Wednesday, May 14, 2014

LINE Stamps



I had my cohort of owls…or whatever a group of owls is called…was called to active duty after a few years sleeping in the barn rafters. A business school friend contacted me about an opportunity for freelance illustrators to submit “stamps” for an instant messaging app that’s popular in Asia. To be more specific, they have over 480 million active users. At 10% of $1 a set of 40 stamps, multiplied by some unknown fraction of the active user population…all my brain was doing was saying mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money.

Not really. I realize the likelihood of making any actual money in a marketplace that was sure to be flooded with worthy competitors was next to impossible. But a girl can dream. And since I already had the majority of the drawings necessary for a set of 40 already done, all that remained to do was draw a few extra owls like basic emoticons, and then color them all in. Easier said than done. It ended up taking me about a month to color them all in and reformat them according to the LINE specifications. It’s all in Japanese, so my B-school friend has to be my liaison. We agreed for all his translating and submitting work, he could make 10% of my 50%. We'll see how it goes!