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You are not wasting your time Will. Thats the furthest from the truth. You have your future and your families in the palm of your hand. All you half to do is adjust some things and keep drawing with photoshop. Try google for "mascot artist" this is where you want to start and hone your skills. Also logos are another spot that you can refine.
Heck it wont be long and you will be doing battle over at the
sitepoint contest forum. This is where you need to be hanging out. You can learn from all the smart people making the worlds websites look much better. Try your hand at some of the real contests. Understand how people approach business design relating to logos and stuff. You need to work under a lil pressure from other designers. This will give you structure and teach you how to meet deadlines. This is how you learn this is how you succeed.
Teach yourself more man because your theme design is really starting to look hot! I think you need to do more graphic rich themes. Much more elaborate than your doing now turn it up a notch bring on the heat. Very intricate graphics with fancy borders and all. You need to brighten up the colors full force. Dont dumb down the colors brighten them up. Make the colors stand out use stuff that helps you with colors. Dont worrie about sigs you have proved you can make renders with the best of them. You need to apply what you learned to rendering headers for websites.
You have a true gift not many people can do what your doing. Bring on the heavy stuff man. You need to get the wow factor going on. Once your graphics are over the top / off the hook / the bomb then you scale back.
Then Client & Co will be able to see a very graphic rich portfolio. Don't think for one second people are going to buy just simple business themes. There looking for hot navs & menus you know dude. Roll it out...
Keep the colors bright think XOOPS mexico colors. Those guys know how to use bright color to their advantage and it shows...
Website color schemesJoin Sitepoint ContestsMascot Artist