I find myself in need of a different format to work with. It's time for me to change the location of this blog, though I still highly recommend Posterous for people who feel their style meshes well with the tools it provides. As a service, I have no complaints at all. It's simply a difference in what I'm looking for and what the service is designed for.

You can now find my art blog at: http://45degreesoff.wordpress.com/

Things will still be here for some time, but no new updates will happen. Please change your bookmarks.

See you at the new place! :)

I'll be more active on Google+ now that it's open to the public than I have been up until this point. If you'd like to add me to an art circle, please do so. You can find my Google+ profile here: http://gtPL.US/kmartinez

I will still be maintaining my official Fcebook page, at least for the forseeable future, but I intend to post less there as I post more on Google+. I'm currently working on a zombie portrait that I've been posting updates about on Facebook. This may be the last project I do regular Work in Progress updates for there.

I've started using 750 Words. I was given the link some months back and did a little digging around to find out about it, but didn't sign up. There were two main reasons that I chose not to sign up at that time. One was that I wasn't able to find out very much about the site. I had almost no clue what, exactly, I would be signing up for. The other reason was that what little bit of a clue I did have let me know this was about writing every day, and something I learned from doing NaNoWriMo last year is that it really isn't that important to me to be a writer anymore.

Let me explain that. I still think NaNoWriMo is worth doing. I would encourage anyone who thinks they'd like to do it to go ahead and sign up when it comes around again. Even if you don't believe you'll make it all the way to the 50k finish line, go for it if it's something you'd enjoy being a part of. I needed the experience in order to find out that the art I'm doing now is more important to me than my writing. Learning that about myself meant giving myself permission to let go of one and focus more on the other. If I had not done NaNoWriMo, I would still be in a very uncertain place within myself about that. I still like to write. I've just given myself permission to let go of focusing on it as more than an enjoyable hobby.

750 Words even has a badge for people who do NaNoWriMo. Badges? (Insert line from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.) Yes, there's more to 750 Words than just writing your words each day. If all you want is to write your words, you could do that. You could log in, write, and log back out after you see the alert that you've hit your goal. It doesn't even matter what you write. It's not a blog. The default is for your writing to be kept private, so you don't have to worry about writing something that's well done or makes sense to anyone else. Or even something interesting to anyone else. The point is just to do three pages of writing each day... 750 words.

There is a point system, though, and some interesting statstics to look at. There are badges that you are awarded based on participation. Some are for the actual writing - days in a row of writing, days in a row of writing 750 words in under 20 minutes, etc. You start with an egg. Three days in a row of writing gets you a turkey. Five gets you a penguin. I'm looking forward to getting the phoenix when I get to 100 days in a row!

Other badges are called "behavior badges". They're given for things like developing the habit of writing in the morning (Early Rooster) or late at night (Night Bat), finishing a monthly challenge, or hitting certain milestones in total words written.

You get a point each day for writing at least 100 words. You get two points if you write 750. You get three points if you write 750 without getting distracted (the system tracks things like how long it takes you, how fast you're typing, etc). There's a little more to the scoring system than that, but it's loosley based on scoring in bowling and explaining numbers isn't my thing. If you like having numbers to track and look over, though, I think the system would be interesting to you.

The system also analyses your writing to find themes and patterns, which are then displayed on different charts and in lists for you. Things like how often you use certain words, what themes dominate your writing (money, love, work, etc), and even how much you talk about yourself as opposed to talking about other people. That kind of assumes you're doing this as a personal journal, but I can see how the information could still be interesting and useful to someone who writes short bits of fiction with it.

I'm currently using it to work out some of my ideas for future projects. It's easy to use. There's not a lot of customization options, and the ones that do exist are things like choosing the font and colors you want to see. There's no settings to fiddle with unless you don't want to keep everything private and decide to enable some sharing features. (Again, keeping your writing private is the default.) You can certainly write more than 750 words a day, but the system tells you when you've hit that goal so that you can stop if you wish. The badges and stats keep me going back so I can see how things change with today's writing, rather than becoming a promise to myself to do a little journaling each day that never results in any real writing.

There are also more options for sigining up now. It used to simply be a "sign in with your Facebook account" thing. You can now also sign up by sigining in with your Google or Yahoo accounts, or an OpenID.

There is an option to become a patron -- to donate to help keep 750 Words going -- and I noticed that some of your donation goes to support 826 Seattle, a non-profit that helps kids develop their writing skills.

I've been plugging away at a shoe design that isn't going well. There's nothing particularly wrong with it. It looks like I thought it would. I don't know what's not going well... I've just run out of steam and nothing seems like the right thing to add, although the design is quite obviously far from finished. Think "a little over a quarter of the shoe still untouched". It's just not going anywhere and I seem to be unable to make it go anywhere.

This doesn't mean I'm burning out on art and need a break. Oh, no... far from it! I missed drawing during the couple of weeks I spent recovering in bed. I'm glad to get back to it! I have a list of things to do, and so many ideas I want to play with, and...

Well, there you go. That may very well be the shoe problem. I was working on the shoe design before my bedrest. It feels like it's weighing me down and keeping me from getting caught up. I'm starting to resent it for not being finished yet. I'm ready to move on! The harder I push on the shoes, the slower progress becomes. I don't really want to be working on the shoes anymore. I just want to be finished with them.

Very few of my deadlines are set in stone. Most of them are set by me just to keep projects organized and help me do my best to balance between my art and other daily responsibilities. I don't have to finish the shoes right now. I can set them aside and move on to the next project. When I feel the excitement and passion for finishing the shoe design, that will be the time to go back and finish it.

When the creative flow gets to the dam, it pools and just sits there. Sometimes that's a good thing. It's an opportunity to immerse yourself in the inspiration and ideas, splash around, and see what what wonderful things you can find under the surface. But sometimes it's better to walk away and find a river of creativity that is still rushing along. You can come back to the pool later. One is not "better" than the other. It's about what you need at the time.

My work has been slowed recently by some health issues and urgent treatment to prevent complications. My recovery is a bit slow, but well within normal expectations. This has also interfered with making announcements about my work. Let's catch up!

I did not win the Disney-Threadless Muppet design challenge, but I did hold my own in a competition where I was new to Threadless and many others entering were more established in the community. I see that as a victory in its own right. The winning design is one I personally liked. Congratulations to Alfonso Diaz!

The really exciting news for me right now is that I have achieved ProSeller status on Zazzle! You can see the ProSeller badge at the top of my Graphic Content store and my Everyday Myth store. It has taken me a little over three years to become a ProSeller, and I'm very happy about it. Thank you for seeing my work as being worth spending your money on.

I have some projects going on right now that the health issues interrupted. I'm getting back into the swing of things so that I can pick up where I left off. I'm doing another cover art piece for The Drabblecast, working on a new design for the Keds shoes sold through Zazzle, and then I've already picked out which of the projects on my long list of "Things to Draw" will be next. (Hint: It will be a piece for the Everyday Myth store.) I'm also looking at doing some work for a type of product I've never done art for before. More on that as it happens.

You can now find some of my work on society6.com. I have talked to several artists in the past few weeks who gave me their opinions on being part of society6, and I've been reading about the site for a couple of months. I am very impressed with the opportunities they make available for artists! The collaborations feature, the retail partnerships, etc. look like they have a lot of potential for artists with... well, a lot of potential.

My two "Alice in Wonderland" inspired pieces are there right now, as well as my Garden of Remembrance Gnome.

I've been made aware that Fairy Day falls during Midsummer celebrations. I'd never heard of this before, but it does make sense. A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of my favorites among Shakespeare's plays!

I haven't drawn any faeries yet. (And yes, I'm odd in that I prefer to spell it "faerie" even thought I've grown up in a culture and time where it was almost always spelled "fairy" when I saw the word.) I have made my fae dragon available on several products, though.

You can find her as a sticker on RedBubble.

On baby clothes at Graphic Content on Zazzle. This baby onesie won a Today's Best Award on Zazzle in February.

And for folks who'd love a fae dragon but don't have a baby, or want something for themself...

A few small items in my Everyday Myth store on Zazzle.

I have pieces entered in two contests right now and would truly appreciate votes and spreading the word about them.

This is the design I've entered for the Muppets shirt design contest from Threadless and Disney. You can see and score the design here. If you aren't familiar with how designs are presented on Threadless, please look for the three dots in the upper right corner of the picture on the Threadless site. You can click those dots to switch among the three slides I prepared for presenting my work.

This contest, because Disney is part of it, is a pretty big deal! The winner gets a rather large prize package, including a set of Muppets figurines designed by Jim Shore. And Disney will buy the winning design from the winning artist for $2,500.00. The competition is pretty fierce!

The theme of the contest is friendship, so my design is a tour shirt for the Muppet band - Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. It's the Endless Friends Tour.

The winning design will be chosen on June 27, 2011, so you have until then to vote.

The second contest I have a piece entered in is a contest at Fine Art America, and the entry is my This Side of the Looking-Glass piece. You can vote for it here, and you do not need to be a member of Fine Art America in order to vote. This contest has a short run. Voting just started today (June 8, 2011) and will end on June 11, 2011. The prizes are much smaller than what's at stake in the Threadless-Disney contest (Fine Art America gift certificates for winners), but it's a nice opportunity to have my work seen and see work from other artists I may not have found without a contest to call attention to them.

Zazzle has grown a lot in the three years I've had the Graphic Content store there. So has the store. Earlier this year, I made updated category icons to tidy the front page up a bit. What I didn't take into account is that the store was getting harder and harder for people to navigate. It is a store focused more on product design. Not finding art and seeing which products you can buy it on, but finding products you want and seeing what art is available on them. That's a big difference from the buyer's point of view.

I've left a few of the old categories in place because they are truly more appropriate when grouped by theme, rather than being scattered among product types. The rest of the categories have been redone so that you can simply look at all the shirts at one time, or see what's available on a mug, or browse the iPhone cases without having to dig through magnets to find them.

A change in how things are categorized also called for a change in category icons. The pictures you see on the icons now show some of the actual products you'll find within that category. Navigating the store should be much easier.

With the completion of the Garden of Remembrance Gnome, it's finally time to open my new store!

The Graphic Content by Rosa Amarilla store will continue and will still be updated. What happened is that I decided several months ago that there was a piece I wanted to do. That spawned an idea for another piece, and soon I had ideas for enough pieces that I started scribbling them all down to make sure I didn't forget any of it. They aren't exactly a series, but they share a theme, so I feel they deserve more of their own space than just a category in a store.

The Garden of Remembrance Gnome is the first piece I've completed from that list, so it is he who opens Everyday Myth. In time, he will be joined by many other creatures, characters, and familiar spirits.