Need to figure out the best way to consolidate all of my various blog/comic/social sites. So much of the stuff that I do day-to-day is process stuff, not often comics, rarely finished, but I still want to be able to share it someplace. My portfolio site wasn't the optimal place for that until I reconfigured it to be more of a sketch-blog (still light on the 'sketch' part). I can't put a lot of this stuff up on the Ellie Connelly site, because that should stay focused on Ellie. And that's tough, because while that project is getting like 80% of my traffic on any given day, I'm only working on it like 1 or 2 days a month at the moment. I don't want to start a whole 'nother blog for other projects - games, puzzles, concept stuff, shirts & merchandise ideas, writing - but I don't think either of my current sites are really conducive to presenting that kind of stuff.

I think the real problem, when I come down to it, is that so much of what I'm working on (and trying to work on) has nothing to do with any of the projects I've already got started. For example, I'm writing a couple minicomics as an exercise to stretch some long-forgotten art muscles. The style is going to be fast, black-and-white texture work, similar to my Hansel and Gretel art, or the Li'l Minotaur mini I made a couple years ago. Quick, fun little comics. Also, I'm writing a pitch for a superhero miniseries based on a minicomic I was working on in high school. Not something I'd be drawing, I'm hoping to find an artist who can do it justice, and free me up to work on other things as well. I'm also looking at other revenue stream ideas and to that end I've been working on cleaning up a couple of old board games I designed years ago, one of which still hasn't been playtested, and I'm hoping to release them as print-and-play games, just like the Dol-Dai set that's currently in my store. See, none of these things really have anything to do with Ellie so it doesn't make sense to talk about them there, and none of them are completed yet, so they don't really belong in my portfolio either.

On top of all of that is the desire to have something good going up on my Google+ page fairly regularly, but I don't want to just be republishing stuff from my other sites. Or I don't know, maybe that's what I should be doing. Does it make sense that, if someone wants to find out what I'm up to, they should have to know to check three different sites? I'd rather they be able to just check the one main site, which, I suppose, should be this one. I suppose it would work fine to start talking more about works-in-progress here on this blog, posting finished art into the portfolio areas, and keeping all of my Ellie progress over on that site, with updates mirrored here.

I know, for most of you this is hardly earth-shaking. Many folks I know have maintained multiple livejournal/facebook/blogspot/tumblrs for years now with no problem interlinking them and being awesome at it. I guess I just have a little trouble compartmentalizing my work like that.

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My personal financial situation isn't something about which I've spoken publicly, I was always taught that money is a private concern. Whenever I asked my parents if we were rich, their answer was always a particularly cryptic "we're comfortable" (which, come to find out many years later, means we were scraping the bone to keep going). I always had a kind of laissez-faire attitude about money, spending my allowance as quickly as it would come, borrowing against future allowances to get that Really Big Toy that I wanted. This way of thinking about money has followed me into adulthood, and to no good result.

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For as long as I've been working as a freelancer, I've had trouble keeping my portfolio updated, current, and organized. I find it hard to motivate myself to work on projects specifically aimed at putting them into the portfolio, and some of the work that I've done isn't represented there at all, because it doesn't really fall into either of the categories there.

So, my plan is to take a tip from the Jeff Fisher episode of Escape from Illustration Island, and turn my blog here at lunarbistro.com into more of a 'blog-folio'. I'll be posting work-in-progress, finished artwork (largely ancillary art for my webcomic, The Adventures of Ellie Connelly), sketches and studies for upcoming designs, and commission information for potential clients.

I will, however, need to pretty much scrap all of the current entries here at the blog. I'll try to be careful and find a way to move them all into a 'legacy' category, so nothing gets lost. And if the entry featured artwork or sketches, well, that'll just be moved into the appropriate category.

So, basically, look for some changes to take place here, and I'll try to make it as painless as possible!

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