Visit this blog for the first post of a series featuring A Journey Round My Skull‘s recently-acquired collection of Soviet children’s books from the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

I believe searching (and viewing) as many examples of other artists’ work as possible is a great way to improve your own work.

While my own work is focused on children’s art right now, I don’t limit my viewing to the genre. I visit fantasy artists’ sites as well as studying my favorite grand masters. I am often guilty of buying “just one more” art reference book far too often.

This week, because childrensillustrators.com is, sadly, still off-line because of a malicious attack, I went out into the wilds of the World Wide Web in search of contemporary picture book artists.

I consider myself a pretty patient person and often I am willing to wait for a page to load when it’s taking a longer than average amount of time. But, I’ve got to tell you some of the sites I tried to visit were too hard to see.

Fellow illustrators, please, if you want art directors or other possible clients to view your work and hire you, make your site easy to view. If you aren’t technically inclined ask a friend or aquaintence who is to help you minimize the load time of your images. When you load your site and open it to viewing by the public, check and see if it takes too long to load. Ask people you know to go to the site and tell you honestly what they think about it. Ask them if they could see the art. Ask them if it took a long time to load. If an art director or potential client has to wait too long for an image to load or can’t figure out how to view your images, they will go on to the next illustrator’s site and forget about you.

I’d like to say this was only in isolated instances, but it was every third or fourth site. That’s a lot of artists who are minimizing their chances for paying work.