Lincoln Tribute minicomic has been a pretty steady seller since I published it. They’re almost gone now, and I should think about reprinting it. The thought has also occurred to me to make more comics like this, either continuing through They Might Be Giants’s discography, or picking another album that hit me the same way. Not sure which way to go with that idea yet.

I really also should think about doing more enamel pins. I often see folks taking a single concept and doing a set of like a dozen or more pins that they fund through a Kickstarter. I’d like to try to do something along those lines, just brainstorm on an idea and come up with a bunch of designs that work well together or independently. My initial thought would be just a series of Memphis school inspired abstract designs, but with like glow-in-the-dark and glittery variants. Bring back the big geometric broches of the 80s.

There are a lot of other things I need to think on as far as the future of my Freelance Art Business goes, but these are the ones rolling around in my head right now.

Take care! I’ll check in again in another month or so.

-indy