Week 1 of the 12 Week Challenge

A recent bout of determination has inspired my to take part in the 12 week challenge over at the Zero 2 Illo blog.

The challenge for Week 1 is to answer the following question:

What do you want to illustrate?

So after numerous drafts and a whole week of consideration, this is my response:

That certainly seems like it should be an easy question but here I am almost a week later and I'm still trying to figure it out.

I work as a designer so I tend to use whatever illustration skills I have to offset that. I create my own stock art, t-shirt designs and mascots/characters. Sometimes I do manage to draw/paint an image 'just because' but not nearly as often as I should. As it stands currently, I tend to use illustration as a design tool more than anything else.

Since I already illustrate in a variety of ways, it's rather hard to narrow it down to just one. I'm also not entirely certain that I should. As a designer I've found that versatility often comes in handy and I think I'd like to keep my illustration on the same track as my design work. To that end, I'd like to see myself following through with several different types of illustration with the ultimate goal of marketing myself as a designer and illustrator.

That said, I think I'm going to group my interests into two categories: design illustration and fantasy illustration.

The design illustration I want to pursue will consist of the types of things I've already been doing:
- Mascots and Characters
- Stock Art/Embroidery Design
- Illustration for Apparel

Fantasy illustration is something that I would like to pursue primarily for myself. I haven't done very much of my own fantasy work, so I'm not expecting to make a living with it anytime soon. Still, of all the types of illustration work out there, the fantasy genre captures my attention the most.