Every year I start several personal pieces that for some reason or another end up being left unfinished. Most of the times I need to abandon them in order to focus on real work and once I can come back to them I have lost the interest, the motivation or I just want to start a totally new piece. In other cases, I come back to an image willing to finish it but as months have passed since the last time I worked on it I now see too many problems and prefer to start over instead of continuing with the same painting. And in the rarest of cases I go back to a painting and just finish it.

Here I have a little collection of unfinished images from 2017.

Dragon Ball

I started this piece as a homage to Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball wich is the manga/tv show that got me into drawing in the first place. This one will be left unfinished, I don't think I will ever come back to it. I will probably work on some other Dragon Ball fan art in the future, but it will be a completely different image.

Vikings

For this one I wanted to do something on the vibe of the cards for the game Gwent: The Witcher Card Game. I love the world of the Witcher games and I have played some Gwent too. The art on those cards is truly awesome and I even collect the images on a folder on my computer for inspiration.

From all the images that I am sharing in this article this is the one that has more probabilities to be finished in a near future, although with a few little changes.

She-orc

Yes, another female orc. I paint a lot of them, I know. This one started as a warm up sketch but I decided to finish it. Most probably I won't come back to it.

Stranger Things

I watched the first season of Stranger Things just a few months before the second one aired. And I have to say that I liked it a lot. Because of that, when I was doing some portrait studies I had this idea of merging some studies in the same image and this is the result. It was quite the challenge to keep the colors balanced between the different portraits.

Studies

I will show only a couple of unfinished studies as I have too many of them. I do a lot of studies, from gesture drawings to value studies, composition studies and color studies. Most of them are quick exercises but every now and then I like to try painting some detailed ones. These two are examples of that.

And this is all for today. Thank you for reading and see you next week.

Alejandro.

The War

As I said last week I have started a war against social media. And I call it "a war" because it is soooo much work. It might not look like so, but trying to be active in a lot of different pages at the same time is really time consuming. Specially for me that I haven't ever been much of a friend of social media.

So here I am now trying to manage a facebook page, instagram, twitter, youtube, twitch, a blog, three different online portfolios and participating on a couple of forums. So, yes, it is a lot of work and I am just starting. There is some stuff that I need to set up and some other things that I still need to figure out. I suppose that I will eventually get the hang of it and it will become easier.

But for all of this to really work as intended (meaning getting my work in front of a lot of people) there is an essential ingredient that must not be forgotten: consistency.

Consistency, that elusive b****

Everyone that recommends using social media as a means of self-promotion emphasizes the importance of being consistent. You are supposed to be consistent with the time and with the quality of the posts. By publishing regularly in any social media portal you teach your audience to expect your publications. That is the best way to keep your audience engaged. That, and publishing interesting stuff. If your posts are bad or uninteresting, you will not get many followers, don't you think?

In order to achieve both consistency in time and quality I will need to find balance between the two. I need to schedule my social media interactions in a way that allows me to be active regularly and with good quality posts (specially when sharing art). But this is something I still have to work on. Scheduling might be a future blog post, when I figure out a schedule that works for me. For the moment it seems that a blog post per week is an achievable goal and that makes me happy. It might be a baby step, but it is still a step forward.

That's all for today. Thanks for reading and see you again next week.

Alejandro.

Hello there,

I'm Alejandro García and I'm a freelance illustrator based in Spain. As one of my new year's goals I decided to put a lot more effort on self-promotion through social media and starting this blog is one of the steps I decided to take in order to achieve that goal. I've been working as an artist intermittently for several years now and one of the things I have managed really badly during that time has always been the marketing side of things. Now I would like to improve my marketing skills and make my work get to as many people as I can so I can finally start getting those jobs we all dream about (don't worry, I know that I must improve my portfolio too and I'm working on that as well).

Now that I've made clear my motivations it's time for answering some questions:

What will you see in this blog? 

I'm still not completely sure, but I have a few ideas. First I will share my experiences as an artist and with this battle against the social media that I've started fighting. I will also show some studies and practice paintings, wich I do a lot of and never show them anywhere. And maybe, in the future I will also write some little tutorials or something like that.

You will also see a lot of grammar mistakes and mispelling of words. I will try my best to avoid them as much as I can, but I'm sure that I will not always be successful with that. I apologize in advance about it.

Who is this blog aimed at?

Mainly at fellow aspiring artist that might be facing the same troubles and difficulties as myself, as well as for anyone that might be interested in this kind of stuff or in art in general.

 This is also aimed at those that are interested in my work and want to know a litte bit about me as I will put a lot of myself here. 

What is the schedule for new posts?

1 post per week, every Sunday. I hope to be able to keep that schedule and I will try my best to do so.

So that's all for today. Nothing really interesting here but I hope to change that in the coming weeks. Thank you for reading and see you again next week.

Alejandro.