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1. What is your favorite medium to work with and why?
Ink, ink and ink. This is probably due to my earliest illustration dreams and influences. I adored the color fairy tale books edited by Andrew Lang, which were illustrated in a wonderful, classical Victorian style.
I also loved to publish at an early age – and ‘publishing’ when you’re that young and poor generally meant xeroxing at the school library. Color printing and copying at that time was prohibitively expensive, and grayscale didn’t reproduce worth snot, so pen and ink was the way to go.
Within the realm of inking, stippling is my all-time favorite. This is a method of creating shadow and depth using dots… lots and lots and lots of little dots. My preferred tool is a Pigma Micron, size 005.
2. How do you manage to organize and optimize your time to do all that you do?
Lists! And more lists! Nearly every day, I make a list for the day, a list for the remainder of the week, and a list for the remainder of the month. Most of these lists live in my livejournal, but I have a longer-term set of lists on a large whiteboard in my office. This whiteboard has a calendar with several months in advance, and every few months I make sure all the very important deadlines and dates and shows are on it. Having everything laid out like that really highlights what has to be done when – and then you just go do it.
It’s important to have attainable goals, so I break down what I have to get done into fairly short time intervals – what can I finish today? What can I finish tomorrow? Sometimes I put vague things on my lists like ‘work on commission’ – no matter how much work I put into it, every little bit goes to the final product, so even if I just erase a line and redraw a little tiny piece, it’s some work, and something I can feel good about crossing off.
I’ve been using lists for a long time, and have discovered that, most importantly, they don’t work well on pieces of paper that can get lost. Because they will. Somewhere in the ether is a whole slug of lost notes – probably with goals I never accomplished because I have a brain like swiss cheese unless I have it written down and can look at it.
3. Can you give us some tips on how to promote oneself as an artist? What has worked the best for you?
I wish I could point to a magical ‘promote oneself there!’ site, because that would make my life a lot easier and I could do it, too.
Most of my best clients come from word of mouth. The best way to get clients, is to have clients, which is one of those disgustingly true cliches that make you want to kick something.
More seriously, I’d say that being active in good communities is a really good way to get exposure. A tasteful signature in your forum ID and a friendly, helpful attitude will get you further than any paid advertisement. Writing articles and tutorials and getting them published is also a great way to get exposure. (I’m not just saying that because I’m trying to get more people to write for EMG-Zine, really!)
4. How did EMG begin?
Ah! The million dollar question. Har har.
I had a lot of penpals – the snail mail variety – while I was in High School. I was way too cheap to buy store-bought stationery, and I did a lot of art, so I started doing my own fantasy-themed stationery. One of my penpals mentioned casually that they loved it and that I should sell it. So I did!
I’ve always loved both art and making things, and have been of the business-minded kind since I was about 6. So this idea of selling stationery for money was really intriguing, especially when people started buying. It was one of those projects that was always growing, little bits at a time. An idea here. A possibility there. An opportunity over there. And suddenly I blinked, and it had turned one of those hobbies that could afford to buy me a laptop and ate up so much time I felt compelled to quit my day job to stay sane.
5. What helped you to decide to quit your day job to run your own art business?
The staying sane bit mentioned above, honestly. I was trying to do way too much – my husband and I were building a house, and the business had grown to an unwieldy size. I didn’t get any downtime, my husband never saw me, and I was going to go crazy! So I sat down, figured out what things were taking time – and it was the day job that sat there at the top of my list. It wasn’t taking me in the direction that I wanted to go, and EMG could. Jake and I did bills, and realized we could get by on just his paycheck if necessary, and we took the plunge. It was worth taking a chance.
6. What are some of the things in which you find inspiration for your art?
My beautiful land (I live in a birch forest in the outskirts of Fairbanks, Alaska), my wildly entertaining pets, my wonderful husband and all of my fabulously talented friends. Also, I am stubborn and proud and if someone says off-handedly that I can’t draw/write something, I will usually have to try to prove that I can, too.
7. In your opinion, how can an artist better their technical skills?
There are two ways, in my opinion, and you have to do both.
One is to practice. It seems simple, but seriously – if you don’t use it, you lose it, and your art ‘progress’ will slide back instead of moving forward because you have to re-learn what you figured out last time if it was too long ago. Draw constantly. Doodle. Sketch from life. Whatever you have to do to constantly be doing art, that’s what you have to do.
Secondly, you have got to develop thick skin. You will not always be able to see what you are doing wrong, and you will have to go to someone else who can look at the work with unprejudiced eyes. They will tell you what’s wrong with your work – maybe not nicely, maybe not as enamored with the subject as you are, and you have to be able to take it and learn from it. Once you can do this, you have cut your learning time into a fraction of the time it would otherwise take.
8. How do you find motivation on those days when you’d just rather stay in bed?
Positive reinforcement works pretty well on me. If I write these three icky rejection letters, then I can go read my friendslist on livejournal. If I clean up my desk, I can buy that print I really, really want. Of course, that still requires a fair amount of discipline!
9. What are some of your artistic goals for 2006?
Gosh, I hadn’t actually thought about that yet – I made a whole list of business goals, but hadn’t gotten to thinking about my own work!
I would like to do several large, color pieces. I have a 14 x 20 inch piece in the pencils stages on watercolor paper that I am really loving, and I’d like to finish it this year. It is a big challenge for me! I’d also like to complete an entry for the fantasy self-portrait show here at FAE, and a big snow-unicorn piece for a contest, and I’ve got several commissions I want to finish. More generally, I’d like to keep learning. I want to be more comfortable with color, and with larger, more complex pieces by the end of the year. I’d like to do more with scratchboard, and more with digital, too.
10. Do you have any advice for artists who would like to get started mailing to or attending Art shows and conventions?
*laughs* I’m the worst person to ask about this. I’ve attended two conventions – at one I sold several hundred dollars worth of artwork (mostly other people’s) and never got paid because the Con went bankrupt. At the other, I sold nothing. I’ve done one mail in show that ended up $40 in the red. So my advice is not to do what I’ve done. Many people have luck in this field. I, do not.
11. Of all your accomplishments, which one are you the most proud of and why?
Tying my shoes.
If I had to pick my single proudest moment, it was a moment following the car accident that crushed my fifth lumbar when I could reach down and tie my own shoes again.
Really – it’s not really a single facet of EMG or a piece of artwork, it’s being able to pay artists for their wonderful work. I paid more than eleven thousand dollars into the fantasy artist community in 2005, and that felt amazing. One of my artists wrote that she was really happy to get her payment because she could afford to go see a doctor and get some medicine with what I’d sent her. There is probably nothing that even compares with what it felt like to be able to do that for someone. I’m really, really proud that I can help artists get some part of what they deserve.
12. Does living in Alaska greatly prohibit you in attending more art shows and conventions?
Oh yes. A plane ticket to the lower 48 can easily cost as much as it costs most lower 48 folks to get to Europe. Driving takes a minimum of 5 days to get to the Northern contiguous border (and gas is not cheap!). It costs more than twice as much for me to attend a themed convention such as Dragon*Con as it would cost someone in the lower 48 – even if they live several states away. Add to this restrictions on baggage which limit how much I can bring to a show, and I have to plan such events very, very carefully; the risk is pretty high.
Someday – in the not too distant future – I hope to do a many-month road trip. My husband and I would buy either a trailer or some vehicle that could transport EMG and us, and we’d hit as many events in a summer as we could manage. I think this would be tremendous fun!
13. What is your favorite way to relax and unwind?
Hot chocolate in front of the woodstove with the cat, in the background either a well-loved DVD or some good music, a stomach full of my husband’s amazing cooking, and maybe a sketchbook (depending on how much of my lap the cat feels like sharing).
Name: Ellen Million
Website: http://www.ellenmilliongraphics.com/
email: ellen AT ellenmilliongraphics.com
DeviantArt: http://ellenmillion.deviantart.com/
ArtWanted: http://www.artwanted.com/ellenmillion
