Urban-Muse is starting a new campaign / slogan this year where we intend to do six paid artist features throughout the year, as well as an art prize. We also have dreams of doing a web series, and more issues of Urban-Muse Magazine. We have lots of dreams and not enough funding to do it. You can help. Please consider supporting Urban-Muse.com on Patreon.
We need your support. Urban-Muse is struggling financially and needs help. Things are serious. Patreon.com/UrbanMuse
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Thank You so much for visiting Urban-Muse. If you like what you see here consider stopping by our patreon. You will get early looks at big features like this as well as Download links to all the issues of Urban-Muse Magazine. Support the Arts and support Urban-Muses’s goal to give artists more paid opportunities.
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By Supporting Urban-Muse on Patreon you will receive Download links to Issues 1-4 of Urban-Muse Magazine. You can Get a free Preview of Issue #2 in it’s entirety below If you like it please consider supporting us on Patreon. The project can not go forward without more support.
Download Issue #2 of Urban-Muse Magazine FREE here:
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https://www.urban-muse.com/media/patreon/FREE/Urban-Muse_Magazine_Issue_2_Low.pdf
300 DPI HIGH
https://www.urban-muse.com/media/patreon/FREE/Urban-Muse_Magazine_Issue_2_High.pdf
Urban-Muse Editorial #1 – June 2019
NOTE: Artist Yasar Vurdem was paid for being featured on this months cover. You can support him and his art here: https://www.artstation.com/vurdem and here https://www.behance.net/vurdem
Endgame to Kings Landing
Wow. The past few months have really been intense, the media machines have been churning out some really big mega properties these past few months that have had the effect of dominating artists imagination across the globe, over the past few months there has been an absolutely overwhelming amount of amazing art inspired by both Game of Thrones and Avengers/The Marvel Cinematic Universe both ending two massive story arcs.
The interesting thing about both of these things is both stories were at the forefront of SPOILERS scandals left and right. Many friendships were ruined, many pages unfollowed, it was a tense time to exist on the web. True story on the night of the Game of Thrones finale I had to to hide my phone for about 10 hours until I had the time to sit down and watch the finale so no one would spoil it for me. Even I wasn’t safe. As a result I wanted to ensure that the art shared on the feeds would reflect these two mega events happening and the art inspired from it, but at the same time I didn’t want to share anything that could be deemed “Spoilery” that could lessen someones enjoyment. This is something I take very serious. Another part of this battle against spoilers is the ongoing war with trolls. Whenever something major like this happens there are always trolls who like to come in the comments and post all the spoilers either with text, images, or gifs. Needless to say these people get banned. During the past few months I banned about 40 people for things like this whereas a more normal number would be something like 5.
Looking into the future we are already starting to see a lot of art come out for the upcoming Final Fantasy 7 remaster, and I expect the upcoming game Death Stranding will have a inspirational effect on many artists. This is something I want to explore further in the future, maybe a timeline and a future calendar that artists can refer to of the upcoming art trends before they happen. Could be fun, then we could make predictions and compare them to what actually happened in a future editorial. This is an ongoing process and will continue to evolve.
Going forward these editorials are going to be REALLY nerdy, and really fun. But this first one we have to address the housekeeping we are trying to do and how we are trying to restructure Urban-Muse going forward.
This time last year we released Urban-Muse Magazine #4 featuring the amazing Stanley Lau aka Artgerm on the cover. This was a big moment for me as Stanley is one of my art heroes. I was convinced this would easily be Urban-Muse Magazine’s biggest issue and finally the one that would catapult it into more widestream success. Sadly this was not the case. Issue #4 was easily the best, most technically advanced issue, also featuring the most famous artist we have ever featured in the history of Urban-Muse. Instead of the Patreons numbers growing encouraging me to keep doing what I was doing, the numbers actually went down. Talk about a punch to the gut. My big plans of starting a massive crowdfunding campaign to fund a print run for these issues started seeming like a far off dream and a fundamentally bad idea because there simply isn’t enough support for the project to warrant investing tens of thousands of dollars to make it a reality. I want to keep going with Urban-Muse Magazine. I want to continue with issue #5 but I cannot justify it unless I get the support required from the community. If the Urban-Muse Patreon reaches over $1,000 a month that will let me know the community is behind me and they want this project to continue.If that happens I will start work on Issue #5, I cannot announce the cover artist for issue #5 but I have spoken to Ilya Kuvshinov and he expressed his interest. Otherwise I will continue to just provide Issues 1, 3, and 4 as Patreon exclusives along with this ongoing feature and potentially some more. In order to promote Urban-Muse Magazine more, I have finally released Issue #2 free to the public as a free sample of what they can expect to find in issues 1, 3, and 4 and #5 if it ever comes to fruition.
Urban-Muse has a long history of hiring artists, commissioning work, and personally buying pieces of art. But we don’t really ever talk about it, it’s just a part of doing business, and it’s what we believe is right. We believe artists should be paid for their hard work. Not with promises of how much “exposure” it’s going to bring them and how they “can’t afford” to pay them. We believe in paying our artist with cash. So they can buy brushes, paint, new software, hell so they can afford to eat and pay their bills. Artists need money to live and they deserve to be paid.
Stanley Lau was commissioned for the cover of Urban-Muse Magazine #4 and was paid. Going forward it makes sense to commission new custom covers for the magazine. But I want to start looking for other avenues I can pay artists and re-invest back into the community. So I want one of the cornerstones of these upcoming editorial features to be selecting artists for each cover, selecting someone who has been doing outstanding work over the past few months or perhaps an image that encapsulates perfectly what we want to talk about, like this cover featuring Daenery’s Targaryen by the amazing Yasar Vurdem. And we want to pay these select artists for the honor of using their work. Not in terms of licensing it or trying to profit off it like that, but just as a thankyou. Not because they asked, not because we have to, but because it’s the right thing to do. In essence every cover feature will be a small art prize. I want to make this a cornerstone of Urban-Muse’s mission statement going forward. I want to set an example for other art website across the web and I want to encourage every day people to invest in their favorite artists work. Whether it be from commissioning works, buying paintings, supporting them on Patreon or even via sites like Ko-Fi etc. One of Urban-Muse’s first slogans was “MAKE ART. PAINT THINGS. BE AWESOME.” I think that’s a good slogan and we can still use it, but I want to introduce a new slogan here today and I want to let it be known: “Urban-Muse PAYS artists. With CASH not exposure.” That is going to be the foundation of Urban-Muse’s principles going on through 2019, and throughout the 2020’s and beyond. Full transparency I am hoping that this strategy has a positive effect on the Urban-Muse Patreon, and I want to let patrons know that the larger the support becomes on Patreon the more I will re-invest into the community.
I can already hear the criticisms forming in my head, “But what about all the other thousands of pieces you post? Shouldn’t they be paid too?” Yeah, I think they should. I wish I could cut a check for every single piece of art shared on Urban-Muse but of course that’s not realistic…now. But maybe it can be? Maybe Urban-Muse can spearhead the charge championing artists trying to survive in this “gig economy” maybe we can work with companies like Patreon and Facebook directly as an advocate for the artist community to ensure that arts on the web continues to thrive into the future, but with a backbone of more artists getting the financial support required to actually make art. This is going to be an ongoing process and it will evolve as we experiment and see what works and what doesn’t work.
Currently the plan is to do six bi-monthly features like this and pay each of the cover artists featured. At the end of the year we do a yearly “best of” feature. I think that feature is an opportunity to do something special and to get the community involved. If people like this re-investment idea of Urban-Muse’s we can potentially change the “best of” feature to a large yearly art prize. I could select four of the top pieces of the year, and then ask the Urban-Muse community to vote on their favorite. Each of the four finalists will be paid a small fee, but the artist selected as the winner by the community would get the biggest prize. If support for this patreon was small it could be a small prize, but if we get a lot of support for this patreon it could be a much bigger prize and something that could really be exciting for the artist community across the entire web. If this sounds like a good idea, let me know by supporting this patreon. Please.
Ultimately if all my dreams come true and Urban-Muse becomes the success I dream it can be I would like to transition into using the patreon money to buy video equipment, a new editing rig, and hiring a crew to film a pilot for an art web tv series. The foundation will be based on the interviews I conduct for Urban-Muse magazine, but done in person, and on camera. I would like to emulate the feel of the late Anthony Bordain’s show “No Reservations” where he would travel the world and visit interesting places sampling the food. I would like to do something like that and really spend time with the artist in their day to day life and try to convey that back to the world. This is actually something I do all the time in real life, and connect with artists and visit their studios. It would be organic like that, just with a small film crew. Something like this could work well just on youtube and maybe funded through this patreon. But I have big dreams and think something like that could even be bought by a streaming companies like Netflix or Amazon. That would allow me to truly make Urban-Muse my career and I wouldn’t have to look for “day jobs” anymore. (BTW I went to Film School, Art School and Business School, I can make it happen) That’s the dream. Let me know if you like my dream.
Urban-Muse isn’t going anywhere. I plan to operate Urban-Muse until the day I die. Urban-Muse will exist until I draw my last breath. But like the late Nipsey Hussle used to always talk about. Life is a Marathon…not a sprint. Urban-Muse is trying to set itself to keep running this marathon forever.
The Marathon Continues.
Curt Anderson
Editor in Chief
Urban-Muse.com
