After a good period of new work and posts, life gets in the way once again. Unexpected things happened to my house and car so my time and energy had to go elsewhere for a while. Hopefully all that’s behind me now and I’m eager to dive back into more art.

I checked back on DeviantArt after being gone for a while and saw this big bombshell of a journal entry. Looks like Brad Rigney, a respected and well-known artist who also goes by cryptcrawler, has just went public with the accusation that The Art Department and ConceptArt.Org have not paid what was owed to him for his work on his video tutorial A Hostile Takeover.

The sad thing is, I paid for and watched that tutorial. Not only is Brad an amazing and unique artist, he also has a very fresh perspective as someone who was completely self-taught and was very honest about his struggles and obstacles. I felt touched by his story, and in many ways felt my life was similar. So it hits me even harder that he was taken advantage of. Also, just from what I’ve read, it seems that he is not the only artist that has allegations against TAD and CA.

As many people have come to Brad’s defense, others are sharing their stories about their trials and tribulations. We all know how hard it is to be paid a fair price for art, because so many people consider it something that does not have an intrinsic value. Things like cars and tools have a specific range of financial value, and its easy to price them. Art can go from worthless to priceless, based purely on the buyer and seller. Plus there is so much talk about doing art simply for the passion and love of art, that it has become easy for people to act unprofessional and prey upon artists to do art for free.

Many years ago I had lots of similar experiences where I was paid little to nothing for my art. Not to say I always deserved to be paid lots of money, but there were many instances of complete unprofessionalism. Once my contract was unceremoniously canceled at the last minute by an editor who didn’t know art from bathroom stains, and soured me from working with companies for a very long time. Luckily I had the last laugh because just a few short months later that same editor was selling me tickets at a local movie theater, as an usher.

I guess my advice would be to always value yourself and your art; stand up for yourself if you feel that you’ve been wronged, and never give things away because people will take advantage of you. We will all have war stories to tell about the time that we were not treated professionally, but if we can all stand up for ourselves, then collectively we can continue to better the situation of honest artists pursuing their livelihood.

Just so this post doesn’t end on a downer, here is a great post from Levi Peterffy about overcoming obstacles, myths about talent, and reaching your goals as an artist. He goes over the same territory as my Myths of Art posts but in a much more succinct way.

In this post I just want to share some useful free resources regarding perspective I found on the internet while brushing up on some of my own fundamentals.

• Perspective Path Tool for Photoshop – This handy free file provided by comic artist Freddie Williams on his website allows for easy plotting of perspectives, perfect for all artists on deadlines.
• Carapace for Windows – This great program is free for all thanks to Warren Marshall at Epic Games, and gives perfect intuitive controls to plot out perspective lines.
• Google Sketchup – Most of you should have heard of Sketchup by now; it is an amazingly powerful tool for creating 3D models easily and quickly. The best thing of all is that the basic version is absolutely free!

And if you have a few bucks to spend towards learning more about perspective, I would recommend CtrlPaint’s Perspective Series and, if you want to go even more in depth, Gnomon’s Fundamentals of Perspective Series. As for books, I would check out Perspective! For Comic Book Artists by David Chelsea, and Successful Drawing by Andrew Loomis which has a great section on perspective as well as other art fundamentals.

My interpretation of a Valkyrie warrior, it was started a while back but I wasn’t happy with it. Came back to it recently and finished it up to a level that I was okay with. Designing the axe was fun, I was trying to come up with something almost feminine-looking for a female warrior but still has some Celtic influence and looks like it could chop your head off.

Finally completed another new piece, this time the Dark Caster Lena from the film Beautiful Creatures, for another contest running on DeviantArt. I tend to use different processes for different projects, depending on a number of factors, but this time I chose to go a very traditional illustration route.

I started off with 4 black and white thumbnails, just to brainstorm compositions. I wanted to show her using some sort of dark magic power while using nature as a background. Once I decided on the composition I liked, its a pretty straightforward process of enlarging the art and filling in the details. Below you can see the step by step process, ending with the final painted image.