I've just realized, there's a point in time in an art career where you become an a-hole in order to expand your vision for where you want to go with your art, and you just have to accept it.
It really gets my goat when I have my mom call me saying:
"Oh, so and so asked if you would be selling prints of that illustration you made of that building. The one from a few years ago? And you know that other person, well her mother called her asking if you were going to sell postcards this year."
That's when I lost my shizz. All over my poor mom.
"Ma, listen, I love that people are supporting me and all and that they want reproductions but I don't have the time to sit at my computer for a week printing ink jet images of an illustration I made 4 years ago that just won't effing die because it is the most commercial thing I've made. And I certainly don't have the funds to pay for a bulk order of postcards of recent work which probably won't even sell because all people want are a picture of a freakin' house. If you want random floating girls heads with hands, or an overtly optimistic hairy ghost, or a dog with a mohawk, or hand lettered Kerouac quotes or a girl drowning in water grasping a red rope for survival, then have them call me. But if that's not what they're looking for, tell 'em go buy a Kinkade."
I mean, she cut me off in the middle of my first sentence with "ALLRIGHT, I GET IT" but I'm certain my point was received.
I'm not trying to be Thomas Kinkade (and kudos to the man for filling the market where us too serious artists don't want to go) but I'm trying to make children's books here and it's my own fault for previously selling people crap.
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