Friday Thoughts Ep. 11

Hello Patrons and happy Friday! I hope you’re doing well!

This week had one main focus: finishing updating my social media presence. I hadn’t updated my bios, intentions, or information since I started this business only three months ago! I feel like I have a much clearer vision of what I want now so it feels good to align my information and branding with that!

You may have noticed the new banner and rewritten intro to the Patreon! This logo needs a little revision but I like it so much so far! I’ve spread this branding to my Etsy, Twitter, and used the same themes and colors on my website. UNIFY! When I run out of business cards I will design new ones including this type of design. 

You can check out my website at www.ragondickard.com to see the updated design and portfolio work! The biggest change is a new front page with all of my major links, an expanded portfolio with new pieces, and I changes the “Patterns” gallery to a “Digital” gallery. Let me know what you think!

In the realm of digital management I also spent an hour or so organizing my photos on my iPad and Google Drive. With about 2000 photos, 75% art images and 25% personal photos, it’s helpful to have all of them separated for quicker access. I spent a lot of time scrolling through my iPad. I‘m trying to get much better at file management.

I completed my first pet portrait commission this week as well! I had such a fun time working on this hilarious watercolor portrait. I thought you might be interested in a few process photos:

With these photos you can see 

1. The initial pencil sketch, which I send to the client for approval.

2. A transferred linework to watercolor paper and first pass with a wash. The middle image was to messily painted and too bright pink, so I started a new one.

3. The new first watercolor pass, with a lighter, neater wash, and lighter areas left out. This initial pass helps unify the colors later on.

4. A second color pass with greens, blues, a few darker tones, and  red.

5. Final color pass and linework. I do my linework in a watered down gouache. In this case I used blue/purple for the portrait and dark red for the lettering/rope. The stripes of the rope were so small that I used a red colored pencil for that detail only.

You can also see a few color tests above the image to make sure I have to colors looking right. After that I trim the paper and mail it off! I am very happy with this portrait and hope for many more pet only portraits. 

And of course I shared previously my next small product project: handmade polymer pins. I am very very excited for this and actually wish I could keep all of them. But I also want to sell them, of course. ;)

Non-Art life: 

A few people have been visiting Seattle this week. Our good friend Tori’s brother and partner are visiting and we joined them in a visit to our local board game bar. 

We also are visited by a college friend’s family from Moscow! Following his graduation they are taking a trip around the U.S., including Savannah, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, LA, San Francisco, Seattle, and NYC! His parents own a vegetarian restaurant in Moscow and I am pleased to say they were very impressed by the vegan restaurant I worked in for 1.5 years. 

Finally, tomorrow Zach and I are traveling to Marysville, Washington for the wedding of one of his former coworkers! This will be our first wedding as adults, and we are honored and excited to attend. As well as excited to get out to a different town in Washington!

So it’s felt like an eventful week! I feel like and hop things are moving in the right direction for this business.

What did you guys do this week? Anything cool or new going on?

Talk to you later,

xoxo,

Ragon