cadmium for dinner

I… don’t even know where to start. 

I’m in training for a management position for the Hollywood US Safety department and I’ve been going to weekly meetings. I’m learning everything about the products and paperwork so I can be in charge of an office. No, this has nothing to do with art but the pay is ridiculous. With this, not only could I live comfortably, but I’d have a good amount of money left over to support the art scene and my own career as an illustrator. It makes me nervous, but everyone there is really supportive and they really believe in me.

I updated the crap out of my portfolio, it’s looking pretty different than it did when I graduated… holy crap, I graduated a year ago. Wow. I’m getting involved with another design company called Iron Bird, designing a couple cake boxes for them. Doing 6 more spot illustrations for Ducts and still waiting on Baker to come through. Briefly spoke to them and they seemed very interested, but never got back to me. Ahh.. well… I’ll contact them again in a couple months when they plan to release their Fall series. Speaking of skate decks, I also got back to HDLM skateboards. I sent them a contract for some decks a while ago, but they were hit hard by hurricane Irene and it also fell through. But now we have more things in the works… mostly doodles of all sorts of animals for different decks. Let’s just see where it goes.

In a nutshell that’s what’s happening, mostly. 

I will be taking The Hive Gallery’s installation space in August for their body paint show, which will basically be a ton of naked painted chicks everywhere. 

In this past couple months, I think I grew up a lot. I’m a very fast worker and I have very high expectations and standards for myself and the people around me and was consistently let down. I learned that even though I can work quickly and make things happen over night, sometimes the rest of the world doesn’t want to cooperate. So I work non-stop and get everything done, and everyone else needs to catch up with me. I’m learning to take my time, take it easy, and take deep breaths, and believe me that’s the hardest part. I don’t like taking it easy, I like stressing, I like deadlines, I like taking on a sick, impossible, ridiculous workload. So it’s a slow and steady climb to my goals, not because I can’t do it overnight, but because the world can’t fucking handle me doing it overnight. 

tl;dr - Getting shit done, just taking a while longer than expected. In training for a new management position, which will be wonderful once I make it through the first few awful weeks of training. For this kind of a salary, no training will ever be easy. To my friends on the East Coast - I’m coming for you.