I’ve been working on rebranding and revitalizing my Liz Stevens illustration (LSi) site and promoting my business. This summer has been filled with ideas and efforts to that end. I wrote a business plan while working on my MA at SCAD, so I dusted that off & tweaked it. After showing it to the hubs (who ran a very successful backpacking equipment company back in the day) and getting a thumbs up on the biz plan, I got to work on the timeline I created for this year. I’ve heard it said that a goal is a just dream with a timeline. So… goal 1 was to upgrade the website.

I had so much fun creating the custom banners for each page – but let me tell you, I really struggled with this WordPress hosted site. I love the “block” format (now) but it took me a while to figure out how to get my pages to look like I wanted them to! The blogger default page really threw me, but I didn’t want to eliminate it because I understand how consistently posting relevant content is important to social media marketing. I just didn’t want the blog to be the home page! I finally worked that out – so proud ?.

So in an effort to upgrade my social media presence, I thought I’d bring back posting the #Inktober52 drawing prompt. If you aren’t familiar with #Inktober, it’s the creation of illustrator Jake Parker and you can find out more at inktober.com. In an effort to improve my own drawing skills, l started using Jake’s drawing prompts. Basically the idea is to use the word prompt to help you generate a daily (#inktober) or weekly (#inktober52) drawing, the ‘challenge’ being to work in ink rather than pencil sketching, AND to post your work to Jake’s Instagram feed or your own using the hashtags. Yikes! Looking at the work on there really makes you want to up your game!

That being said, here’s this week’s prompt from #Inktober52 – CROWD:

And the year’s prompt list thus far. Hard to believe we are almost halfway through 2022!

I will work on a fun drawing for #crowd but in the meantime, here’s what I’m currently working on. Instead of CROWD it should be CROWED ?? This is a work in progress coloring page for my coloring book (another goal in my biz plan)!

Let me know what you think! Xoxo Liz