@lizardillo that's so awesome! I'm so glad that you passed the information on to her and that she's now better equipped to proceed publishing her book in a more mindful way. Hopefully this will save her from a lot of publishing pitfalls.

And good on you to resist the lure of a paying job and saying that you don't feel that your style is the best fit. That takes a lot of guts and shows how much you care!

@ksfabian Do you have a copy of the Graphic Artists' Guild Handbook for Pricing and Ethical Guidelines? It's a lifesaver in situations like this. When I don't know where to start, I can look it up and say, "well, the GAG handbook reports that artists in X market get paid between $X-X for those projects," and then I ask for something in middle and see what happens.

Additionally, tomorrow (Wednesday 2/8) at 11:30 EST there's a webinar on the subject of pricing offered by Nate and Salli of @illustratorscircle on Instagram. The zoom class costs $30, and I'll be there! Anything to help me get more comfortable with asking for what I'm worth.

Fingers crossed 🤞 @danielerossi!

My books came out great and everyone I spoke to thought the quality was very good.

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@ArtistErin ill. Heck him out, thanks!

@Melissa_Bailey said in What do you do with old projects?:

@ksfabian absolutely there is.

What I do is air drop them to my computer, which is backed up to an external hard drive. I export them as PSD files so that the layers are preserved and editable in Photoshop or if I want to move them back to Procreate.

You could also move the files to a cloud sharing platform like Dropbox or Google Drive. If you tap the ‘share’ icon on the top left, you’ll have several file format options and then several options of where you would like the file to go.

I second this. I try to save my Procreate files on my computer, which has both a hard drive and a Cloud backup. I’ve lost files due to crashes before (so… so many files…) and it makes me paranoid enough to triple layer my files haha

Never trust your iPad to save your work. They don’t have good backup systems for Procreate files and if your iPad breaks you WILL lose every file on there. It’s happened to me and it sucked 😞

Thanks everyone! Turns out it was a smacking-my-forehead moment. I followed up with the printer and it turns out that I had told her that my book was 128 pages completely forgetting that my page 1 starts on page 9! So there aren’t any extra blank pages. Just a proper page count 😂

@Melissa_Bailey Thanks, Melissa! Yeah, my main questions concern record-keeping and how the percentage will be paid out to both of us.

I’m not sure, yet, what my percentage will be—I think we need to nail down the book production cost and retail price first. I’m pretty set on going with earning a percentage since it will incentivize both of us to market it (note, he’s got a HUGE upper hand on me in this respect), and in this case, I’m suspecting I could make a lot more over the long term than what I’d feel comfortable asking for as a flat fee. It would be cool to establish a longer-term connection with him and other people in his field, anyways.

@Tom-Harshberger OOO yes!!!

I’ve used 360Digital in the past and plan on using them again. Low prices, great quality and great people to work with.

@ajillustrates Oo it's so cool that you can turn characters around in your head! I was talking to my friend who is a game artist and he talks about being able to visualize objects as a rotating 3D plane in his head to try out camera angles and I was like...nope can't relate to that at all! I have a wool dryer ball with eyes on my desk to visualize head turns lol.

I guess we all have different strengths and unique ways of working and it's all cool💪

@NessIllustration I’ve been looking at those for a long time now. Nice to know it’s decent quality. I bought a bendy arm clamp from our dollar store until I could find something that would work well with my phone.

@Griffin-McPherson rules don't apply to you if you're famous I guess 😂😂😂

@Griffin-McPherson He looks great to me! Easily recognizable as the same character throughout, and with a lot of fun variation in poses and facial expressions. I really like @ajillustrates 's idea to have him wear the aviation goggles in the bottom middle pose.

@Griffin-McPherson I use character sheets just as a fun exercise, but do not include them in my picture book portfolio, because for picture books, you want to show how you create picture books, not character sheets, I think? But maybe I am wrong. 🙂
And I did use for my portfolio some illustrations I've originally done as a character sheet, but I put them there separately.
When I think about it, I even didn't send a character sheets to my editor when working on a picture book. I did sent "development" sheet, when we were brainstorming about how the character should look like and what style would be the best for this specific book. (I would not place that on my portfolio)
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After that, I've done just one illustration with the approved character and used that as a reference for me when working on the book... (also not for my portfolio though)
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And as @NessIllustration said, I would rather focus on having some nice sequential art on your portfolio!
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It doesn't have to be a ton, but it should show that you can stay consistent with your characters (this you could do on the character sheet) and how you are able to place them on a page, background and everything (character sheet is useless for this).
But - social media looove characters sheets! So if you like to create them, do it! And post it 😉

You've improved LOADS since you started posting art to this forum. Whatever you do, don't give up, even if you need a break sometimes. You'll amaze yourself!

@Michael-Angelo-Go this is a tough angle! It’s looking pretty good though. I think on the head you probably need to show more underneath the chin, unless of course she’s looking down. I did a quick draw over.E25E9BA8-DF4D-4B89-9448-6E4987294C35.jpeg

@Miriam Humm... this author has only written descriptions of their characters. I'd be creating the actual visual representation of the characters so ... I think I need to research this a bit more. I want to find a happy medium where we both get what we want. Thx for response.

@Jean-Watson This made me chuckle 🙂 I could envision the whole scenario and put myself in your shoes, felt the mortifying feeling of being skewered by 12 year old boys. So funny

Thanks to everyone for the feedback and those who entered the poll. It was good for me to receive thoughts on the matter from peers and mentors.

Can I ask for an understanding of what is currently taught to school children (ages 3 to 7) about the holiday (with the understanding school boards across America have their own policies). For example, my older sibling was taught the contributions of Tisquantum/Squanto, but by my generation his contributions was removed from the curriculum. Has some districts completely removed the tale of the "First Thanksgiving" from their lesson plans?

@NessIllustration Thank you Ness - I think that's probably the case for me. I don't know, I think I will look around elsewhere all the same. Thanks for all your advice, it's much appreciated! PS: great YouTube channel by the way 🙂