Follow me around for a day in the life of an artist and fantasy illustrator. As a freelance illustrator, each and every day is new, exciting and different. Today I thought it would be fun to share with you what goes on during one of my days as a working artist.

Video Transcription:

00:29 Hey guys! I thought it would be fun to bring you along with me today on just a day in the life of an artist?

00:35 So I just got finished working at the coffee shop. I typically go out to the coffee shop every morning now actually it's where I do my writing.

00:44 Beyond just sharing with you what it is I do as an artist I'm hoping this inspires you to pursue your goals, whatever that may be. I love what I do and I love the process. Anyways, it's time to head home and get some more things done.

01:02 So last night I have been organizing and inventorying all of my prints because I need to be making a print order. So this is going to be my second year of doing fairly large conventions and already got a few of my prints that I'm going to be taking out of circulation.

01:18 Bringing all of the prints to my shows is a little bit impractical just because there are some pieces that just don't really sell as well. These containers, if you're looking for something to hold 8 by 10 prints are amazing. I bought them from the container store and they're just filing boxes that are for I think regular 8.5 by 11 paper. They fit my 8 by 10 prints very well.

01:46 I'm gonna grab some lunch and get started on some sketches. So I'm working on some of my world building designs for my book. I wanted to share with you one of them. So in my book, there is a city that my main character lives in. This city is built up on this amazing rock structure. I've actually sketched and painted this city before. It was just an early idea before I'd actually even written anything. It was when I was still thinking about the outlines.

02:13 Since I've already gone through five rough drafts, I now have a much better idea of what I want it to look like and just kind of the little, the little small things that I completely missed in the, in the first first try.

02:29 So this right here is my painting that I've done before I created this— like my other pieces, it's watercolor and pen. With almost all of my watercolor paintings I like to save my line work. So I saved it and pulled it into Photoshop here. I want to take this sketch and use it as a bones for revising and developing on top of it a more accurate representation of what I want my city should look like. So having something already there that have kind of played around with and spent a lot of time on, like thumbnails allows me to just kind of throw whatever on top of it. Maybe adding random shapes I can cut and paste the image that I already have and it just gives me a little bit more to work with then just a blank empty canvas.

03:20 So what I'm going to start doing here is I'm just going to take little sections of the city and see, I can copy and paste this. If I wanted to, I could set it to multiply layer. If I did that it would look like this and then the lines behind it we show through. But I'm not going to do that because I still want to be able to see the solid building structures. I'm just erasing a few lines behind. But see, and this isn't perfect, doesn't have to— It doesn't have to look finished. I know there's gonna be a lot of buildings now that are going to look copy-and-pasted, but I don't really care because I'm going to go over this anyways the very end and create a final painting-type-sketch over top of it.

04:11 So next I'm going select the top section here, and I just want to make this a little bit wider and a little bit taller because this, I don't, let's take that back. I'm not, these buildings over here, a little bit taller and a little bit wider. I don't, I don't care about keeping proportions correct—I didn't want us to like this other side. I didn't want to select these buildings right here on this other side because if I stretch those up— they would look a little bit funny. In fact, I'm going to stretch these out even more and then those over the side of the cliff face. So I've got my—just the basic pencil. It's from Kyle's—Kyle T Webster's brush pack and I'm using the 2B, ultimate 2B pencil and it's the 10 pixel size. I'm just got black selected here.

05:13 So what I'm gonna do is on that new layer, I'm just going to start adding some interesting shapes that I want my rock structure to start to take. For me, the reason that I'm revising primarily is because the city wasn't large enough—with a story that I've written, it needs to be at least two times larger, if not more. So I'm going to be adding a lot more buildings to this and I'm also going to be adding this more substantial dock area down here. This area down here is where the goods come in and out of the city via the river. And the river is just a very short ways from the ocean. So a lot of their, their commerce is done— through that access point. And also if you can tell there's a waterfall back here and it's too small, it's just, yeah, it's way too small.

06:09 So I'm going to play with this for a little while and I'll show you my results. I have something that's pretty cool that I'm excited to share with you. It's much larger than before and includes a lot more greenery, which is important because my world is a tropical environment and there needs to be a lot more green things in my city than there were before. I need to work on the dock area more. I think I'll do that some more tonight perhaps. Just because I'm not satisfied with this, just going down to a bank—with the terraced rice fields. There needs to be a bit more of a buildup here. I think there needs to be a higher higher bank where everything is built up. So—there are rice terraces here. That's what those little lines are going to be. I'll work on these again tonight and that will actually be a little bit more apparent.

07:07 I went and color coded the greenery just to make it a little easier for you to distinguish that from the other lines in here. You don't have it in here yet, I have a couple more elements that I need to be adding. There's a lift system that will take passengers only from this area down here near the docks to a point at some point in this center area and then onto this other upper area. And then one final one that's just a short hop to the palace which is at the very top. There's a main path that is going to run along this sort of part of the city I guess if that makes sense. So consider there's like a path here and then there's also one here and then on this side on the back and then up around in here. Any of the other sides that are exposed that are not inhabited are going to have just kind of jungley rainforest as well as maybe some gardens and things like that.

08:09 But yeah, I'm really excited with how this developed. Let me show you before and after real quick. It looks super cool. Okay, so this is the city before in the painting and the n this is what the linework looked like. And as you can see there is, yes it is quite substantially larger. I need this city too to feel like a almost, I would get, I guess you would say a metropolis. Anyways, I want to continue working on this but I realize it's two o'clock and I have a couple of other things to be working on. I am probably going to end up going out running at maybe 4 o'clock or 3:30.

08:54 So you may be asking what on earth are we doing now? I want to work on a couple of rough ideas for another painting. As I mentioned, I think, I think I've mentioned before that I like working on one or two paintings at a time, especially if the themes are similar. If I can work on two paintings at once, then the drying time is shorter. If that makes sense. I'll have one painting going. I could set it aside, work on the next one while that one's drying and yeah, just move through paintings a little bit quicker. I know this is absolutely tiny. But I feel more confident actually when I work really small and really loose in those earliest stages I really just want to keep things quick and moving and not get too hung up too early. So just have a rough idea that I'm going to work with and use as my base for a better sketch and we'll go from there.

10:17 Being out here it makes me so happy. Even if the hills kill me. I love coming out here to walk and sometimes run—working on getting better at running but it's still a challenge for me. Shower time!

10:54 Okay. Where were we? Right. So I'm going to keep working on my city sketch and develop it more as well as maybe start some new sketches that are related to my book. And then I've got a few prints to sign actually and a few other Kickstarter related things that I need to be doing this evening. But before I forget, I want to thank you so very much for watching and yeah, if you, if you have any questions about anything that I've shared today or at all about what it is like being a full time artist, please leave them in the comments below. I am more than happy to answer questions and I would like to hear from you actually, what is your favorite daily activity? Is it getting out and wandering in nature every day? What kinds of things do you do in your day that you enjoy? We all have different things about us that make us unique, and I think that's obviously one of them. I'm looking forward to reading those and getting to know you a little bit better. Thank you so very much for watching.