The Secret of Nimh was always one of my favorite animated movies when I was younger. When I decided to do some fan art, the Secret of Nimh seemed like the perfect idea. There are so many great characters in that movie.

Earlier I posted a WIP of Nicodemus. Today I was able to finish up Nicodemus and Justin. I also have a WIP of Mrs. Brisby. I still plan on doing the Great Owl and Jenner for sure. Mr. Ages would be cool too. I wanted to do Jeremy since he is one of my favorite characters, but I’m not sure how to handle it, I mean, would I just paint a realistic bird? Doesn’t seem very exciting. Dragon could be cool.

It was good to finally take some time for myself. I’ve been so bogged down in freelance that I never get to have fun. Right now I’m working on 6 illustrations, 5 character concepts, and I just finished up another 28 character concepts and another 3 illustrations. I’ve also been trying to get ready for Wizard World Con next week and I am about to embark on an epic journey around the world. Next month we are going to Denver for a prerelease, then in June we are going to Singapore, Japan, and Kansas city…all back to back. Oh, plus we are moving next month. Busy busy busy. June is going to be tiring.

Detail of Nicodemus, it is a big one. I don’t think I’ve ever posted anything this large before. I think this detail shot is 1500 pixels wide. The full size painting is 4500 pixels wide, so this detail shot is actually smaller than the full res version.

Update – Finished up the Mrs. Brisby painting tonight.

Typically at shows I get a lot of requests for card alterations but due to time constraints and whatnot, I am limited to using sharpies and paint pens. I know some other Magic artists, like Terese Nielsen, do some pretty crazy card alterations using acrylics. I’ve only used acrylics maybe 3-4 times back when I was in school, so I am not exactly the best when it comes to using acrylics. The last time I used them was probably back in 2003. I wanted to give it a go, so I tried doing some extended art on some proofs I had laying around. It was fun getting back to traditional media, but I had forgotten how hard it is mixing paint. It was pretty tough trying to match the colors and transparency was a big issue. I’ll probably offer these for sale at my next shows and maybe I’ll try doing more in the future. If I get fast enough I might be able to do these at shows. I think these took between 20-30 minutes each, which isn’t really viable for shows. I think people in line would go insane.

Bog Wraith

Asceticism

Grave Peril

Loch Korrigan

Scourge Servant

Steel Sabotage

Form of the Dragon

Hellkite Hatchling

I often go through periods where I am unhappy with my work. Usually I just put the tablet down and try stepping away from art when I get to a point where I feel that nothing I do is worth anything. I felt like that on Friday night and I ended up lying in bed until almost 6:30am because I couldn’t stop thinking about my work. In the morning I decided that maybe I should do some painting for myself instead of working on freelance. Working on personal work is something that I rarely do because I usually don’t have the time. I also never do fan art. Dave Rapoza has been doing some pretty awesome fan art lately, so I figured maybe I should give it a try. This could be a good opportunity to have some fun and do something for myself. Maybe this would help me out of my slump. Over the weekend I ended up starting three paintings, all from the same IP. None of them art finished, but I thought I would share a WIP (work in progress) of one of the paintings. Can you guess what this is from? Tomorrow it is back to the grindstone. I have 6 freelance paintings to work on.

As you may know I upload free tutorials from time to time on my YouTube site. When I uploaded the Sci-Fi Environment trailer someone messaged me asking me to do a tutorial on how to paint a male and a female nude in a basic standing pose. I haven’t uploaded any free videos in a long time, so I figured this would be a great opportunity. Both of the videos are 40 minutes long and filmed in real-time so that you won’t miss anything. No reference was used for these paintings and they were each painted in about 40 minutes.

Male Pose
Female Pose

I had other people asking if they could give donations for the time I spent creating these tutorials, so I decided to bundle and release them on my store. I added an additional 5 minutes to each video, talking about basic measurements and further refining the painting. I also included high res (1500 pixels wide) layered psd files of each painting and the brushes that I used. Also, the videos are higher res than the ones on my YouTube site. These new videos are 1440×900 and in QuickTime format. The whole bundle is $10.99. You can purchase it here.

I hope these tutorials help, thanks!!

My Sci-Fi Environment Design tutorial is finally available for purchase through my store. The tutorial is $21.80 with tax and is broken into 4 parts, so be sure to select all 4 parts when you are checking out! Some stats again.

Format: Quicktime HD 1920×1400
Length: 149 minutes
Extras: Layered PSD, Brushes

I figured I would give everyone a little update with how my Sci-Fi Environment Tutorial is coming along. I seem to finally have pushed passed the plethora of bugs from Camtasia and iDVD, so I give you THE SCI-FI ENVIRONMENT TUTORIAL DVD OF DOOOOMMMMMmm!! As you can see I am in the process of printing and cutting out the DVD inserts and the DVDs themselves. As always, I do all of the filming, editing, printing, cutting, and distribution by myself. It takes me a long time to create a tutorial, so it really sucks when I find out that everyone is pirating my videos. For the first few months after I released my first two videos I couldn’t find any torrents. As soon as the torrents started becoming available my sales dropped to nearly zero. I found one site where my tutorials had 30k downloads. I know there isn’t much I can do about it and pirating is pretty much inevitable, but it still sucks when you put a lot of work into something and people just steal it. I’m trying to tell myself that probably at least 90% of the people that pirate my tutorials are people that wouldn’t have bought them in the first place, but even if 1% out of that 30k bought my video, that is still 300 sales, which is more than I have sold per video. Oh well, not much I can do about it. Just because people pirate my videos should I punish those that do buy them by not producing new tutorials?  The short answer is no. Pirating has hit every industry hard, so does that mean people should stop making music, or movies, or video games? All people can do is continue to create bigger and better products in hope that people will support their efforts.

Bah, anyway, I’ll tell you a little bit about my process and equipment and whatnot. So I filmed the video using Camtasia for Mac. For the audio I actually used a program called Wiretap Studio. I find it easier to hit play on the Camtasia timeline and record the audio with Wiretap while I watch so that I can time the audio correctly. After that I have to export each section (I broke the tutorial up into 5 parts). Once I had all 5 parts exported, I had to put them back into Camtasia and export them as one large file. I was then able to burn that one file onto a DVD using iDVD. After that I use a program called Epson Print CD to print the DVD with my Epson Stylus Photo R1800. For the DVD insert I used Photoshop and then printed it on double-sided glossy paper with my Epson Artisan 800. I then have to cut each insert out using a good old exacto knife and a ruler. I was able to make 15 DVDs before I ran out of ink and paper. At the end of April I am attending Wizard World Con in Anaheim and in June I’m going to Singapore and Kansas City for a Magic: The Gathering Grand Prix, so I will have these DVDs available there for purchase. I may only make a few available through my site for now so that I can have some to sell on hand at the shows.

Right now I’m getting my digital download ready, so I should be able to have them available for purchase in the next day or two. The digital download will be $21.80 and the DVD will be $33. Why the weird prices? Well the state of California makes you pay sales tax on everything you sell, so I need to charge sales tax in order to cancel out the sales tax I have to pay to the state. So not only do I have to pay federal tax and state tax, but I also have to pay state sales tax and city business license tax, yay! Basically I am being taxed 4 times for everything I sell. Gotta love America. Some quick specs:

Sci-Fi Environment Tutorial
$21.80 – Digital download, 4 parts
$33 – DVD, 1 Disc
Length: 149 minutes
Bonus Material (digital download): Layered PSD, Brushes
Bonus Material (DVD): Trailers, Brushes, Portfolio Gallery

Holeeee crap. Creating this new tutorial has been quite the epic journey of fail…Camtasia (and iDVD) fail. I’m sure if you’ve ever worked with Camtasia before you will know that it tends to crash…a lot. I had a lot of crashing problems with it back when I was making the Female Hunter and The Final Charge videos, but nothing like now. I even had problems with it when I made my Liche Priest video way back in the day. Let me just say that my Camtasia is up-to-date and both of my computers are up -to-date.

One of the most annoying problems I have with Camtasia is the bug where you export a video…it goes through the entire export process, and when it finishes a dialog box pops up saying that it is finished and you can reveal the file in the finder. Clicking on the “reveal in finder” button does nothing. So I go to where I saved the file…no file. I check everywhere, no file. I check my hard drive space before and after, no change, which means it just spent 2.5 hours exporting nothing. So I say hey, maybe it just screwed up…I’ll try again. Another 2.5 hours later…nothing. So I think maybe it is the computer. I change computers, 2.5 hours later, no file. So I think it is the file itself, I change files, 2.5 hours later, no file. I think maybe if I try changing the export options…2.5 hours later, no file. Good lord. I google the problem and many other people have the same problem. Someone suggests saving the file to your documents folder…it worked for them. So I try it on both computers…2.5 hours later, no file. So I try using my PC instead of my Mac…but as you may have found out, you can’t transfer Mac Camtasia files to PC Camtasia. Boo. Guess what else, all videos recorded with Camtasia are saved as Camtasia extensions and guess what, no other program can open them…so…I HAVE to export them…but it won’t work. I had this same exact problem with my Female Hunter AND the Final Charge videos. Sometimes it would fail, and I would try again, and it would work. Sometimes it would fail two times in a row, and I would try again, and it would work. No settings would change, no files would change, nothing. I would just hit export again and it seemed to work or fail at random. Now I’m thinking, “holy crap I just spent like 2 weeks on this video and I can’t get it to export…I’m screwed.” Oh, by the way, the file I’m trying to export is only an hour long. 15 or so hours later I give up and go to bed.

I think maybe I should try breaking the file up into two smaller parts. One annoying change Camtasia made recently is that all videos recorded in a project are saved into the project file instead of being saved in another location. This means that if you duplicate the project it will duplicate all of the videos. If you don’t want duplicates, you have to go back after the fact and delete them by hand by clicking “show package contents” in the finder. An hour or two later and finally the first part exported. Let the clouds part and the sunlight shine down and burn my eyes out…something actually worked! So I tried the second part, and it too exported. Now that I have the first half of the video exported, it is time to do the last half. During this whole time I was speaking with TechSmith support, and after going back and forth with them and not coming up with a solution, they finally said “Camtasia has a known issue with not being able to export longer videos. We will try to address it in our next patch.” So if you plan to make a video that is longer than 30 minutes, be ready for an ulcer. The thing that is weird is that I was able to export much longer videos before…but I guess maybe one of the new updates screwed things up…I dunno. So you might be thinking maybe this is just a Mac issue…well I used Camtasia on my PC for the Liche Priest video, and it had just as many problems. It tended to cause my entire computer to crash while I was filming…very awesome.

So armed with the knowledge that I can’t export longer videos, I tried to export the last half of my video. I broke it into two sections and exported them, both worked. I started to listen to it and I realized I forgot to change some of the audio properties. I go back and make the fixes and then export again…surprise surprise, the bug is back and it didn’t export anything. All I did was change an audio setting and now it doesn’t export. So I leave everything the same and just hit export again…magically it worked this time. Yay for random bugs.

You may think my bug issue is over, but not so fast there buddy. Now I am on to my crashing issues! Someone had asked me about adding captions since they have a hearing disability, so I figured I would go ahead and do it. See all those black boxes with audio waves in them that are above all of the green boxes with audio waves? That is the caption timeline. In order to write captions you have to click on one and then start typing as it plays that section of audio. Seems simple enough, until you click off of it. Crash time. It doesn’t crash every single time you deselect the caption timeline, but I would say between 20-40% of the time it will crash. Now I’m saving my file about every 30 seconds in case it crashes. Here is the kicker…in order to save you HAVE to deselect the caption timeline. If you have it selected, the save option is grayed out. BUT, in order to save you have to deselect and risk the program crashing. Kind of a Catch 22. At one point it crashed 7-8 times in a timespan of typing less than 10 minutes of captions. The other awesome thing is that it takes 1.5 minutes for Camtasia to reopen my file after it crashes (yes I actually timed it). I have autosave set to 1 minute, but still, having your program crash that many times in that short amount of time starts to add up to a lot of time lost. Oh, and it isn’t a file or computer related issue…I have tried using captions on two different computers using many different files. Maybe I am just lucky. It could be a Mac thing…maybe I should try it on my PC.

I also mentioned problems with iDVD. I wouldn’t really call it a bug, but rather just poor implementation of the program. I guess you get what you pay for (same with Camtasia). In iDVD you can make it so that it has a “Play Movie” button. BUT, it only works if you have 1 movie file. Since Camtasia wouldn’t allow me to export one large movie file, I had to break it into 5 parts. If I try to make a DVD with iDVD, I can’t make the DVD play through all 5 parts back to back. You have to select part 1 from the menu…watch it, and when it is over it will take you back to the menu where you have to select part 2…watch it…go back to the menu…select part 3…and so on. That is really annoying and something I don’t think anyone would want to deal with when trying to watch a video. I did find one bug that caused iDVD to crash. If you select something on the timeline and hit “smart delete,” half the time the program will crash. Wee! As of right now I probably won’t release a DVD version of my environment tutorial simply because I don’t want people to have to go to the menu 5 times in order to watch the whole thing.

Update Oh man…so I was able to stitch all 5 parts of my video together with Camtasia and export it as one file so that I can burn it to a DVD. I created my DVD project in iDVD, tried to burn it, and after about 30-40 minutes, I get an error saying something is wrong with the menus…the menus that COME with iDVD. So I think maybe it is just a glitch. I try again, it fails again. I try deleting the stuff out of my library/quicktime folder like people suggested…didn’t help. I deleted my entire project and created another one like people suggested…didn’t help. I tried saving to a different location like people suggested…didn’t help. So I decided to completely change the theme and bingo, it finally worked. It took 6 hours to burn one dvd because of the encoding time. The first one always takes the longest, but now it only takes 30 minutes to burn one DVD. Soooooooo, I will have DVD versions available when I launch the tutorial. Sorry, the DVD version does not have captions. If you want captions you will have to get the digital download version.

So yeah, with all of the crashing and the bugs, I have lost several days of work. Gotta love it! I should probably just invest in Final Cut Pro, but the $1k price tag is a bit steep. Maybe if I worked on videos all the time it would be worth it, but it has been almost a year since I last created a tutorial. When, you may ask, will my tutorial be finished? Well, the tutorial is done but I’m still in the process of trying to add captions. The other thing about the captions is that Camtasia will only allow the option to turn them on and off if you export it to YouTube or Screencast.com. If I want to export it as say, a quicktime file, I have to either leave them on all the time or leave them off all the time. That means I need to export two versions, one with captions and one without. This also means doubling my chance of running into the export bug. Adding captions is a lot more time consuming than I had anticipated (especially with all of the crashing), so it might be another week or so before I am finished.

After a 13 year absence I made my return to Vegas! I think this was the first real vacation I’ve taken from work in probably 4 years or so. Usually the only time I “go on vacation” is to signing events, but at the signing events I’m still drawing and signing cards for 8-10 hours a day, plus sometimes I take playmat drawings back to the hotel to work on if I didn’t get a chance to finish them during the day. I guess you could say I took a vacation from work when I drove from Virginia to California…but I was driving like 15 hours a day…which actually ended up making my CARpal (hah, car…) tunnel worse than painting. This time my schedule worked out perfectly and all of my deadlines ended the day I left. In order to prevent myself from doing any type of work, including personal, I left my computer behind. It’s actually kinda funny because I’m making a big deal about going on vacation and not working…but I was only gone for two days. I make it sound like I was gone for two weeks or something, but no, in reality I only went two days without working. Most people take two days off from work each week . I may end up needing a vacation from my vacation. I haven’t walked this much in years. I think yesterday we walked probably at least 6 miles. I haven’t done that since I lived in San Fran. I’m too old and out of shape now. When I got home yesterday and took my shoes off I noticed that I had blown 3 holes in my sock…the sock was hole free earlier that morning.

Anyway, Vegas was great. We stayed at Mandalay Bay, my first time there. It was a cool hotel, not as fancy as some of the others, but still cool nonetheless. While we were there we went and saw Cirque du Soleil’s O (at the Bellagio). All I have to say is that it was amazing. It was by far the coolest show I have ever seen. As an artist, I felt incredibly inspired to go home and paint. This is a must see show for everyone. If there is one thing you should do while in Vegas, it is this. I’m actually listening to the soundtrack as we speak. They were selling them after the show and it was definitely worth picking up.

In the typical Daarken fashion, I forgot my camera so I had to use my iPhone. Time for pictors, wee!

Aria…I think.

Smoked turkey crepe at Max Brenner.

Our hotel, Mandalay Bay.

My cupcake of awesomeness. Unfortunately my ganache center fell on the floor ;___;

View from our room window.

Dinner at Dos Caminos.

Rushing to see O.

Shooz

Gru’s stolen Las Vegas landmarks.

Kobe burger from Burger Bar, home of the $60 burger. The $60 truffle burger was a little too rich for my blood, so I stuck with the cheaper one. This one is Kobe beef with Avocado, Bacon, and Blue Cheese.

I leave you with this, a $30 love box from the room’s mini-bar. I made sure to stay clear of that sensor plate.

This is another very popular topic and one that never actually receives any concrete information. How much do I charge as a freelance artist? How much indeed. I still don’t know the right answer for that. I’m not sure why, but for some reason talking about money and how much a person makes is considered rude, taboo even. People look the other way and pretend not to hear you when someone asks how much you make. Why is that? Are people afraid that person will leak your information to their less than savory buddies who will then proceed to kidnap you in the middle of the night and ransom you off for large amounts of monies? Maybe your subordinate makes more than you and you decide to go on a rampage through the office? Maybe artists are afraid they will be blacklisted by their clients if they leak any info? Or maybe people are embarrassed with their income because they don’t think they make enough? I’m not really sure. While growing up I was always told never to tell anyone how much I make because I would be kidnapped…but that is just my experience.

So how do you come up with your rates? Well, unfortunately dictating your own rates isn’t as common as most people would think. Most companies have a set rate they pay, and if you don’t like it, you can hit the road. I would say at least 90% of my clients have set rates that they don’t negotiate on. Client x pays x amount for an illustration, and that is that. I’ve tried negotiating these rates in the past, but they were always in vain. You may ask, how do you know which clients have set rates and which ones will negotiate with you? Hah, that is a good question. From my experience, large companies tend to have a set budget, and therefore, a set rate. Usually the clients I can name my own price with are individuals, people looking for artists to work on their own private project. Also, working as a freelance concept artist in the video game or film industry offers a fair amount of negotiating, although the client still has a budget they want to stick to. Clients that only pay a set rate (for illustrations that is) will usually come right out and tell you what their rate is when they contact you. Clients looking for concept work (film and video games) will usually ask you what your rates are because they want to hire you for the cheapest amount possible. They still have a budget, but if they can hire you for x instead of y, then they can take the remaining budget and use it elsewhere, or get more concepts out of a person.

I know I know, I still haven’t actually said how to figure out how much you should charge. All of my rates have been figured out through trial and error. I come up with a number and tell the client. If they say ok right off, I know I probably bid too low. Next time I might try asking for a little more. If you bid too high, they will usually make a counteroffer. If they say “Nope, that is too much. See ya,” you can try lowering your price, but Clients usually don’t shut you down and leave after one bid. There are a bunch of freelance calculators online, like this one. It is actually pretty complex. It takes into account all of your business costs, personal bills, how many hours/days you work, how much you want to make in profit, etc. Bills are easy to calculate, but trying to decide how much of a profit you want can be tricky, especially since this calculates an hourly fee. Most of the time clients won’t pay by the hour, but rather by the illustration or asset. Now you have to take that hourly rate and figure out how long it will take you to create your illustration and base your fee on that amount. I always hear that you should take your bid and increase it by 20%. Or was it that you should take your client’s offer and increase it by 20% because they always bid low…I dunno.

This whole secret underground rates thing can be a real detriment to the art industry. I feel that a lot of artists are being underpaid because no one ever knows how much to ask for. Usually people tend to undersell themselves too, either because they think their work isn’t good enough or because they think client x couldn’t possibly pay that amount. The art industry is also very competitive, so you have a lot of other artists bidding low just to get the job over another artist. This just perpetuates the cycle because clients then become accustomed to paying a low rate to their artists. At the same time you have artists that are just starting out who need to take lower paying jobs just to get their foot in the door. This could also contribute to why clients aren’t as willing to negotiate their rates. They know they can get other people to work for amount x, so why pay another artist amount y. If you are super awesome you can probably get y instead of x, but you need to be super awesome. So maybe artists should always strive for quality over quantity since that will get them the higher paying jobs? Plus with the internet and the vast amounts of pirating going on, the industry has taken a big hit. I know after my tutorials started being pirated my sales dropped to nearly zero. There are sites like PayScale or Salary.com that have reports based on job types, but to me the rates seem a little low. The other thing about these sites is that they aren’t very specific. “Painter/Illustrator” could mean just about anything.

After four long paragraphs I still haven’t given you a concrete answer as to how you should figure out your rates. If you have trusted art buddies, try asking them for advice. There is also the Graphic Artists Guild book that talks about rates, contracts, and industry practices. It is definitely something worth having on your bookshelf. The other really cool thing about this book is that it comes with sample contracts. Creating good contracts is another very important aspect to being a professional artist. You need to protect yourself in as many ways possible. Again, you come across the difference between working with large companies vs. private clients. Large companies will always have their own contracts that you have to sign, and the terms are usually non-negotiable. Private clients may or may not have their own contracts, so it is up to you to create one. Many times private clients haven’t worked with an artist before, so they won’t know much about writing contracts and you may have to go through several rounds of negotiating the terms. Becoming acquainted with contract lingo is key. Have you ever noticed that contract jargon is ridiculously hard to understand? Well that is done on purpose. If you can’t understand what the contract is saying and you sign it anyway, you may be signing away rights you never intended to sign away. Learn the lingo and make sure you know what you are signing. If you don’t, ask.

After almost a year I am getting close to releasing a new video tutorial, yay. I asked around for suggestions on what I should make my new tutorial about, and most people said an environment. Sooooo, I decided to go ahead and do it. As I’m sure most of you know, I am not really known for my environments. Most of the environments I have painted are still under NDA and will probably never see the light of day, plus they are all fantasy environments. Instead of going with what I know, I decided to go out of my comfort zone and paint a sci-fi environment…one with architecture to boot (another thing I don’t really paint very often).

Right now I am in the process of editing the video. After that I will need to add the audio and create a trailer, so I’m not sure when I will be finished. I hope to have the tutorial finished in the next two weeks or less.

In the Final Charge tutorial I asked for questions from the audience and I wanted to do that again. If you have any questions you want to ask about my process, my thoughts, the industry, or anything that comes to mind, just leave me a comment on here or on my Facebook page and I’ll try to answer them to the best of my ability. Thanks!