Young Gods featured in Daz3D's Gallery of the Month!

Yes, today's good news is that a picture of Impact fighting the security drones from Young Gods #1 was selected to feature in Daz 3D's Gallery of the Month for January 2006. Basically, that means a little bit of exposure for me, and a $25 voucher to spend on the site. I'm chuffed because those gallery of the moth images are all pretty amazing, and it's great to have my work be judged as equal to that.

I almost entitled this post "OK, what's with all the ads?" because I also want to explain...well...why there are all these ads all of a sudden.

Firstly, there are the Ads by Google. Basically, Blogger has recently added a facility for me to quickly and simply integrate ads generated by Google which will be generally relevant to this site. As you can see, they are just a single line of text ads and are as unobtrusive as ads can get. Why have them at all? Why does anyone put adverts up anywhere? To make some money. I'm not really expecting to make much, if anything, from these adverts, but I do put a lot of time and effort into maintaining this site (admittedly mostly for my own amusement) and it really wouldn't hurt to get a little something out of it.

Secondly, there are the new Daz3D ads. Basically, I've signed up to the new Daz3D affiliate program. That means that, yes, I will make some money if you click one of these ads and then buy something from Daz. However, making myself money is only a part of why those ads are there. If it wasn't for Daz3D there would be no Young Gods, and if there were no Young Gods then I would never have hooked up with the guys from Markosia, and if I hadn't have hooked up with the guys from Markosia then I wouldn't be inking again...and so on... Basically, I really want to support Daz3D because it's a fantastic resource and I would genuinely recommend them to anyone wanting to get into 3D artwork.

So, there you go, I didn't want to stick the ads up without commenting, and I certainly didn't want anyone to think that I'm in any way "selling out" by plastering ads everywhere. This is still a very young site and we've had relatively few hits, but the site's popularity is growing. I'm fascinated seeing where people are accessing the site from, and what keywords they've used when searching Google or MSN that have led them here. Quite a few people have ended up here because they're fans of Skander Keynes, who plays Edmund in The Chronicles of Narnia. I must admit to finding this a little odd, but hey. (And, of course, it's no coincidence that I've just mentioned him again, either). The really cool thing is that over the last few days I've started to see people coming to the site after specifically searching for my name or for the site itself, so things are starting to take off.

Oh, and lastly, I finally found out who the mystery Spanish person is. So...here's a big hello to Inaki Miranda! Inaki is the penciller on The Lexian Chronicles, published by ... of course ... Markosia! To bring things full circle - you'll be able to see both my3D art and Inaki's pencils in the forthcoming Lexian Chronicles tradepaperback, due out in March.