A Wonderful Surprise

It was about half a year ago or more that my girlfriend Rebecca first told me that I should submit my art to ImagineFX. Which is a fantasy and Sci-Fi digital art magazine based in the United Kingdom. It has been a long time favorite of hers and she believed that my art would surely make it into their pages. I wasn't as enthused and was a little apprehensive because the magazine was mainly for digital art. Also I didn't really know where my art belonged. I knew it was fantasy, but not hard core fantasy. In a way it resembled realism, but no where in life would you see the colors or scenery that I created.

So for a long time I procrastinated, which seems to be the norm among many artists. I would always make the excuse that my images aren't good enough, I need to take better pictures or that my art isn't quite what they are looking for. Well, after a few months I finally stopped procrastinating and got around to learning how to best take pictures of traditional art.

After many tedious hours spent editing on photoshop and searching the internet for tips on photography. I finally came up with some files that I felt satisfied with. So I sat down to read the rules of submission for the Reader's FXPose in ImagineFX and sent my images as well as Bio information. It only took until the next day for me to receive a reply from them asking for better quality images. As you can imagine I was quite excited. I thought to myself that if they were going to reject my art then they wouldn't ask for better images. Then again, it also occurred to me that I probably just didn't send a large enough resolution picture. So I followed their instructions and made my images as large as I could and sent them through YouSendIt.com which is an online file sharing website which allows you to send files that are too large for e-mails. After that I never heard a word from them. I assumed they chose another artist and that my gut feeling towards their request for larger images was just wishful thinking on my part. Still I kept hope alive and continually kept a look out for future issues of ImagineFX in hopes of seeing my art inside.

A couple months passed by and I almost gave up hope when my e-mail notifier popped up while I was searching the internet. My notifier allows me to view the first few sentences of an email and what I saw right away was,"I discovered your work in a UK magazine..." That first line made my skin crawl. I thought what magazine? Was my work pirated and printed off as their own, because I've heard several horror stories of that happening to other artist. Then I remembered...UK...that sounded familiar. Could it be the magazine ImagineFX. Truly it had to be, stupid of me to think otherwise. How else could this person contact me if someone else was claiming my work as their own. So I replied to this kind gentleman who was so fond of my work and thanked him profusely as well as asked to which magazine was he referring to. To my amazement he replied that it was the June issue No.57 of ImagineFX. He even quoted some of my statements as well as offered to scan the page for me. You can understand the joy I felt having heard this news as well as finding a new fan of my work.

Now came the question, is it here in Canada as well.? By the way if you didn't know, for the past several months I have been attending school at Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Ontario, Canada. They have wonderful programs for those interested in learning more in the fields of art like animation and illustration. Anyway, back to my question, was it in stores in Canada? My search ended up in vain for later I found out that since the magazine was based in the UK it took an extra month for the US and Canada to receive theirs. So now began my agonizing wait and wait I did for it took longer than a month.

My torment ended this last week for I finally got my hands on a copy of issue 57. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the colors printed well, better than my own attempts. I did notice that the images seemed off so I compared them to the originals and found that they were slightly cropped. Which is understandable because they have design and layout issues to deal with in making a magazine. With that minor change I am quite happy with how it turned out. I have my images in an international magazine which will be viewed by thousands of people who will then hopefully go to my website where they can view my work in its entirety. So if you have the time please check out this magazine or my site. Hopefully this is the first sign of many blessings to come and one day I will be called an equal among the favorite artists that I admire.

Thank you for your time and GOD BLESS!!!