AMBITION: 25 YEARS OF BEING THAT GUY

Image | | sandpaperdaisy

As a part-time freelance artist, I’ve raised money for day trips and dates, medical help for family members and friends, art supplies, booth rentals, and presents. I even managed to raise some money for charity. I’ve had a pretty good run! I’ve been able to do many things I could not have otherwise done.

It is with these things in mind that I will now proceed to destroy my artistic reputation forever.

Lol destroy your what?

I’ve been a jerk more times than I can count, although I will attempt to count them for this article. But one common thread has united virtually all of my artistic knavery.

I speak of AMBITION.

Almost every (art related) act I’m ashamed of stemmed from my artistic ambitions. It’s not pretty! But if you’ve seen my gallery, you already know that “pretty” is not the goal here, so let’s get started.

Continue reading →

Inexpensive Tarot Art Commissions in time for Christmas!

A piece of original art of the tarot card The Moon depicting a woman's face floating over spider lilies in a line heavy style with neon colors
Image | | sandpaperdaisy
I’d like to help a friend with some medical bills and I feel like tarot card art might be a nice Christmas gift for someone out there. If you’d like one, they’re $10 in the style you see below. Your art file will NOT be watermarked but I will happily share a small watermarked version online with your links in the description.
https://paypal.me/sandpaperdaisyEmail reference pics to: sandpaperdaisy@gmail.com

A piece of original art of the tarot card The Moon depicting a woman's face floating over spider lilies in a line heavy style with neon colors

The word is Zain: Arthur Machen’s The Terror

A many armed angel of death descends from the moon in a cloud of scarlet moths.
Image | | sandpaperdaisy

I stayed up entirely too late last night making this. The funny thing was, I didn’t plan to make it beforehand at all. Not even earlier that day.

…I just up and made it. (While watching Pink Floyd’s The Wall.)

But, I think I can point to the reason I felt so compelled to create this piece in particular. I had an incredibly stressful weekend, coupled with an ever-sharpening sense of my own mortality. Locally, covid-19 cases and deaths continue to break daily and monthly records and yesterday was no exception. People got sick yesterday, plans were cancelled…and then I surprised myself by making a painting based upon Arthur Machen’s story of a deadly force of nature killing a family isolated in their house.

Continue reading →

Are You Ready to Build a Fanbase? Yeah, Me Too.

A terrified girl sprawled on the snow looking up at a menacing shadow covering her.
Image | | sandpaperdaisy

Let me start out by saying WE ARE IN AN EXPERIMENT TOGETHER.

I’m a prolific and modestly successful obscure artist. At the time of this writing, 251 people have a passing awareness of me on Twitter, 252 on Facebook, and 5 on Patreon. I think most of them overlap, so let’s call that 252 fans total. Weed out the bots and people who have abandoned the platforms and let’s call it 200.

I have been active as an artist online since 1995. This should tell you that I am not an authority on building a fanbase. You’re not here to listen to my expert advice, you’re here to observe me succeed or fail, and try some of the same things if you’re interested.

What could go wrong?

Ready to start experimenting? Let’s go!

Continue reading →

All June Sales Will Be Donated to BlackLivesMatter

A black hole surrounded by flaming petals against a space backdrop. Detail of the digital painting SUNflower by Heather Landry
Image | | sandpaperdaisy

Hey guys! I’ll be donating any art revenue I make in June to help out with #BlackLivesMatter. I’ll be making my decision(s) closer to when I have a more sizable donation pool, but I welcome any input on good organizations to throw money at!

Currently, I’ve gathered money from my patreon, society6 and a recent freelance job, and I’ll also be donating the sales of these two pieces at the Arts Council of Southwestern Indiana‘s upcoming Unsheltered show (assuming they make it in).

And if I make any other print on demand sales, any of you guys email me for a print, or I do any more freelance work in the month of June, that money will be donated as well. I may or may not do commissions to reward people for making donations of their own, but that’s more “iffy” since I’ve been having some humorously strong headaches recently.

Either way, feel free to drop any links of deserving organizations in the comments below! And I hope you all have a very safe month of June, filled with love and unity.

Plague Doctors and Other Strangers

An excerpt from the comic The Ocean by Heather Landry, a comic about the black plague of 1348, depicting a plague doctor and the imploring necrotic hand of a plague victim.
Image | | sandpaperdaisy

The medieval plague doctor, with his waxed robes and beaked mask, has always been an important part of my internal horror landscape. So much so that when our own real-life pandemic hit, a plague doctor sticker giveaway was the first thing I thought of in order to try to cheer a few people (and myself) up in the early weeks of the tragedy. I’m happy to report that it did just that! I sent out lots of letters and everyone who requested them was delighted to get a little “extra” with their stickers: a little sketch of a plague doctor (often with a big heart on his robe or doing something silly like pushing a shopping cart) telling them to “Stay Safe!”

Now that the giveaway is over, I thought it might be nice to commemorate the event with some more glimpses of plague doctor madness. Continue reading →

The Cradle of the Worm novel free beta release on HorrorFam

A towering giant consisting of a man and woman fused back to back like the original conception of Ha-Adam, humankind. Set against a glowing forest hanging inverted from an enormous swollen moon. An illustration for the cover of The Cradle of the Worm, a fantasy horror novel by the artist of the piece, Heather Landry
Image | | sandpaperdaisy

This past Monday I finally finished my first horror fantasy novel, The Cradle of the Worm, and released the beta version on HorrorFam.com on their Freebies page.

The entire text of the novel, as well as the first audio chapter, are all available there. My friends and I will continue to release free audio chapters of the text on podbean and youtube. Here are some scenes from the novel if you’d like a quick glimpse of what you’ll be getting. Continue reading →

October 2019 Sketch Challenge: The Magnus Archives

Image | | sandpaperdaisy

Every October I like to do some sort of drawing challenge. 2013 and 2014 were digital art challenges. 2015 through 2019 have been ink challenges. Often I like to have a theme, as in 2018 when I did all SCP Foundation related drawings. This year I did a Magnus Archives drawing challenge!

I didn’t get 31 drawings done, I the only years I managed to do so were 2013, 2014 and 2018. But I still had a lot of fun doing it. Here are the drawings I got done, captioned with the (awesome!!) Magnus Archives episodes they are based on. Continue reading →

SCP Horror Ink Drawings

| sandpaperdaisy

I spent the month of October 2018 (or #inktober2018 if you will) doing a series of ink drawings based on stories contained on the SCP website. If you haven’t come across them yet, they’re a treasure-trove of cooperatively created weird fiction and horror. I may do another SCP series one day: the stories are always being added to.

Below is the entire series. The first one is a kelpie or river horse, another favorite creature/monster of mine but not drawn from a specific SCP story. Continue reading →