Over the last few days I’ve been working on a major re-vamp of the old Biro-art .com site. Stripping out all the old hand-coded stuff in favour of proper content management courtesy of WordPress.
There’s never a theme that quite looks like you want it though is there. Hence the ‘last few days’ part of the first sentance. I have to say, I’m getting pretty sick of peering at CSS trying to figure out which bit effects what bit on the layout.
Still, hopefully it;ll look OK when it’s done.
Once it’s finished I shall be using it as a showcase for prospective employers/clients and try to make a go of the art thing.

I’m always starting new projects, I must have ten or more on the go at any one time. I do get them finished… eventually but I find it hard to stay focussed.
In fact Odd-Fish as a whole was partly an attempt to break this habit and force me to keep up a sustained effort over an extended period of time without letting it fall by the wayside and so far it’s pretty much worked. Odd-Fish has been studiously undated regularly for the last ten months.
But at what cost? Other projects, most notably Biro-Art have fallen foul of my old habits in favour of Odd-Fish and nor Biro-Art has only been updated once in nearly a year. It’s not that I don’t want to update, it’s just that I never seem to get the time. There’s always something else that needs doing, like an new Odd-Fish strip or something to watch on telly or the constant daily urge to eat and sleep.
I’ve even been avoiding getting any new games so that I don’t spend hours shooting monsters when I should be wrangling a biro.
It doesn’t help that it’s become a hell of a lot more busy at work either. I used to use drawing as a way of avoiding boredom on long, quiet shifts but now there’s no such thing. Our branch is no longer open overnight so my beloved night shifts are no longer available and the service stays stupidly busy well past midnight these days so I’ve pretty much given up even taking out a pencil at work any more.

Last year I got a delightful email out of the blue from an American lady called Mrs Duck (for real!) who is starting up a small business making her own recipe of hot and chilli sauces.
She’d come across an illustration I did back in 2006 called Devil Duck which fortuitously was the exact same name she come up with for her sauces, what with them being as hot as Hell and her name being Duck. Makes sense.

She was interested in acquiring the rights to use my illustration on the labels of her sauces but being a fledgeling enterprise had very little spare cash to throw my way in recompense. I agreed with her at the time that she could use the image for a while till she got started then we’d discuss it again.

Yesterday I got another email from her. The time has come where she wants to ‘go live’ with her products and we need again to discuss the purchase of the rights to the image. Now I’m in a bit of a pickle. I know what the going rate is for this kind of thing and I really don’t think she’d go for it. Especially with how weak the dollar is at the moment, if I ask for sensible money in pounds sterling it’s going to be megabucks on her side of the pond.

So do I sell myself short and let her have it for a pittance just to get my artwork seen? or do I hold out for proper money and risk losing the deal altogether? It’s a problem, and no mistake.

All of the posts here older than this one are from my older and now abandoned blog NobbyNobody’s Biromash Notes and have been imported here for the sake of completeness and somewhere to keep them.

Another four tiny teaser thumbnails of biro illustrations from the children’s book that I’m working on at the moment in between other routine biro-art stuff.
These are the illustrations for the pages dealing with the, (from left to right) Starfish, Squirrel, Whale and Ladybird.
There are still many, many more to do but so far I’m pleased with the way things are going. The design of the central character, the Frog has evolved a little as things have progressed so I may have to revisit or even completely re-draw some of the earlier pages at some point.
With a little digital jiggery-pokery it’s possible to just re-draw the bits that need updating then incorporate them into the original biro drawing so it shouldn’t be too much extra work. Still, it’s a learning process and hopefully when it’s done it will be something rather special. Here’s hoping.