My professional portfolio on deviantART - stay or go?

The last few years if you've looked at glendonmellow.com , it's whisked you away to the URL otherwise known as daportfolio.com/179939 - I have been using the popular art site deviantART for my professional art portfolio hosting. I'm considering a change and would love some opinions. Below I have my pros and cons.

Before I say much more (an oh, I'm gonna), there is a big difference between a standard dA account page and their portfolio service. I'm not planning to leave dA entirely, just considering whether or not to stop paying for Premium and using their professional portfolios.

Here's the visuals:

Standard dA bio page. 

Portfolio bio page.

Standard dA gallery page.

Portfolio gallery page.

I pay about $30 a year for the Premium service (last year with some very welcome donations from fans for this new dad). The Premium Portfolio means:

• I can customize the URL, hence the very original glendonmellow.com.
• No ads from deviantART appear on my page.
• I can make new portfolios, add specific page URLS through my domain host (like published.glendonmellow.com ) 
• There's lots of image storage. 

Those are all decent features in the plus column.

Here's a couple of other things I like:

• Layout forces me to stay clean and simple for potential clients. 
• It really easy for me to change and add or drop artwork. 
• Limits on how much art per gallery forces me to keep it fresh for return clients.
• I occasionally add my entire resume to it as a pdf download - not there at the moment, but that's neat-o. 
• I love how it looks. 

But here are the features in the minus column that have me wondering if my $30/year would be better served somewhere else. 

• Not enough links. The text on the bio page is insanely limited and includes the HTML - so when something helpful to my business like say, Google+ crops up, I have to delete another important - actually important, not just for fun - link from the link list. They limit the text so that the whole portfolio has no scrolling. Yeah cool. But to link to my Scientific American gig and increasing Media list, I had to drop links to two other blogs I have contributed to. 
• I pay for no ads, but I get pranks. This past April Fools' Day, deviantART thought it would be funny to pretend they were taken over by cats and there was a pop-up that if you wanted, would lead you further into the joke. Or you could disable it. Each time you went on dA on April 1st, it would pop back up. Kind of funny stuff, but I pay for no dA ads, and here's a silly joke I had no part in designing that any potential client was going to get stuck figuring out for a whole day. Pissed me right off. 
• No links in art descriptions. Click on the little letter "i" under the art, get some neat info about the image. But no links to further information, and it's reduced to about two short sentences. I do science-based art. It sometimes needs a bit more explanation about the client, project, subject and materials. You know. The professional details. 
• No statistics. This is the worst. The HTML I am allowed to use is on the bio page only, and is very very basic. No third party html widgets or gadgets to track stats using SiteMeter or Statcounter or even Google Analytics. When the portfolio service first launched I assumed this was coming at some point (dA offers crazy amounts of stats for their basic accounts). That was 2.5 years ago. Last year, when Annalee Newitz of the popular geek site io9.com featured Trilobite Boy and some of art in a fun article, they appropriately linked back to glendonmellow.com . And though I can see on the io9 article that it had over 14000 views (most just in those first few days) I have absolutely no idea how many went through to my own portfolio.

So. Do I stay or go?  If I go, does anyone have any good suggestions?  


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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite © to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Portfolio
Blog
Print Shop


Find me on Symbiartic, the art+science blog on the Scientific American Blog Network!

Trilobite Boy revisited

Another Instagram tweak for fun.  This one might make a nice print for the shop.  Can't wait until my schedule opens up a bit to work on new Trilobite Boy stuff.

Big plans!

One of the things I've been considering is changing his name from Trilobite Boy to something with a name: "Trilobite Elroy" or "Dave" or something.

So here's a handy poll!

If you have suggestions for an actual name or reasons to leave it as Trilobite Boy, please let me know in the comments! 

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.

Portfolio

Blog

Print Shop 

--> Find me on Symbiartic, the art+science blog on the new Scientific American Blog Network!

Messing with Trilobite Boy Rocks Out on Instagram

I like making messed about versions of some of my paintings. The variations are interesting.

Here's Trilobite Boy Rocks Out in Instagram.

Almost used this sketch

Recently, over on Symbiartic, I posted a piece ruminating about copyright and the utility of good scientific illustration, called Dinosaur Couture Should Be Open To All. I hesitated putting the post up, since although tangential, I thought some sort of illustration riffing on dinosaurs and high fashion would enhance the post. 

Squeezing in time to make any sort of artwork is next to impossible the past couple of weeks: our son is teething, not sleeping well and I'm very behind my self-imposed deadlines. So I spent some time and tried to work on the sketch above, thinking maybe a model with some sort of fossil couture outfit could be fun. The face is pretty flawed, I didn't use an actual model. Perhaps I was thinking of Eva, from America's Next Top Model season 3?

Ultimately not happy with it, I decided instead to attempt a breezy fashion design sketch, using watercolours in ArtRage. 

C'mon, the hipster pants and shoulder pads on the right not doin' it for ya?

I was scrambling to complete it before posting and heading out the door...in the end, I erased the two dinos on the sides, and went with the parasaurolophus in the spring dress. 

Ok. Not my best work. But I hope a splash of colour livened up the post. 

I feel hopeful about getting some sort of studio and blogging schedule back on track soon. We're going to try some new things with Calvin's sleep schedule to allow him to be more rested, and in turn, me more rested. I love being a stay at home dad and freelancer: it's a balancing act that's tipped a bit askew, that's all. 

I'll leave this post with a fanciful parasaurolophus I'm more proud of. 

Check out Dinosaur Couture Should Be Open To All on Symbiartic! 

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.

Portfolio

Blog

Print Shop 

Find me on Symbiartic, the art+science blog on the new Scientific American Blog Network!

Science-Art Communication Specialist - it's now a thing

Changed my LinkedIn profile to read "Science-Art Communication Specialist". I've decided that's now a thing.



Although painting and illustrating are my first choice in career and I'm busier than ever with commissions, when I consider my blog writing at Symbiartic on Scientific American, the growing number of talks, podcasts and interviews and my new volunteer Board Member position with Science Art-Nature this seems like a more apt description. I find myself doing a lot of networking for and with other artists engaged in science, and slowly starting to hear from scientists looking for artists. I've been seriously considering turning it into a consulting business. 


I've developed a standard email I send out to artists contacting me about their science-art and asking for advice since it's happening more and more often. (And I don't mind at all!

Keep 'em coming.)

Here's what it typically says.

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I've added your blog to the Science Artists Feed (It's in the 2nd list that feeds into the first one...the first one filled up fast).  So when you have a show or update the bloggy portion in any way, it will appear on the Feed to subscribers, and on scienceblogging.org which is a huge aggregator site many science bloggers turn to to follow the many science blogging networks. 


I don't know if it will help traffic or eyeballs in any way, but it also helps me to stay on top of people's work, which I irregularly compile interesting links from and put in posts I call Scumbles. They used to be on my personal blog The Flying Trilobite, and I've moved them to Symbiartic since Scientific American asked me on board. 


So far the biggest impact the Science Artists Feed and Scumble posts have had is drawing together the disparate scattered science-inspired artists into a tighter community.  I've shared a Circle on G+of them in the past and more are talking on Twitter. I just finished up at my 4th trip to ScienceOnline this year, in North Carolina. Usually I've been one of 2 or 3 science-artists or illustrators out of a few hundred researchers and science journalists.  This year, there were about a dozen of us in attendance which had an impact. If you're on Twitter, an easy way into the community there is to use the #scienceart hashtag. 

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(For the interactive version of the image above, head over to Symbiartic and explore the image!) 

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Portfolio
Blog
Print Shop 

Find me on Symbiartic, the art+science blog on the new Scientific American Blog Network!

Inky Bidness

Coupla tattoo things. 

Fascinating personal post by paleo-author Brian Switek of Laelaps over at his other gig, Dinosaur Tracking, where he talks some more about the tattoo I designed for him not long ago. And hints at a second design possibly in the works. (I'm trying to see if it's possible to make a theropod's jaw open and close on Brian's flexing bicep.)

Check out his Allosaurus Ink, Brian has more recent, healed photos.  

Another tattoo I designed, the caffeine molecule for my SciAm peep Scicurious has long been one of my most popular all-time posts for getting traffic. Bound to happen then, that another internet denizen, Ryan S on Reddit has gotten a similar tattoo based on the design Sci and I came up with. 

Here it is on Scicurious:

I've also made a portfolio gallery of my science tattoo designs if you'd like to see more.


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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.
Portfolio
Blog
Print Shop

Find me on Symbiartic, the art+science blog on the new Scientific American Blog Network!