Illustrators of the Future Workshop 2017 – Day 4

On Day 4 it was another early morning. The artists had been working throughout the night and into this morning. The drive and passion of the winners has been an inspiring part of this year’s seminar.

We had an awesome lecture from Maria Ragusa-Burfield, owner and founder of Altpick. A Professional Portfolio site for artists. It provides a vehicle for talent to utilize the web and connect artists to more buyers. She was very impressed with the work and provided some great advice on how to advertise themselves by talking about their process and promoting their work through a website, email list, and social media platforms to build a network. She surprised them with a page for each artist and with an article to promote their work with the Writers of the Future anthology!

The seminar then covered the different ways you could self-publish your work through sites like Patreon and Kickstarter. Each needs a different business model to be successful and we focused on Kickstarter since more of the winners were interested in it. Lazarus and Echo have done 13 successful Kickstarter projects and showed the kits and campaigns they had run. Then the clock struck 11 AM and it was the deadline for their assignment.

All the judges, the past and current winners huddled around each artist as they presented their final piece. Each one had a unique and stunning take on the work over the course of just two days. Yader Fonseca had an incredible painting that used the silhouette of his three tigers to look like a mythical Cerberus. While Rachel Quinlan’s art had such a successful composition and the most integrated use of “the dragon” curveball included in the brief. Anthony put his reference to great use and had a great value structure. Ryan Richards could be seen down in the lobby every night working on his piece and the work paid off creating a very complete piece. Chan ha Kim’s work was filled with fantastic details in her pen and ink drawing. David Furnal’s art had one of the strongest uses of shapes to frame the main character. Michael Michera’s piece had the most ambitious composition and Hanna Al-shaer’s art really had a Saturday Evening Post vibe. All in all, it was an impressive display and we were able to review all before lunch.

After Lunch we had 4 esteemed judges present their work, Val Lakey Lindhan, Sergey Poyarkov, Ciruelo Cabral and Rob Prior. Each shared their process, experiences and advice that is quintessential to their work. Then the writers came down as we setup to sign the first batch of books. The assembly line really grew into an efficient machine. Although for many artists this was their first book signing. So it took some getting used to and would be a good warm up for the coming weekend.

Then to top it all off the Winners were invited to a barbecue hosted by Author Services up on their roof! As the sun sets and the lights began to glow we could feel the anticipation in the air for the event that would come up this weekend! Get ready for a show!

Photos from today’s highlights can be seen HERE.

Joshua Meehan

Guest blogger, Joshua Meehan.
Joshua Meehan is a freelance science fiction and fantasy illustrator. He was an Illustrators of the Future winner in 2013 in Volume 29. His client list includes Paizo Publishing, Analog Sci-fi magazine, Fantasy Flight and Bethesda. Joshua’s illustration for Robert J. Sawyer’s short story “Gator” is in the latest Writers of the Future anthology, Volume 33.