"Fabrizio's Fable" book cover

This is the book cover for "Fabrizio's Fable", a children's book I'm doing for a local publisher.  It's about10"x10", and done in watercolor and colored pencil.  It's been a really fun project to work on, but between this and being at Dreamkind full time, I have no more free time :(

More pages will come soon, and so will the final cover :3

Ninja Sushi

I went on a date a while back to a place called Ninja New York.  The food wasn't amazing, but the atmosphere and the employees were fantastic!  Basically, the menus are on scrolls, you have to go through a secret passageway to get to your table, and all throughout your dinner you hear people shouting and women screaming because of the ninjas that pop up while you're trying to eat.  It was hilarious and I had an awesome time. 

One of the highlights of the night was that my date and I ordered a "ninja specialty dish", which just meant it was going to be on fire.  He scared the crud out of me when he yelled out in pain, but assured us that "Real ninjas don't get burned."

Margot drives me insane.

So I've been crazy busy with this children's book, so I haven't really had a lot of time to do my own things, such as play with the pets or work on my own stuff.  Margot has recently shown her displeasure with the lack of attention, and has become EXTREMELY clingy.  Every time I leave the effing room, she starts screaming her head off; it's annoying and nerve wracking.
Screaming birds are not fun.

Pencil, about 9" by 12".

Here, there be dragons!

I've been asked to do illustrations for a children's book (yay) that's to be self-published by a very nice lady, but I had to definitely finish this first :)  My usual medium, watercolor and color pencils.  About 14" by 20".

I had to do like, a bajillion composition sketches for it, most of which were too messy and unsightly to paste up here, but I shall post a couple anyway.  The first scan is the last page of three pages of ideas.  I had just decided to make the girl in the foreground with the dragon close to her, on the right.  The previous sketches don't look like the final at all, so I only scanned this page outta my sketchbook.

The second page is the final sketch before I started on the actual piece.  I always need a final sketch to look at and build my final off of, or else I can't finish the painting.  I envy those who can just compose and sketch off the top of their heads, grrr.

I'll update next with the layouts and character designs of the childrens' book, yay :)

ignantwitted

I was featured on my friend's blog.  REK's a bit of a jack-of-all trades, and his blog has a bit of everything, but mostly features up and comers in art, culture, and music...but mostly music :)

check out the interview here

snowy bridge

So I promised my grandma I'd draw her a snowy landscape....about two years ago.  I feel bad, but I found it unfinished today, so I thought I'd just touch it up and frame it so I can keep my promise... a tad late, but better late than never, eh?
I rushed it towards the end, so I'm not really happy with how it came out... but at least it's passable, haha :)
Done with mechanical pencils on bristol.  Super small, only about 4" by 6".  My grandma likes miniatures, and I thought it would be cute if I made it small.  Plus less work for me!  Oh God, I sound like the worst granddaughter ever.  Well, it's a good thing she can't read engrish.
Original photo used for reference

Anyway, here it is:

  

P.S. "super small"...teehee, that's what she said!  

whilst in the works:

bottoms up

So I decided to do something a little different, something I just found fun.  I had this image of a kind of candid shot, like something a friend would take while calling your name.  Plus, this crazy snow has been making me miss the beach like crazy!
I had a few problems doing this, and it took a medley of different mediums, and it STILL didn't come out the way I wanted.  It's mostly markers, acrylics, and gouache.  About 9" by 12".
I had to take a bunch of reference photos... butts are surprisingly hard to draw!  The drawback is that now there are currently way too many photos of me in my underwear on my powerbook.  It's like a 16 year old's myspace up in my iPhoto app.  Speaking of, I should delete those now that this is done...

 

I'm super bad at composition, so I had to draw a lot of thumbnails, rawr.

I eventually roughed this out, it turned out to be the final drawing.

 

done!

chirp chirp chirp :)

I tried my hand at screen printing... there were some mistakes, a little confusion, and A LOT of mess.  I took pictures and recorded my process.  Unfortunately, it was with my cell phone, so they're not of the best quality.

 

I sketched out an idea really quick, scanned it and fooled around with it using the pen tool in illustrator.

 

Then I drew it out by hand (since my printer decided to quit) onto vellum.  I used acrylic paint since it's the most opaque/fast-drying medium I have.

 

Then came the confusing part... the instructions said to use a "150W clear bulb or a BBA No.1 Photoflood bulb.  Either should be fitted with a foil pie tin."  I don't have those bulbs, so I collected all the desk lights in my room and added up the watts.  I figured it would be close enough.  However, I did have a foil pie tin, so I taped that on, haha  Then I covered everything up with an old bed sheet, turned off the lights in my room, and kept my fingers crossed.

Success!  I washed it out and got my image.. it was a little blurry, but that was expected... I didn't really follow the directions well.  And yeah, this is my shower :3

 

I had to work fast to prevent the ink drying in the screen... I made my own ink because the speedball kit didn't have enough colors, but my ink dried pretty fast, and I risked ruining the screen.  Wow...typing this I realize I don't follow directions well at all.  Anyway, I screened the pink parts first.

  

and done!  Here's one scanned:

Not the cleanest lines, but I had fun and now I know how to screen print for future projects :)

me :)

I sketched some of my every day expressions, (most of which horrify my mother and make her sigh, "this is why you don't have a boyfriend"), for a future project I'm thinking about.  It was a lot of fun, I'm trying to be more loose with my drawings.

Reindeerrrr

Finally finished this today... it took forever!  It's not my best, and I don't like it much, but I thought I should finish it, since I haven't finished anything since graduation...  I'm just going to look at this as a practice piece I had to work through.  I had a lot of problems with it, and there are a TON of mistakes, but I learned from 'em :)

rough sketches

I've been working on a piece since graduation, but I am determined to finish it this month.  Between Georgia and my other side projects, this one was getting left behind.  I'll update with the work in progress sometime next week.

Catskin Colored

So this has been done for ages, but I never update my blog :(  I've made a late New Year's resolution to update at least twice a week, so I guess I'll start with this!