Of How Juana Celebrated Fans

Many personal traits may question my mental sanity. If numbers are involved, then the answer becomes clear to people: Juana is nuts! I can say to my defense: I’m not crazy, I’m precise. And the hubs can attest to that.

So 2 weeks ago I jumped on the bandwagon, followed the trends and opened a FB Fan Page. I know what you are thinking and I can assure you that these two paragraphs will connect. Bear with me. Opening the FB Page was not an egotistical move. It was all about networking. I can confess the sole thought of creating the page sent cold chills down my spine. 14 hours of chills later I clicked on “Make Page Public” and I had Juana Martinez-Neal – Illustrator Facebook Fan Page.

I stepped up to the plate and sent my invitations, emailed my suggestions, twitted my tweets, and status updated my LinkedIn to let people know that I had a FB Page. It was official and I preferred facing the embarrassment of self-promotion through all my networking avenues than to have my FB Page with 3 fans – one of which was the hubs.

Seeing the number go up was exciting. It really was. Again, we are talking numbers here. Did you see the pattern? In my excitement, I set a goal… 150. Why 150? I dunno but it did sound precise enough to my standards. 150 it was. When we (me and my work) hit 150 FB Fans we were going to celebrate. So here I am to officially announce you that it happened yesterday!

— This illustration is to celebrate YOU, all of YOU who support and cheer me on and my work. To all of my 150 and all of YOU reading me now: Thank you, Danke, Gracias, Obrigado, Toda raba, Terima Kasih, Xie_Xie, Nandri, Gràcies and in all of the other languages that you can imagine. It means the world. —

A little inside on how this piece happened below and the commercial break at the very end with a FB “Become a Fan” link. If I’ve got this far, I may just bluntly ask for more fans.

Let me know what you think of this article, of the new site, of me actually *writing* a post. Your comments feed my blog! And don’t forget to click on the images so you can see them closer.

THE PROCESS

I thought this piece may help me show my working and thought process. Hope you enjoy it! Remember to click on the images so you can see them bigger.

I normally start with a very general idea of what I want. In this case, I wanted a “150” so I started with the numbers and continued by adding characters. The more the merrier.

As I was working, I knew I wanted to have me in there so I drew myself in a different paper. More often than I’d like I run out of room.
*Hint: look 4 and 5 photos down and you’ll see how I had to masking tape my legs to the rest of my body*

Do you think everything is really planned ahead of time? Wrong! In the middle of my sketching my 4.5 year-old stomped in the room with a Lucha Libre hat on and his knight, silver fabric boots. He was in!

Well, it looked good in my head and placing paper after paper on top of each other but I really wanted a fox.

Here are all of the illustrations together. I kept adding pages as I felt I needed something else. I ended up with 7 sketched pieces of paper. And now what?

I scanned everything in Photoshop and saved all at 300dpi as psd files. You can see them here.

Once everything was scanned, I created a larger canvas for my file where I added a layer for each illustration or element as I saw fit. I rely a lot on masks and use the multiply type layer quite often when I work.

In Photoshop I played with sizes and moved elements around. But something was missing and I was feeling a disconnection in between the elements. So I did a print out in an 8.5″x11″ and sketched what I felt was needed.

Then sketched, scanned, saved as different files and added to my main psd file. And I was done!

And here a couple of girlies that didn’t make it in the illustration but still say thank YOU. They were actually the first 2 sketches that I got done.

COMMERCIAL BREAK

And if you are still with me, if you are not an official fan yet and if you don’t mind my bluntness, here’s the link to *My* FB Page.

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