What I've been doing for the past year and a half

Looking through this thing, it's pretty evident that I've had a depressing lack of blog-worthy work in my life since my 2008 Christmas card.  Well, with great relief, I can finally discuss the reason for that.

Two years ago, I was hired to do illustration work for startup ecard company unvelope.com. Since then, what I initially suspected might be a short freelance gig became an all-consuming project (or, as one might call it, an actual job). They put me through Flash training, and after taking some time to acquaint myself with working as a designer/animator as opposed to just an illustrator, I started making cards somewhere around March/April 2009. And I haven't stopped. If someone asked me after I got home from the Illustration Academy what I saw myself doing, this wouldn't have been my answer... but I'm glad it worked out this way.  Overall, it has been a really good experience, and I'm working with some truly wonderful people.

It's been a tremendous challenge in a lot of ways.  I think the hardest thing was I basically had to re-train my brain to work completely differently than I ever had before, and the hardest part of that was probably having to think in terms of movement and the flow of time in addition to composition. Also, I've been the only illustrator working for the company thus far, so I've had to bounce between lots of different styles, and get more comfortable working digitally.  While all that was frustrating at times, I found that I liked a lot of the new things I had to do, and I'm eager to try some different things in my personal work (if I ever have time to do any again).

I'm going to have to break this up, or it would be the longest post ever. I guess a good place to start would be the site design:

Anyway, please check it out! We're a very small team and we worked very hard to get it up and running. All the illustration is done by me, and I also had a hand in everything visual. Tell all your friends and relatives who like ecards. The site is still brand new (just launched this week), so if you run into any bugs or have any suggestions, please let us know!

Lots more to come.  Thanks for looking!