I just finished the cover art for Angela Korra’ti’s urban fantasy novel, Faerie Blood, and now the next step is get it to the printers! We’re less than $400 away from the goal, with a little over a week left to go.
Check it out the project page at Kickstarter for more details and a glimpse at the awesome rewards, and please help us out with a pledge, by reblogging, or spreading the word however you can!
Paisley stingray tattoo designed for one of my dear friends. She wanted to commemorate her experience of getting to meet and pet a live stingray, and she wanted a similar style to a paisley moth tattoo that I designed for myself (and I’ll post pics here as soon as the tattoo is done…my last session will be this coming Friday.)
The paisley design is from a couple different stock arts by Jess Volinski – you can purchase them from several of the major stock art sites. I edited it to make it look like waves and added the stingray, sea stars, and scallops.
I have new artwork to post! I started this piece in November, intending to use it as my holiday card or New Year, but life and work got in the way and I just didn’t have time to finish it.
This piece is entirely digital – I usually finish the line art in traditional ink, but I just wasn’t getting the look I wanted with traditional media, so I ended up inking in Photoshop. It’s a much slower process, which is the main reason I don’t do that very often!
Not much new to report…I’ve had personal art I wanted to work on, but the end of the year was busy with a lot of graphic design work, and then I spent most of January with daily migraines. My doctor had me switch one of my medications, and things have been improving. Compared to doing practically nothing last month, February has already been much more successful. Even picked up a new project – I’m working on a CD cover for a local band.
I’ve also decided to get a tattoo, because I’ve finally decided what to get, and I found a tattoo artist whose work I really love. I wanted to have the tattoo artist design the tattoo…I could draw it myself, but I’m hypercritical about my own work, and everything I’ve come up with so far just wasn’t right. So I’m handing the task over to Nick Chaboya at Seventh Son Tattoo. My first appointment is in June, and I’m really excited about it.
I’ve always admired the art of paper cutting, but I’ve never really explored it. I love the traditional Mexican folk art of papel picado, and I used it as a motif in my Día de los Muertos poster, but that was just drawing meant to mimic the style. There is a mural in the Mission by Swoonthat is a gorgeous example of paper cutting. The mural is wheatpasted to the brick wall, and has been slowly deteriorating over the years.
Photo by Rebecca, Mad About the Mural, http://madaboutthemural.wordpress.com
Last week I picked up a book, Paper Cutting: Contemporary Artists, Timeless Craft
I was inspired to dig out my x-acto blades and try some paper cutting. I’ve been working on a simple image with a moth and some succulents, and it adapted well for a cut out design. And inspired by this tutorial by Jeffrey Rudell on making paper cut embellished thank you notes, I left part of the sheet uncut so that a letter or note could be written on it.
Moon moth and succulents, paper cutting
I used a 9×12″ sheet of white, acid-free construction paper, strong enough to hold its shape but light enough to not chew through too many blades (I did dull two of them in the process – I’ve since invested in a pack of extra durable blades). The cutting isn’t perfect, it accidentally tore in two places, and I didn’t like my first version of the antennae, so I cut them off and glued on a second set. But overall, I’m happy with my first attempt.
If you like my design and want to try out some paper cutting for yourself, I’ve turned it into a pattern that you can print and cut out! Download and print this pdf onto a sheet of sturdy paper (construction paper, heavyweight inkjet paper, cardstock, etc). Using a sharp x-acto blade and working on top of a self-healing cutting mat or other protective surface, carefully cut away all of areas shaded blue, working from the inside towards the outside.
This is my third year creating the promotional poster for the Marigold Project’s Día de los Muertos festival that takes place in Garfield Park in San Francisco every November 2nd.
The posters have just gone to press, and should soon be making an appearance in the Mission neighborhoods!
Last Saturday I went down to Monterey with a couple of my friends for a whale watching tour out on the bay. It was my first time on a boat that wasn’t a commuter ferry, so experiencing the late afternoon waves and swells was exciting. It had been very warm in inland, but it got colder as we got farther out onto the water, mostly because the boat was moving at a fast clip and it was extremely windy. I had brought a snowboarding jacket with a fleece lining and a wool hat, and definitely needed them!
We didn’t see any whales (late summer isn’t an ideal time to spot them, and apparently this year there hadn’t been as many sighted in the bay anyway), but there were thousands of jellyfish just below the surface of the water. Most of them were sea nettles, which were a striking bright orange-yellow against the teal waters. It was kind of frightening to imagine that if our boat capsized or sank…we’d be in these cold waters literally swarming with large, stinging jellyfish. We saw a large pod of Risso’s dolphins out in the bay, and then a pod of bottlenose dolphins when we were returning to the pier. I’ve seen dolphins at aquariums before, but I had no idea how excited I’d be to see them out in the wild. I was gasping and shouting every time I spotted one. Another amazing sight back at the pier was a massive flock of shearwaters and gulls and pelicans, all gathering in a feeding frenzy.
Since we didn’t see any whales, we were given free tickets for another trip! I really just enjoyed the boat ride and being out on the water, so I’m definitely looking forward to doing it again.
I decided to paint a page in my travel journal for the whale watching trip – two hours away counts as travel!
It was a busy week for graphic design work, and progress continues on the Dia de los Muertos poster. Here’s a sketch that will be on the poster – a girl in calaca costume on a trapeze!
And I’ve finally updated my Etsy shop with prints of three ‘new’ art nouveau insects. The paintings were actually made a few years ago, but I hadn’t had an opportunity to have prints made of them and I sort of forgot about them! Now that I’m making my own prints, I’m trying to go through my hard drive(s) and see what forgotten and neglected art is lingering there.
I’m having a special sale on the three new insect prints through the end of October! Purchase any number of them and use the coupon code INSECT and I’ll take 10% off of your total order. OR if you order the full set of the other art nouveau insects I’ll include your choice of one of the new insect prints for free! Be sure to use the coupon code when you place your order!
I’ve been finding it harder and harder to concentrate when I try to work at home. The internet isn’t even the worst distraction anymore. I have things I want to knit. My room needs to be cleaned. Books to be read. And honestly I’m just tired of of seeing this room sometimes. I spend entirely too much of my life cooped up in here. So lately I’ve been venturing out to cafes to work – beyond the local cafes, which are either too crowded or too familiar, and it’s helped me get some drawing done. So far my favorite is the Mercury Cafe in Hayes Valley. There’s nothing special about it, but I like the space, I enjoyed the music they played, and the vibe from the other patrons and the employees was welcoming and relaxing. I went on a Friday and had lunch and drew for a few hours, and then returned the next day with my friend Liza (whose amazing work is at http://stellarbaby.com/) and we chatted and sketched for several hours. (Part of the reason we stayed so long was that we were waiting for their freshly baked blueberry pie to be ready, but sadly we had to go before it was fully cooled. Next time, pie will be ours.)
Friday’s work was a preliminary sketch for this year’s Dia de los Muertos poster, which is a going to have a very Mission-centric theme. The past two years’ posters have both had decorative borders that looked like papel picado, and we wanted to keep that motif. This year, the background of the illustration is more complex than the foreground, so I decided that rather than use the papel picado as a border element, I’d let it be more of an integral part of the design.
It’s also a practical decision – we got started late on the poster design this year, and I only have 2 weeks for to complete the illustration, which just wouldn’t be enough time for a fully rendered background.
On Saturday I drew a sketch based on one of my photos from the drive from Santa Fe to Taos, and on Monday I tried another cafe (Cafe du Soleil. More of a restaurant than coffee shop. Tables too close together, friendly, but a little too busy. The music was too jazzy for my taste. The food was good, though.) and added the magpies and the girl to the foreground.
I haven’t drawn the rest of her legs or her right hand because I’m not sure yet what she’s sitting on and how she’s interacting with it. I’m leaning towards having her perched on an old wooden fence.
So this will be another New Mexico themed drawing. We saw a lot of magpies and sunflowers in Taos. Everywhere that a road sign was planted, huge clusters of sunflowers were growing alongside.
I’m back from vacation! New Mexico was just beautiful, and I had a great time doing a lot of hiking and sightseeing and a little too much shopping. I saw hundreds of hummingbirds and one hummingbird moth, ate rattlesnake, rabbit, and elk for the first time, got caught in a flash flood (August is the rainy season!), and devoured as much green chile as possible. I have lots of photos that I will post when I finish uploading and editing them. I’ll definitely share those soon, but for now I wanted to post a sketch I’ve been working on.
I came up with the concept for this illustration several weeks ago – a kind of dream-like scene of a girl inside a terrarium, surrounded by succulents and snakes. Whenever I could steal some free time I’ve been trying to resolve the preliminary sketch for it, but the composition of the piece and pose for the main figure just wasn’t working out. The first girl I drew looks too surly, and sultry and confrontational. She was just angry about being in the terrarium. The next two poses felt too urgent and scared, like they were desperately trying to escape.
I had my sketchbook with me while I was on vacation, but I decided to just let the drawing rest. Either it would eventually work out, or it was one that I just needed to let go of.
I didn’t touch the sketch again until this past Sunday, and finally it came together like I’d wanted. Sometimes I just have to step away from a piece for awhile.
The finished preliminary sketch has the atmosphere that I wanted. The girl is pressed up against the glass, but she looks more unsure about what’s outside of the terrarium. She’s a part of the life growing inside, it’s the uncertainty of what’s beyond her little world that scares her, even as she’s drawn to it.
In a couple of days I’m leaving for my first real vacation in years. One of my girl friends will be joining me on a trip to visit northern New Mexico – we’ll mostly be exploring around Santa Fe, but we’re also staying a couple of days in Jemez Springs and plan to spend at least a day in Taos. I lived in Santa Fe when I was young and have fond memories of it, so I’m very excited to be going back for a week.
I decided I must buy a new journal for the trip. I covet beautiful journals, and I came across this lovely one by Kreativlink on Etsy:
Her journals are works of art in and of themselves. The pages are hand torn and painted (so you’re never faced with that dreaded blank, white pages) and the binding and stitching seem very sturdy. And her quirky drawings on the covers were definitely what drew me into her shop.
I had to go ahead and break in the journal before the trip started – and see how the paper worked with a couple different media. The paper is a heavy text weight, with just a tiny bit of texture. I did a quick drawing of a yucca (New Mexico’s state flower) to test out pencil and india ink. The paper is just thick enough for watercolor or ink, as long as you aren’t working too wet. I didn’t have any issues with the paper buckling or the ink or water bleeding through to the other side.
And here’s the drawing I did. I think the painted paper background gives it a really nice effect.
Now it just remains to be seen how much downtime I’ll have for journaling on my trip!
