mykeallen

So, I've been a deviant art member for over 5 years now. Its been a long quiet 5 years. For a while there I was only posting infrequently and only the work I thought would get the most response. I was pretty much wrong about most of it. My most popular piece of art involved a creme filled gay innuendo. nonetheless, I continued to post and didn't really see much of a following for the effort. My wife suggested that I post more sketches but I didn't listen and the result was no attention.

It wasn't until I met Steve Saunders that everything began to change. Steve is a well known and talented writer and most importantly, he knows the industry and how to get seen by viewers. This is something I don't know how to do but am starting to relearn the idea of. Over the past 5 years I've had about 6 to 10 favourites and even less follows. Steve, in an attempt to improve my public image, told me it would be a good idea to rearrange my gallery into folders and add some sketch art so that people can better understand me and my process. I'm a very secretive person especially when it comes to my artwork so it took a lot for me to open up my private vault and show people what I've been working on for the last year. The result was startling.

I spent the evening scanning and posting sketches of work I'd done recently. In all I scanned 60 images and posted 54. Before i was even done posting the first 10 I had more feedback and comments than I'd had in the past 5 years of activity! I finished posting work at about 1am and in et horning I woke to find 30 feedback messages. You have no idea how good it feels to see a return on my efforts. I have steve and my wife to thank for that. My wife told me a long time ago I should post everything I do and I ignored her. I was wrong to do that. She's never been wrong I've just been too stupid and afraid of rejection to hear her. I realize now that what she said and what steve said are exactly what I should have been doing all along. Steve recently told me "if you wanna be seen you gotta be an attention whore." and I didn't want to put myself out there because I was afraid of being rejected. I guess if I want to succeed at this then I need to quit being scared to show you what I can do and just show you.

As many of you know, I'm a full time illustrator. Its lucky position as artists don't often have the luxury of producing work at a full time rate. Often Artists work project to project and are therefore contractual or commission-based in most situations. I,  however, draw content for Facebook games are social gaming is a constantly moving industry. Which means I work in an office 8hrs a day and then I go home to my heaping pile of freelance illustration and graphic design work. Its a pretty tiring schedule. I usually work about 13 hour days where I do a full shift at the office and then pull another 5hrs of comic drawing from home. My work list includes:

•4 Villains webcomic
•Devil Eggs app comic commission
•The Distiller promotional comic for MJS distilleries
•My own personal comic project
•Website revisions

I'm looking into cloning myself but the process is quite expensive. Until that happens I'm just working until I pass out at night or until my wife demands I cease for enough hours to enjoy the evening.

I did a 30 day cleanse a few months ago and its left me with an extraordinary inability to digest wheat products. before then I could eat whatever but now. Those days are gone. I've been trying to get used to the idea of no longer having a sandwich (I make amazing sandwiches), hot dogs (love hot dogs) cheeseburgers (don't get me started) and failing miserably but what I find even harder is eliminating wheat in all the stuff you'd never think contained it. Today I ate 2 hershey's kisses and I still have head and neck pain and its been 5 hours!

After 3 years of having no idea what to do with this page, I've decided to finally put in some effort to showing the world some of teh work I do in the depths of my basement office. Most of the time I just use these projects to progress toward some unknown style that I have yet to discover but between then and now I should try to remember to subject these things to public inquiry. Sometimes I'm just far to cerebral.