Tales of humour, whimsy and courgettes
A very fluffy yellow portrait for this weeks #colour_collective. This week’s colour is Cadmium Yellow Pale.
Getting near the end of an alphabet with these names. I need to give this gal a name beginning with Y. Yuri? Yelli? Yurellow? Help me out here gang! haha.
Thanks to Warren for the $10 Patronage.
Ko-Fi | Patreon | Etsy | Books | Skillshare | Threadless
I often find myself saying “I’m getting there,” when asked how I am. Well, here’s not there yet, is it?
I am creating some different designs for my Threadless store while pulling off all my art prints. My prints haven’t sold Threadless. I’m also re-making all of the mockups. Dark backgrounds were the most unpopular mocks when I polled last year. Clean ice white backgrounds just aren’t Fears, but we can lighten the pics in other ways.
Here’s not there yet, is available on Threadless. https://littlefears.threadless.com/
Ko-Fi | Patreon | Etsy | Books | Skillshare | Threadless
WordPress needs to have a parent page for drop-down menus on the website. So we needed a new Shop & Tip Jar page. Following advice I was given long ago, ‘artist, market thyself!’ Main page link: littlefears.co.uk/shop
“You’re right,” replied Fluffeh, “we have multiple shopping outlets and experiences for our fans.”
“Multiple!” gasped Masks. “I know we might get accused of marketing if you answer this out loud, but where can I visit these Fear filled shops and experiences?”
“You can buy our books from Amazon“, said Fluffeh.
“Cool,” said Masks.
“We sell original art and art prints on our Etsy store,” said Fluffeh.
“Brillo,” said Masks.
“Folk can buy our t-shirts from Threadless,” continued Fluffeh.
“Oh, right,” gasped Masks.
“We teach on Skillshare,” claimed Fluffeh.
“Awesome,” grinned Masks.
“You can also hire the illustrator for writing or design work,” noted Fluffeh.
“Excellent,” gurned Masks. “What work can he do?”
“Well,” pondered Fluffeh, “a lot of things, but obvious examples would be designing posters, creating unique logos, writing articles or creating book covers.”
“How many more ways can the illustrator say “said”?” asked Masks.
“I don’t think we should test that,” replied Fluffeh.
“I guess not,” laughed Masks. “But listen, if there was a way of personally supporting the illustrator, how would I do that?”
“You can visit his Patreon or Ko-Fiand drop a dollar or two into his tip jar,” said Fluffeh.
“Do you think anyone’s going to read all this?” asked Masks.
“Probably not,” sighed Fluffeh. “But you know the illustrator. He ain’t writing a normal shop and tip jar page.”
“Innit tho,” chuckled Masks.
Ko-Fi | Patreon | Etsy | Kindle | Skillshare | Threadless
Super sorry if you’ve been getting notifications of old posts being published today everyone.
Went a bit mad this week as repair work on the website, post WordPress 5.0 update came to demotivated stand still. An hour or two a day of repairs until March wasn’t working for me. So I just spent the last three days working on repairing as much as I could. I’m 45 hours into repairs. About 5 more hours of repairs to go I think. Found a stack of extra problems with the Gutenberg import.
Also found if I drafted an old post then set it to published again it sent out a publication notice to every channel, email and social media with no option of not doing so. The usual bit you publish that has options to share to all social networks was actually greyed out. How silly is that. I published a few posts before realising they were appearing on my Twitter and Tumblr and people were leaving comments on the blog like they were new posts.
Pretty livid about the whole thing but the bulk of the work is done now. Crack a beer open with me and cheer as it means I’m going to have more time than expected to work on new Fears.
Cheers for sticking with me as always everyone. I’m so glad you all still enjoy a smidgeon of fear-filled humour every morning, with me, here. Have a great Sunday everyone!
Sometimes you’ve got to tell the story you want to tell, even if you’re not sure it’s going to work. I’ve had that struggle with Brass, a post-apocalyptic road trip featuring two new Fears, Copper and Iron. A blend of horror and humour. The entire story is just over ninety stories long forming one continuous narrative.
I’ve been pondering on whether or not to publish this story online since August last year when I’d told the first of Lily and Sally’s Lost Leads stories. A thirty tale long narrative felt like the limit for an attention span on the Internet. Five stories a week would mean if I started today the story wouldn’t finish until June. Could the Little Fears focus on one story for that long? Heck, could I?
So the stories, sat, languished, and niggled. I want to tell the story, but I don’t feel it would work on the net.
Until this weekend…
My Internet friend and fellow blogger Lauren bought Copper and Iron as a print after my Etsy overhaul the other day. (You can visit her website HERE and my Etsy store HERE. Wink, wink.)
To quote Lauren:
“I just really liked their dynamic… something about em really appealed to me.”
Me too, Lauren. She pulled me back to their story. I gave it a few read-overs and figured if I re-wrote about 40% of it and loosened off the connection between each days tale, I could tell their tales in my daily horror and pun format. It’s a big job, but, well, sometimes you just have to tell the story you want to tell.
It helps that I’m hoping to have my entire website fixed post-Gutenberg/WordPress 5.0 update by the end of February. Then I can rework the front page and side-bar with links to each complete story. Grey Moon, Seeking Hydra, Lost Leeds, Capricorn, January and of course, Brass. That’ll certainly make navigating my site easier. I’m not sure if I’ll stick with the current theme, but eh, can figure that out when the website’s been fully repaired.
So, thanks to Lauren for prompting me to return to Copper and Irons story. Thanks to Warren for the $10 Patronage. And thank you to everyone else for the continued support!
Cheers, Fears!
Ko-Fi | Patreon | Etsy | Kindle | Skillshare| Threadless
Here’s to the new year, everybody. I hope y’all have a good one.
No #Colour_Collective again this week, so I’m drafting in Aquarius for this weeks portrait. Spooky-horoscope-sea-beasts gonna be spooky-horoscope-sea-beasts, yo.
Spooky-horoscope-sea-beasts also gonna be on my Etsy store. Just saying…
Linky: etsy.com/uk/shop/LittleFears
With special thanks
Weekly shout out to my $10 patron, Warren from IWrite. Without people like Warren, I wouldn’t be able to wake you all with my little fears and you’d probably cry a lot less in the morning than you already do. So please do check out Warrens blog.
So I thought I’d share a photo of my not-Instagram-worthy studio today. Also, I thought I’d share what yesterdays Storm Deidre did to my new homes fence. Pssh. The fiend! The Fears are on hand to help drop a pallet on a salvageable panel that was pulling the rest of the fence down. Cheers Piscies and… Oh… Deer…
Now, there’s a studio pic. It’s a mish-mash of the cheapest furniture I could get with odd second-hand bits and bobs. It ain’t very stylish but it is very functional. The studio includes a spacious dog crate used as a desk extension (because apparently, my desk chair is nicer for pups to sit on).
The PC was a self-build and cost £300’ish for a 16gb ram, AMD Ryzen 3 2200G with a bunch of old hard drives in. I’ll cover the PC in a future post about the tech the Fears use.
I ended up with two small monitors instead of one big one. A £20 19″ monitor combined with a £4 “16 flat screen TV. Both second hand. The 16″ TV is absolutely dire. It has less than 720p resolution. The monitor is absolutely awesome. I know 19″ is too small for most people nowadays, but the picture is so darned crisp. It’s an odd one because I cannot find it listed anywhere. It has a 1920 x 1020 resolution. But no matter how much I search, I just cannot find any 19” monitors with a resolution that high. Maybe it was one of the first 1020p monitors that were too expensive to make? Whatever, It’s small, but I absolutely love it.
The lamps are of course, meant to help with future videos. The window doesn’t get much light as I’m around the back of the house. So when I’m videoing myself drawing I need every bit of light from my left that I can get.
Oh, that box against the back wall is a delivery of art-prints. I’ve had them nearly two weeks and haven’t gotten the buggers onto Etsy yet! Hopefully, this week…
Some hot-picks furniture links.
Phew. Ever put studio pics or other creative spaces photos online yourself? Leave us a link comments so we can have a perv over your own creative spaces and writing desks.
This weeks #Colour_Collective was Rose Madder. And, well, it would have been rude not too at this time of year, right?
The website overhauls taking forever. Ruddy, arsin, bloomin, flipping, WordPress 5.0 with its pointy faced Gutenberg of blog destruction. It’s getting there though. Sadly I don’t think it’ll be finished before Christmas.
With special thanks
Weekly shout out to my $10 patron, Warren from IWrite. Without people like Warren, I wouldn’t be able to wake you all with my little fears and you’d probably cry a lot less in the morning than you already do. So please do check out Warrens blog.
There was no #Colour_Collective last week, but I still wanted to do a portrait. So the lovely insect queen steps up for her portrait. She likes sugar, honey and ruining humans picnic sandwiches.
She’s also available as an original artwork on my Etsy store.
You can purchase the insect queen here: etsy.com/uk/shop/LittleFears
Ooo, and speaking of Etsy. My new Little Fears prints arrived last week. They look awesome. Whatever printer type they use it puts the ink down far better than my old HP did. I’ll be overhauling the Etsy store and adding a bunch of new prints over the next few days. I will, of course post some sexy photos of them here.
With special thanks
Weekly shout out to my $10 patron, Warren from IWrite. Without people like Warren, I wouldn’t be able to wake you all with my little fears and you’d probably cry a lot less in the morning than you already do. So please do check out Warrens blog.
Little Fears 