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.
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!
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!
Here is the final version of what I’m still calling, for lack of a better title, Puppeteer. I’m really happy with how this piece came out, especially since it sat and collected dust for so long! Usually once a drawing has lain dormant for over a year, that’s it. No hope of resurrection! Thankfully this one had some life left in it. I ventured into a new coloring style for this one. For a while now I’ve been feeling like I’d outgrown my cel shading style, even though I still really like the look of the style. This combines my cel shading technique with some loose painterly brushwork, and I think it worked well. I still want to have strong lines in my work, so I’m not looking to go completely painterly or completely realistic, but I want something that looks like it has more of my hand in it than the cel shading does.
And almost immediately after finishing this painting I started drawing another piece set in the same world. It features a different character and a closer view of one of the live dragons. Apparently they are semi-aquatic? I’ve finished up a pencil sketch and a color rough, and further progress is waiting until I have some extra time off work!
I haven’t done an Illustration Friday in awhile, but I remembered to look at the topic for this past week…and by Thursday I’d come with an idea of what to draw for it. I drew my entry on Friday, so it was actually to late to post. But sometimes inspiration can be hard to come by, so I felt like it would be wrong to just not do this illustration because the arbitrary deadline had passed.
About two years ago I was hired by a local small press (who shall remain unnamed, and likely you haven’t heard of them) to create some illustrations for a website they intended to design. Long story short, the client disappeared without a trace before the project was ever finished, I only got 1/4 of the payment, and the art that was completed never got used for anything. And I figure after two years it’s never going to be used for anything. I had practically forgotten it existed. Which is sad, because I think I did a pretty nice job on these!
The theme was a Cabinet of Curiosities with a gritty, steampunk look. Here are the two pieces that were finished (the press’ name has been removed from the banner)
I do want to come up with something to do with these, because I really like them, especially the vertical one with the pipes and spider-y thing.
I also had some free time a few nights ago and I spent it sketching in my neglected Moleskine. I’ve been wanting to draw a pic of Ellie Goulding for a while. She’s also good practice for faces, because her features are so distinctive. I’m not very good at likenesses; it’s something I want to work on.
