Saving the art
When I started out in my artistic career, I decided to keep a record of as much of my illustration work as I could. In this way I could chart my progress as an artist over the years. Back in the last century, this was not an entirely easy thing to do. The one sure way was photography. In this modern day and age everything is digital and you can grab a quick photo with your phone and instantly send it all over the world in moments. Back in the artistic dark ages, it was not quite so simple. Fortunately I had learned quite a bit about photography and was fairly adapt at setting up my art, lighting it and getting some pretty good color slides of almost everything I painted. Many years later when the digital age started I paid a good friend of mine to convert the bulk of my slides into digital format and copy them onto CDs. Now they reside happily in backed-up files on my desktop computer, a fascinating compendium of over 40 years of work.
I didn’t quite have the illustration career that I had hoped for, but I did extremely well as a graphic artist. And now that I have slowed down in formal work, I have a little more time for more unusual jobs. A year and a half ago I volunteered for a position providing marketing, art and promotional work for a major science fiction convention to be held locally. My art library has been a wonderful source for much of the visual art that I have been using for that work. And having my son Rob, who has also gone into graphic arts, has helped out quite a bit with more modern visuals and logos. The amount of art that goes into any promotional campaign, and the necessary publication materials, is pretty large and my art library has been there to supply it. Especially when the campaign keeps growing and changing more then I anticipated. I offer the half-dozen covers for the progress reports that have been used so far, as an example below. We still have 3 more months to go, and many more things to do. But with 40 years or so of old art laying around, I think I am in pretty good shape to complete the task.
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