New Personal Work: "Soulbound," and DeviantArt Updates

First off, here's a new personal piece I finished yesterday:

"Soulbound," digital painting, ©2014
[prints available here]

This piece was originally conceived as an entry for a male pin-up challenge on the Women in Fantasy Illustration Facebook group, believe it or not. Through a couple conversations and the ideation process it ended up evolving into something else- there's a story that's been developing behind the scenes, and you can see some recurring symbolism and themes emerging in my recent personal work. If you're feeling adventurous, see if you can spot some of it.

On a style note, I really enjoy that aesthetic in 19th century paintings that feels like you're watching actors in a Greek tragedy, with sheet-draped actors and the intimate eye-level POV. I don't know how many more I'll do like this because I don't want it to become a crutch or a formulaic "thing." I dig it here, though.

"OMAIGAHHH..."

Second off, I finally updated my DeviantArt account again, with loads of work from this year so far. There was some shockingly old (translation: bad) work still on there that I cleared out, too. And I don't want to hear about how DA is a great place to show an artist's evolution. No one needs to see that crap within 100 miles of my portfolio. Those lazy compositions, the blinding saturation, the knuckleless sausage fingers...

Yeah, sausage fingers.

Ok, my dear readers... It's been a day. Time to paint.

Updates to Print Store, Website, & Blog

Normally I take care of website/blog changes at the beginning of every year, but this time I'm late. Or early, depending on how you look at it, I guess.

First of all, I'd like to point out that I've made some updates to my Print Store, with the latest painting and some other goodies:



Here on the blog, I just spent some time going through every one of my posts and re-labeling them, so that now you can view the posts by their categories (see the "Entries by Category" list on the right). If you're just looking for career talk, tutorials, or videos, etc., hopefully you can find it more easily.

Website updates are coming, too. For the first time since its launch I've kept the same website design for over a year- almost two now. But that's about to change, in favor of a clean layout. My portfolio's going to be light for a while (both in content and background color), while it goes through a major transition. I've just got too much new work coming out next year that doesn't fit with anything I've done before it, so I'm making an entirely new portfolio for 2014. Meanwhile, older work and other archived stuff will be available here on the blog.



That's a small preview of what the transitional site update is going to look like. You can already see how much less saturated the body of work is becoming. I hadn't realized how freakishly saturated my body of work was before, and I've made a conscious decision to stop assaulting peoples' eyes with color. Apologies if you really like my highly-saturated work... I'm going through a phase where I hate it.

I'm sticking with the large thumbnail layout for now because it's been working fine, omitting some useless and broken crap, and re-instating an "About" section that will hopefully answer some FAQs about me and my art.

And now that my blog is (finally) organized, I can even point out that there's a label for website updates like this one! Check out the "Art Career Talk: Portfolio link to see the evolution of my portfolio website from 2006 onward. Spoiler alert: the thumbnails keep getting bigger.

Website Updates and Thoughts on Branding

Sheppard-arts.com has received its yearly facelift for 2011, including a new mobile version for those of you who are bound by the confines of the modern smartphone.

I spent a little more time planning out this year's revisions than last, and more time thinking of myself as a brand. Some new features include:

-An official Cynthia Sheppard Illustration logo.

It's high time I had a single image that I can carry across all my promo items. I was inspired by some of my cohorts such as Sam Flegal who established his "Strange like Sam Flegal" brand last year.

-Bigger thumbnails.
1. I got a lot of comments like "make the thumbnails bigger!" hehe.
2. I still opt for a lightbox image viewer over a slideshow or full-page-scroll format because the proportions of my images are all different, so they look disorganized or don't read/resize well in a fixed window. One AD mentioned that using a lightbox can be cumbersome, especially if the window overlay doesn't allow you to right-click/save the pictures. So to make his life easier I chose a version that does allow people to save, and increased the thumbnail sizes so he and other ADs can better jog their memory of what a painting looked like without having to click on anything.

-A dropdown menu for external links/social media and to share the site on facebook.
I'll probably add some more sharing-via-social-media options later, but I want to test Facebook first to see what kind of traffic is generated.

-The removal of unnecessary sections.
My painting tutorials will still be available, but since I rarely had time to update them, having a whole page dedicated to them was dead weight. The majority of people that come to the site are there to see the artwork or to find out how to contact me, so I also nixed the Resume section in favor of a small and tidy client list on the homepage.

Enjoy!

New Website: The Evolution of Sheppard-arts.com

New look, same great taste. www.sheppard-arts.com

I've used my online portfolio as an excuse to tinker with web design for several years, before doing web design as my day job. I put up my first art site in 2005 under the domain cynthiarimmer.com (my maiden name). Unfortunately there was a random DNS error coupled with a hard drive crash, and the site was only up a mere three weeks before plunging into web limbo. If I remember correctly, the layout was mostly greys with some curly-cues around the edges (to cover for the fact that I didn't have much work to show yet). Despite the design blunders, the real issue it had was that it was trying to accomplish too much. There was a separate page for illustration, design, photography, and music (don't ask). People would ask, "so, what is it you do, exactly?"



Moving right along to 2006, I designed the first illustration website I wasn't embarrassed to show anyone, mostly. I had only done a couple of table sites at this point, using what was popular in band sites at the time as my guide... remember the days of teeny tiny websites that floated in the center of a black page. Yes, that.

Well, for the first time I had what seemed like enough art to call a portfolio, however no one could find what they were looking for with the little 50x50 px icons. We live and learn.



Next up is the site I put live January 1, 2008, which is what I've used to represent my art on the web until earlier this afternoon.

While definitely stronger than the 2006 iteration, I've always felt it was a little too much. Too wordy all over, for starters. I realized I don't need a bio, so much as I need a PR statement. If people are interested in my life story, they can read my blog, but most people visit a portfolio site to look at the portfolio. Also it was a royal pain to update without a CMS.



And finally, we have the new 2010 edition of Sheppard-Arts.com! I always tell people web design is an organic process, as websites grow and change over time. So for 2010 I lumped together all my knowledge from my design job, my former art sites, and advice from art directors and artists, and came up with a very clean, simple layout that will hopefully do what I need it to do.

My portfolio hadn't been pruned since 2007, so I did get rid of a lot of older work (maybe a bit too much, but I'll start here). My ideology is that an online portfolio should reflect the leather book you showing to people at reviews. Blogs and external portfolio sites are a great dumping ground for everything you've ever done, and your portfolio site should reflect your best work.

Another thing this site doesn't have that the last one did is a place to buy prints of my work. People did sometimes contact me about prints, but everyone seemed to want custom sizes or surfaces, so offering up the standard sizes ended up being more of a hassle than it was worth.

I'm keeping the tutorials section in hopes of adding to it over time, and because enough people have told me it's a useful resource. The blog feed is now condensed into titles in the lefthand column, but there's also a link to my physical blog in the main navigation, and an RSS subscription button for the google reader types.

I'm very curious to see how this new site performs over the last one, because I'll undoubtedly want to upgrade it again before long.