Topic: Palacio Illustration Website

[evilrobot]

 Hey guys,
William Palacio here. I'm a new member and fellow artist looking for some feedback on my work. If you have the time it would be much appreciated if you would drop by my website and blog. My goal is to have a website up to standards so that I can break into the children's illustration market. Any and all comments are welcomed. Thanks so much for taking the time out your busy schedules to have a look at my work. You guys ROCK!

http://www.palacioillustration.com/
http://palacioillustration.wordpress.com/
http://www.facebook.com/PalacioIllustration?ref=hl

[Whizbee]

I visited your website! I know nothing about illustration, but I wanted to tell you that I loved your monsters. They put me in mind of books I read as a kid. Really fun. Keep at it!

[evilrobot]

Thank you very much Whizbee the monsters are very fun characters to work with and I have a love for working in black and white. Thanks so much for the kind words!

[Tatumhart]

Hi William,

I *love* the kid daydreaming about the cat and the dragon.  I didn't start at the beginning.  I just picked a picture from the middle, so I didn't catch what you did at first, but when I got it, it cracked me up.  My real kid is always off in his own world, so I totally relate.

Best of luck!

[lynnalpert]

Nice work! I like the texture work!

[pjlyons]

Hello Evil,

Your work is excellent! Good characters, full range of values, interesting compositions. But as for your website, my initial response is: Your images feel too close together, a background would be nice, and the double menu, one at top, one at bottom, feels redundant. Keep going. You inspire me.

[evilrobot]

Thank you very much. I'm going to do a website repair real soon. Thanks for the feedback!

[evilrobot]

Well I just quit my day job today to concentrate on full time freelance illustration. I have two books going at once and hoping more work will come in to keep me busy and not starving. Anyway here's my scbwi portfolio page http://www.scbwi.org/Illustrators-Gallery.aspx?i=3014784133275684 and here's my twitter account https://twitter.com/myevilrobot also updated my website http://www.palacioillustration.com/ and my blog http://palacioillustration.wordpress.com/ any comments or crits are very welcome or if you need an illustrator or know someone who does please send them my way. Thanks guys!

[Tatumhart]

How great that you can do something you love full time! 

Your art is so vivid, and I'm glad that you have a couple of books to work on.

I am still not published in the kidlit world, but for about a year, I've been soaking in online portfolios and reading lots and lot of articles about what to include/exclude, so this advice is based on that.  Not on personal success or my own major publishing contract or anything.

Also, I looked at your website the day you wrote the most recent post, but I didn't have time to write anything that day.  I just looked again, and some of the things I noticed are already better.

Could you add a few more girls?  Maybe try to add kids of other races?  I've read that publishers look for that.

The kid getting eaten by a monster coming out of a book probably makes sense in context, but it would make my kids scared of books.  Could the monster break out of a TV or video game console instead?

I love the mummy snowboarding.  I like all the monsters on vacation, actually.  Could you add a beginning and end to make it into a story?  Like, the three of them packing or at a travel agency?  And at the end they could all come home to a porch full of mail and newspapers because none of them thought to ask the neighbors to check the mail.

[evilrobot]

Thanks so much Tatumhart for taking the time to look at my website and the effort to write a reply. You really hit the nail on the head with the ethnic flavor missing from my portfolio. I'm planning a few promotional pieces with more women and children and adding in more races as well. Good eye.

The kid getting eaten I made for an entry to the SCBWI bulletin illustration contest. It was in the context of "getting into your work or being drawn into your work" I guess it is a little scary for children. I'm thinking more and more that my art will be more for a young adult market. It has a little cute but also a little bit of an edge. (That's what I'm going for anyway)

The monsters are actually a book I'm working on and will be self publishing this year. It's called "One Monster Vacation" it's about a group of monsters that run a haunted hotel. They've worked so much and so long that they decide to take a vacation together. But each place they go, they end up getting into some kind of trouble. In the end they come home to the haunted hotel and find that even though things went bad they all still enjoyed it because they were together. I like all the mail being piled up. That would be a funny gag.

Again thanks for your time!