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Today I have the pleasure to introduce you to a lovely, brilliant artist called Drea, who has agreed to give us some insight into how she comes up with the incredible artwork that I’ll be showing on this site. Please be sure and return tomorrow for Part Two.
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Andrea Fuenzalida (Drea) is an international, multi cultural artist. Born in Perth Australia to wonderful Chilean family, lived on Groote Eyelandt aboriginal lands in Northern Territory of Australia, Port Hardy B.C Canada, Santiago Chile and now resides in the multi cultural community of San Francisco California USA.
Drea has been consciously putting her effort into art all her life and heavily influenced by both tribal and modern culture. With a BFA in Computer Animation she has a multitude of both digital and traditional skills under her belt. After graduation, she chose a path to conceptually develop her fine art into her own distinct styles and extremely powerful, marketable visual ideas. She has also been freelancing her various skills (mostly to independent businesses) in computer graphics and traditional art, to everything from logos, T-shirts, Posters, CD covers, brochures, web graphics… Giant puppets for theatre and even a 5 x 5 ft mosaic which has withstood a 9.0 earthquake. Since March 2011 she has been self employed full-time with her own art creation sales as well as custom illustration mostly for private commissions.
Now 2012, she has completed her first book cover illustration for her good friend Janice McLean’s yet to be released, “The Becoming” and has decided (thanks to Mimi Barbour) to open her schedule for other authors in different genres to commission her to do original illustrations and designs for your book covers and interior illustrations.
Tired of seeing your generic book covers with procedural formula design work that cost a fortune?
Now is your chance to get something at a reasonable market rate that not only blatantly stands out from the crowd and is valued as a collectable piece of art which you will own the rights to.
Drea would also like to use to opportunity to explain how her custom illustration commission process works and it’s good information to know as general advice for hiring and have a good working relationship with professional illustrators and graphic designers:
In researching book cover designs, I noticed lately a lot of book covers in the market are currently taking advantage of photo editing and digital collaging for their cover designs. Being that I have used photoshop every day, sometimes for several hours, since 1999 and have excellent photo editing and manipulation skills and on the conditions that you provide all the photographs at a high quality resolution for printing, I can definitely do this technique for you.
(Low quality photographs cause pixilation to occur all over the image and looks awful (unless for some very good reason such as the story line we want the ugly looking pixels there. From a professional view point I only recommend this if you are willing to pay for all the photographers, models and locations rights fees – or pay for the photos, because I must warn you that you might face a lawsuit in the future and nobody wants that.
Unless you insist and have a proposition we both agree on I really don’t legally really need to sign a contract with you. The conditions are very simple, if the work is not fully paid for the image belongs to me, if it is fully paid for it belongs to the client and this will also be explained with your price quote. That said I highly appreciate good client’s business, have a high level of integrity and (as I’m sure you all relate) take a lot of care and pride in the work I do. If I use it to promote myself or in my portfolio the rights to the author/client will be fully credited. Be aware, many people in my on-and-offline social networks world wide have a lot of increasing interest in everything I do so if other people want copies of the art unless we come up with another agreement I will direct them to your shop links to buy copies of your book and boost your sales 🙂 I embrace the community spirit and my dreams is to see all us independent artists and businesses in the world rise up and be successful together.
***For the next few days I will have excerpts from Andrea about her work . And drawings that will show us the actual steps she took to make the wonderful cover above. So please check back tomorrow.
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The cover art hits me in the heart. It's absolutely beautiful. Thanks so much Mimi for letting us know about this amazing artist.
Best Wishes
Jo-Ann