Re-posting: New year, new site, new blog!

Original post from my blog: http://isissousa2d.blogspot.no

Wow, it’s been a while since I wrote a post here! I took a long break, since mid-December last year, due to a long holiday trip and an extra busy beginning of year. 2013, here I go!

So far this year I have done 6 Black & White illustrations for Grace Draven’s upcoming book, a retelling of the classical “Beauty and the Beast” and have 6 more to go. Have done a couple of interviews, very cool ones for IT’SART (click here and read it) and CG ARENA (coming soon, but you’ll find it here). I’ve done also a tutorial/making of for CG ARENA e-mag, based on a work called “The Green Man, which I developed for this tutorial.



Have done a very different work, in a cute/caticature-like style for Mad Artist Publishing’s BOND book. Cool huh? And have also done a Bettie Page commission for Falcata Times, in a more cartoony style (soon you wull see it there too!). Noooo, I am not abandoning Fantasy, I am just pushing my boundaries, so that’s why I did these last two mentioned works ;)

On top of that, have been organizing and recruiting artists for a series of video workshops: IT’S ART FANTASY WORKSHOP – taking place during the year of 2013, with 13 themes into Fantasy Art! More info about it coming soon!

Now, let’s take the subject of this post. I am always thinking of ways to improve and have a website/portfolio which works for me. I have tried several layouts before, after a while I switched to Blogger: I have started a blog and set it to be my portfolio. So when people entered www.isissousadesigner.com (before) they in fact were seeing my BLOGGER site. I thought it was very handy, I found a layout I customized and seemed to be right for me. I kept it for a year or so.

Since I started a website, back in 2010, I’ve been DAILY checking and monitoring my visitors. I learned very much with this habit, such as which images people like more when they visit my site, which page they are more interested in, where do they come from, where did they find the link for my site, etc. These are all important data to help you take your site/portfolio in the right direction.

In the beginning of 2012, I published a work on this Blogger portfolio called “A FantasyPortrait of Sir Isaac Newton”. The piece called a lot of attention, both in my site and my other online galleries. Somehow, after a while, I was receiving a huge traffic of visitors coming from Google Search, all of them looking for “Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton, Newton, etc.” At first I thought it was cool, because I thought some of these visitors looking for images of this great scientist would also be interested in my work and eventually that my commissions could grow.

The Google Search traffic increased very much within the months, at a point that it started to “suck”! It wasn’t cool anymore! I found out NONE of those visitors searching for Isaac Newton had given me a single commission, feedback or anything back. More than that: they were in the way of me seeing the good, healthy traffic on my stats service. So I took a decision: to take the blog down and make a new website for my portfolio, more industry oriented. I’m still working on it, but I see the changes are for the better.

Talking about changes… I’ve been also thinking about better content for this blog, since its start. “Why not share some of my mistakes, hints and growth as artist” I asked myself lately… So since TODAY this blog is called “Artist in progress” and I hope to make substantial articles about my difficulties, my ups and downs, visions and improvement as artist. I think sharing this experience as well as adding other interesting content such as great news and interviews may help aspirants and also may be interesting for those who have been long down the road!

Stay inspired!