It is Monday.
It is early.
It is a day on which I had to remind myself that I really do love my job, when my alarm went off a few minutes before 4am.
Now, I’m at work and mulling over packing designs for strange and random products, looking at art blogs
and packaging blogs to get my creative juices flowing.
Unfortunately, it worked a little too well, and now I want to go away and work on my own stuff. Which is, on the one hand, awesome — I had a few days of not really feeling the creativity bug, which is always frustrating, not to mention, the spark is a little less sparkly after a full work week creating. But this morning, looking at the super cute and sexy pin-up art of Bill Pressing, I just want to curl up with a sketchpad. Not just due to his adorably curvy ladies, but also ’cause of his wonderful use of color and value and composition. But, I’m gonna rein it in and work on making some packaging. Then at lunch, I can peck away a little more at my ongoing personal piece that is taking a year and a day, since I have mostly just been working on it on my lunch break. (Almost there, though!)
Other art-related stuff…a few days ago, there was an internet artistic community uproar regarding a website selling art nabbed off of DeviantArt and another site (and for $200-$300 per print, no less, and of course, original artist getting nothing.) I dutifully added my voice to the tumult putting out the word that artists should check if their art was being sold without their knowledge or consent. The site was down within about a day — good job, internet. And usually, the story ends there for me. But this morning, a fellow DeviantArt user sent me a message informing me that one of my pieces (that they knew of) had been on the site. It was taken down before I saw it, but I am…slightly flattered, to be honest. I mean, no, they shouldn’t be selling people’s art…it’s horrible and I don’t understand how they think that is okay, but the site is down, so…the internet prevails. But, while it was up, they thought my art was good enough to sell for a horrible mark up. I always kind of felt like, if my art was good enough for people to want to steal it, then I would know I had ‘made it’. Forget having a graphic design job, and doing professional illustration freelance on the side. It’s all about illegal use of my work.