Merry Christmas and Murals

Simple paint, but look how the snow came out! Soon it shall be decorated with cute colored snowpeople, tree decorations, and doves as colored by the little ones at our library. Exciting! My first public art project.

Another view. I love the stars!

I led a simple printmaking workshop - here's what the kids made!

On the very same day I hosted an "art challenge," where kids got a bag of supplies which had to be used in their entirety to complete an art project. They received prizes! This one was a fantastic finished piece, and was complete before any of the others. Look at all that modge podge!

I am getting better at photography. Here is my crazy cat trying looking for food. She is like a houselion.

More embroidery!

Here is one I am working on now - it's a hand-drawn sketch very loosely inspired by a selection autumnal holiday greeting cards. If you know me, then the subject of this one is likely not a surprise. I do love my furry little critters.

And HERE is the finished version of my gnome embroidery -- this is my very first attempt at embroidering, everything was either spontaneously stitched or hand-sketched and then stitched with freehand embroidery. You'll notice a variety of different stitches. It's not a very cohesive piece, but that's okay -- what do you expect from a test piece?

New project: embroidery!

Gnome embroidery project with a wonky flower. He needs a lot of filling in, and many more flowers. This is my first time embroidering EVER, which you can probably tell by the lack of quality of my stitches.

Recent Digital Illustration

Here is a more "finished" version of a drawing I've been working on in photoshop. It involves a source image and some careful tracing, but all in all it is hand drawn and colored. My first foray into serious digital illustration. It takes a lot of time!
Here she is again without much coloring! I am looking forward to finishing her and perhaps starting on other projects. I don't know what it is about isolating figured outside of a context, but I kind of love it. I am so into detail that sometimes everything I love gets lost in a sea of beauty, so if you pull out just a few things, the presence of a person or animal, or the shape and line of an object and isolate it, you get something just a little bit magical. Or so I hope ;)

I want to go:

What I'm working on:

The seal of Martin Luther for a new friend. To be used for a very fun game that I have never played. Think treasure hunting?

A bonus gift for said new friend. Yet unfinished... Exposed stitching. I think it's Japanese?

He likes farms, so I made one.

He also likes bright colors, and, as I've decided, multicolored tucans.

Assorted Doodles

I left my prep sketch for this at my Grandpa's house right next to his easy chair. Now, Grandpa is sometimes a little forgetful (he has medication and illness related dementia), so when he saw it again recently he said to my grandma: "Who drew this? This is very good!" and she answered that it was my drawing. "Ooooh she is so good! She's getting to be really excellent. In fact, this is *almost* better than what I can do (he is an oldschool arcitecht and an artist)." Repeat this about 5 times every hour, and Grandma begins to get a little sick of hearing how awesome I am. She called to tell me this, and I felt sorry that I wasn't there. Who wouldn't love some (hyper) frequent praise? Anyway, I thought it was very sweet of her to say so, and I felt very honored to be so well liked by my very critical grandfather.

This gem is inspired by a friend of mine who loves to bike. It was drawn just this last weekend! 8/22/2009 -- It is my first serious drawing in a long time, but only took a few hours. See if you can identify the foliage. I used source photos and everything. It was a lot of fun.

A random doodle from my notebook that I cary about everywhere.
A doodle for the gnome print I did a long time ago (you can see an example in one of my very first posts). The doodle is better than the print, by far.
I forgot to lighten this up in photoshop, but oh well. Here is an example of a very well done drawing of a volcano. I love implied texture, and have a thing for indian miniatures, persian paintings, and anything with teeny tiny detail -- so that was my inspiration, I am always doing these things on my notebook just to practice patterns and textures. :) I especially love the volcano smoke.

Moooore Fibers!

So I took this class in "Fibers" -- basically a part paper making class, part surface design class. (My sister is listening to the hamster dance song on her cell phone as I write this, FYI) Here are some experiments and final projects. Enjoy:

If you dip fabric in soda (like the chemical) and you smash flowers on it, and then you iron it, it stays permanent and dyes the fabric like this! Lots of smahing.
I did some really lame pulp painting (I just did NOT get the pigment to fiber to water mixture right, and ended up with very translucent pulp. This piece came out the best in terms of color (browns, beiges, and blues). I then painted over it with textured medium and acryllics, did some papercutting, ink drawings, paper transfers, and modgepodged different elements all about. There's even some ink dyed cloth! Joy!

Marigold paper close-up
Marigold paper in the sun. How lovely.

Oooh now THIS is pure joy. I made this paper by tearing up all the dead lilly leaves in my garden. I proceded to dry them for a few weeks, cook them for a day, rinse them, blend them, and syphon them out to what you see here-- sheets of fine paper. It is slightly brittle, but not terrible. It would be very nice if mixed with cotton pulp.

Fibers class - Books

The first one is a miniature book -- my first attempt at doing a sewn binding AND a pop-up element. Kinda lame, but fun. I also got it dirty. Eep. Nothing inside yet (maybe not ever)

This one (below) is an accordion fold book- one of the rare instances where I accurately measured everything. It is going to be about the changing of the seasons, I hope to illustrate some snow covered foliage and such within it's pages. The cool thing about these books is that they fold out, almost like a scroll or a mural. Dual functionality -- part book, part installation illustration! I especially liked the paper I used. Cereal boxes covered in printed blue paper, with a medium weight cotton paper on the inside. :)

Day of the Dead

This is a wonderful little rinky-dink book made from scratch by ME. I do a very poor job of trimming things exactly, and as you will see by the photos I post, I am... shall we say... much more organic and spontaneous with my materials? This is NOT a good thing in the art world, hence why I call this rinky-dink. It is and was an experiment, and a poorly documented idea, but beautiful all the same. The pages are out of order (actually, totally backwards). The paper is hand-made from cotton pulp and marigold pettals. Ink is india, drawn by quill pen. Hand sewn.

Old and New Doodles

This is what I do when I get bored, or need to practice:

Eclipse - Post-it note and crayola marker

Mountains - Ball point pen and homework criteria handout

Barn study - Envelope and Acryllic

Farm animal doodles for babies - fine tip marker & moleskin

Altered photo - fishies. Acryllic on printer paper.

Old(ish) Drawings

So, despite taking a drawing class early on in my artschool career, it hasn't really been a medium I've explored much except for within the last few years. These are all relatively new, within the two year mark I'd say instead of the four or five year mark like most of those paintings and prints. These are my "old" drawings, as I have since created many new (which I shall get around to documenting and posting soon... hopefully).

"Octopus" - Archival inking markers of various sizes. Later rendered digitally?

"Floating field" -- India ink and quill pen.

"Tree" - Indian Ink and quill pen.

A wonderful comission from two little boys I was nannying a summer or so ago. "General Grievous" - Pencil.

A collaboration with artist Allison May. "Spooky Mountains" - A throwaway print scrap illustrated with black finepoint sharpie. I drew the sleeping yeti.

Old Paintings

Here are some terribly poorly documented paintings, some better than others.

"Cherry Tree" acryllic study of a stained glass window

"Electric Wildflowers" - Acryllic on Cardboard

"Prayer Painting" -- Acryllic on canvas paper

"The Toad King" - Acryllic on oak panel, lots of textured medium.

A very poor photograph of "Racoon" -- acryllic on pine panel.

Another poor photograph and zoom on "Weezy" - Acryllic on pine panel.