Shipping is a problem out here in our remote mountain hideaway, even more so now that the government closed our post offices on Saturdays. I am sure we all appreciate the tax savings, but it’s a long drive to the city to mail those ebays.
And for those who wonder, no I am not selling art because I am about to starve or anything. Some artists sell their art, some don’t. I have expenses to cover, just like normal people. Alas, the sparkle fairy dust of the fantasy artist life does not make the tax man go away or pay the big Visa bill. Darn it all.
Speaking of which, more just went up on my auction page. I’ll be adding more over the next couple of weeks, then the art goes back off the market.Orbiter, A Distant Soil, Book of Lost Souls and a Sandman preliminary sketch for the 20th anniversary poster.
I love the Lost Souls page. Actor Craig Parker is a comics fan and asked to be a villain. Well, there he is in all his villainy. I love his face and I regret not making it to conventions this year so I can get more shots of him. He’s a terrific model. The last time I took shots of Craig I was still using film, so my entire catalogue of Craig is a mess in boxes.
So Lord of the Rings fans, instead have a nifty reference shot of Jed Brophy, one of the best models ever. I’m using him a lot in Gone to Amerikay.
More remote mountain weirdness: we are having daily satellite brownouts which last for hours. The uplink queue is compromised. I can get to direct links quickly. This is odd, because I can’t search Google or any other engine. I can get to my mail via an external web page, but not with my Apple Mail. The external mail link is a little slow and sometimes fails, but I can low res scans to clients.
I’ve read that internet service providers are expected to experience overloads in 2010, but I’d say we’re already there. I do not exceed my bandwidth limit. My stats show a greenlight, even during the brownout. Only by going into the detailed problem statistics can I see the problem.
I wonder if these brownouts are affecting rural customers first. Uploading one image to ebay can take more than an hour when it should only take about 30 seconds.
At this point it’s not hurting my work much, but it’s a little annoying. I make it a point to upload images at night when there is no uplink problem.
Since switching our website host, we’ve had few problems with A Distant Soil.com. High traffic this week did not shut down the site even once. Thanks to Diana McQueen for her excellent service! If you are looking to design a site or to hire blog maintenance aid, DC is your girl!
Work is going wonderfully well, so I think I will ride this wave and draw lots more while the drawing buzz is buzzing.
