
My work “Buffalo Hunt” appears on the cover of the new book by Rick Gilmore. You can check the book out here: Echoes thru the Thunder
Adventures in Art and Adventurous Art
My work “Buffalo Hunt” appears on the cover of the new book by Rick Gilmore. You can check the book out here: Echoes thru the Thunder
My work “The Long Journey Home” now appears on the cover of the book “Echoes thru the Wind” by Rick Gilmore. Check it out on Amazon!
This work is turning out to be the go-to image for Mammoth related news articles in science publications. You can check out it’s appearance in a Live Science article here: Woolly mammoths survived on mainland North America until 5,000 years ago, DNA reveals
My work, Dire wolf appears on the cover of Deep in the Wild: Dire Wolves, a novel by author Gerry Griffiths. You can check out the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Wild-Wolves-Gerry-Griffiths-ebook/dp/B09CZHD8CP/. The work is altered a bit for the cover, but if you want to see what the original looks like: https://daniel-eskridge.pixels.com/featured/dire-wolf-daniel-eskridge.html.
It’s always nice to spot one of my art works in my newsfeed. This one is in an article on Phys.org by the University of Cambridge. Check it out: https://phys.org/news/2021-10-humans-woolly-mammoths-extinctclimate.html
Also, the same image is being used in a similar article on EOS.org: https://eos.org/articles/mammoths-lost-their-steppe-habitat-to-climate-change?mkt_tok=OTg3LUlHVC01NzIAAAGA-uNkx9a4-H3pgLOr9CBdgse2spAgJ2ziob1qVeAHvtYUVztplHm8Gmuq73Y8w18sQKTETxsn927MVUBshsH9eEvIYWKT4lwSrHPOsQ
Rarible is a marketplace for digital collectibles. That means you can buy digital art there, but you are not just buying copy of the image. You are buying a certified version, that is the “original” (…or limited edition)
Wait? What? How do you do that with digital images? …Enter NFTs
They sound like some sort of medication for curing toe fungus. But, no, are not that. Rather, they are akin to crypto currency. You’ve probably heard of Bitcoin, the most famous of these. There’s another kind called Etherium. Etherium however is more than just currency, it’s also a record keeping system. In the case of NFTs, the Etherium network keeps track of who owns an NFT.
So, in effect, and NFT is a virtual Certificate of Authenticity (and ownership). So if you buy the NFT, then you own the digital image that is attached to it. It’s much like owning the original of a real world painting. You own it (but you don’t necessarily own the copyright).
To buy an NFT on Rarible is not quite as straight forward as providing your credit card number. You have to use Etherium to make a purchase. That requires installing a digital wallet like Metamask, and then funding that wallet using an exchange like Coinbase.
It’s analagous to exchanging U.S. dollers for Euros, then having a special purse you use when traveling in Europe to hold those Euros.
Anyway, it’s new and interesting. Right now, I only have one work there: Sorceress and Dragon. As it cost about $45 to list a work at the moment, I’m not going to be putting much there. You can find my profile on Rarible here: https://rarible.com/danieleskridge
In the June 2019 of Wild West Magazine, I’m the featured artist! They show several of my works, some with full page displays. What’s really cool is that I was able to actually find this on the newsstand at my local Barnes and Noble.
Apparently, there are quite a few subscribers who liked what they saw. I had quite a nice bump in print sales almost immediately.
There’s a short interview with me included as well, but here are a couple of the works that were featured.
I have my first museum piece! One of my artworks, Anhanguera appears in a traveling show for science museums about pteranodons. Here is a shot of me in front of it at the Fernbank Science Museum in Atlanta
Mailchimp and ConvertKit are both email list management websites. Such a site allows you to keep a list of subscriber’s emails, handle new subscriptions to those lists, send out emails, report on receipt of those emails, and much, much more.
For years, I used Mailchimp. Using that service, I kept a list of people who liked my art and had subscribed to my list. Weekly, I’d send out a newsletter featuring my latest art, discount codes, and free wall papers.
I was generally quite happy with them, but…unfortunately, I recently had some trouble with them. What should have been a small problem quickly turned into a huge headache.
There are tons of sites that will help you manage your email lists. However, Mailchimp really is the biggest and most well established. The user interface is flashy and easy to use…most of the time. Occasionally, it was difficult to find something, but for the most part it was great. Furthermore, their email editor is quite powerful, allowing you to create some really professional looking emails.
They have all of the major features that such a provider should have: Subscription Form editors, reporting, autoresponders, etc. but, most importantly, they have a free tier where you don’t have to pay a dime until you have over 2000 subscribers. That makes it great for getting your feet wet when it comes to email marketing.
They do have a few issues:
That last issue is what MAY have been what got me. They have an automated process called Omnivore that monitors their system for terms-of-service violations. At the time, I had a page on my website describing how print-on-demand sites work for selling art. (This was before I started offering my ebook on the subject). Perhaps that is what tripped Omnivore. I’m not really sure though. I sent off several requests to Mailchip’s support desk. After a month of no responses…I was forced to give up on them.
I had a few choices of where to go, but I decided to go with ConvertKit.com. It’s been getting a lot of buzz lately. Plus, it was easy to move my existing list over from MailChimp.
Its chief feature is the ability to segment your audience. Instead of having to maintain multiple lists, I can just have one list of subscribers with certain ones being tagged. This appeals to me for several reasons.
For one, I really produce several different genres of art. I have western art, wildlife, fantasy and so on. With Mailchimp I was sending out every genre to everyone on my list. The problem is that Western art fans don’t generally want to see pictures of dragons. Now, I can tag the western art fans and the fantasy art fans and send them separate series of art.
Also, I have a lot of content about making and marketing and selling art. Such content really only appeals to other artists, and, while quite a few of my subscribers are indeed artists, many are just patrons. With ConvertKit, I can have the artists use a different subscription form and get just my artist content, while my patrons still only see my art.
ConvertKit is definitely more oriented around automation. Setting them up is way easier than it was with Mailchimp. Yet, I can still send out my newsletter on an ad hoc basis.
I do have a few gripes about ConvertKit, though.
For one, it’s a bit expensive to start at thirty bucks a month for the first thousand subscribers, then sixty a month until you hit 3000.
Also, I’m a bit underwhelmed with their email editor. It’s easy to use, but the emails are nowhere near as flashy as Mailchimp’s.
But, otherwise, so far, I’m happy and looking forward to creating genre themed email series for my fans. If you want to give it a try, check it out at ConvertKit.com.
Yours in Art,
Daniel
P.S. Now that I’ve talked about it, do you want to get on my new email list? If yes, then click here: subscribe
Check out my newest artwork…Dinosaur Moon!
Somewhere on a moon orbiting a world far from earth, dinosaurs live again. Long necked sauropods roam through orange fields edged by strnge purple trees. Ornithopods too run through the long alien grasses. In the skies a pterosaur glides over strange rock structures that jut up from the ground, and, in the sky, the horizon is dominated by the ringed planet around which this sci-fi nature preserve circles.
So, I haven’t played video games much in the past twenty years, but, as a software engineer and IT professional, I still get lots of articles about them in my news feeds. One that I’ve seen pop up a lot recently is science fiction game called “No Man’s Sky”. While I don’t know anything about how the game is played or its backstory, I was very impressed with it’s visuals: alien worlds with strange flora and fauna. So I was inspired by those visuals to create this scfi-fi/paleoart mashup. The dinosaurs, by the way, are giraffatitan and altirhinus. The pterosaur is an anhanguera.
If you’d like to know more about the technique I used to make this, here is a link to an overview: http://fineartbydaniel.com/2017/12/18/how-i-make-art-3d-rendering/
To see about some of the software tools I use, here is a link to my resources list: http://fineartbydaniel.com/resources/
Thanks for looking!
Daniel Eskridge