Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays everyone!
Merry Christmas to all of you who celebrate!

Here's a silly little poem I wrote for this holiday season. Hope it makes you smile!

Thank you to everyone who visited my sites, read my blogs, and bought my merchandise! =)
Best wishes to you all!

Mariya

News from November

Oh wow, it's been quite a while since I've last posted. November has been a busy month, however. Along with the secret, collaborative project that I've been working on (and still am, which is why I haven't posted much new art), I've also had to produce work for a local gallery show and art sale.

On November 14-16, 2013 I took part in The Postcard Show, Volume III at the Hot Art Wet City Gallery, Vancouver. I contributed five 4x6" artworks which went up for a silent auction. When I stopped by I saw that a few of my pieces had bids on them, but I'm not sure as to what happened later - if they all went to happy homes. I'm sure the details will be available shortly thought. 

Here are the scans of them however:

"Northern Knot Trees"

"Silver and Ivory"

"Tea Tag Time"

"Duali-Tea"

"Walnut Tree" (not a new piece, but it was the right size, so I included it)

And here's a photo of them hanging at the show, right next to Seth Rutledge's work. (Thanks Seth for telling me about show!)

P.S. Prints and products from my postcards are available at my Society6 shop. =)

Then from Nov. 22 to 24th I took part in the annual Emily Carr Student Art Sale. I mostly had postcards and unframed prints for sale, but there were also a number of framed prints, a couple of acrylic paintings, and three patterned boxes up for grabs. I'm happy to report that most of this merchandise got sold, with only a few pieces left for me to take home. I'll be making an illustration-based Etsy shop soon - so stay tuned!

Here are a couple of photos from the sale where some of my works can be spotted:

And now I'm off to work on all sorts of things, both secret and not. I hope to post again soon!

Freebie Friday - Black & White Textile Textures 3

Afternoon! So now the black and white segment comes to close (until more B&W textures are collected) with this third installment. Enjoy!

As usual, feel free to use these resources for personal or professional projects but please:

Do not claim the original resource images as your own,
Do not redistribute commercially. Basically, don't save and sell the resources as your own, but by all means do share the link to this page with others. :)
Do not use these textures as a base to create your own stock art/resources.

And, please feel free to share anything you've made with these resources with me. I'd love to have a look! =)

Some previous Freebie Friday posts:

Black and White Textiles (part 2)
Black and White Textiles (part 1)
Coffee Stained Paper
Fanciful Florals
Vintage Inspired
Green
Red
Denim

Have a great weekend!

Losing Altitude - Northern Spotted Owls

 

Hi there,

Today I'm going to do a quick process post about my latest painting - "Northern Spotted Owls (Strix occidentalis caurina)" It was a piece I did for Losing Altitude - an upcoming book about threatened/endangered birds. This collaborative art book will feature over 50 artists and well over 100 pages of beautiful, full-color art of endangered birds from the world over.

Check it out here: https://www.facebook.com/LosingAltitude

And now for the process.

1. As usual, I sketched out some thumbnails. to see what layout I wanted to work with.

As you can see from the finished product, the image ended being a combination of all 4 of these.

2. After getting my references together I went on to penciling. I like use the double penciling approach - where I first get the shapes and elements down more loosely with my blue pencil and then go over ad add more details with a graphite pencil.

Close up of the adult owl.

3. Then came my favourite part- the inking, using my black microns.

Adding even more detail during this stage.

After inking the whole image, I erase the pencil marks.

4. For this piece I decided to do a grey-scale values under-layer. It seemed like a logical idea since the owlets were mostly grey.

Almost fully rendered under-layer. I ended up darkening the adult owl some more later.

5. Then I got my coloured, waterproof inks out and finished up the painting, sprinkling some table salt on the background for hazy effect. Oh, and of course - for the final touch I used white gouache to add some shine and detail to the birds' feathers.

Here are some close ups:

 

-Original size: 11 x 17.7"
-Materials: Waterproof coloured inks, microns, white gouache, and salt on 300 series Strathmore Vellum Bristol paper

Prints available at my Society6 shop =)

Cheers for now!

Freebie Friday - Black & White Textile Textures 2

Hi again!

This week there are six more black and white patterned textiles for your artistic endeavors. And I've got enough left for a third segment of black and white textures next Friday. :)

As usual, feel free to use these resources for personal or professional projects but please:

Do not claim the original resource images as your own,
Do not redistribute commercially. Basically, don't save and sell the resources as your own, but by all means do share the link to this page with others. :)
Do not use these textures as a base to create your own stock art/resources.

And, please feel free to share anything you've made with these resources with me. I'd love to have a look! =)

Some previous Freebie Friday posts:

Black and White Textiles (part 1)
Coffee Stained Paper
Fanciful Florals
Vintage Inspired
Green
Red
Denim

Have a great weekend!

Freebie Friday - Black & White Textile Textures

Hi!

This week I've got a set of six black and white patterned textiles for your artistic endeavors. And I've got plenty more stocked up, so stay tuned for more next week.

As usual, feel free to use these resources for personal or professional projects but please:

Do not claim the original resource images as your own,
Do not redistribute commercially. Basically, don't save and sell the resources as your own, but by all means do share the link to this page with others. :)
Do not use these textures as a base to create your own stock art/resources.

And, please feel free to share anything you've made with these resources with me. I'd love to have a look! =)

Some previous Freebie Friday posts:

Coffee Stained Paper
Fanciful Florals
Vintage Inspired
Green
Red
Denim

Have a great weekend, be it rainy or sunny! :)

Freebie Friday - Coffee Stain Textures

Hello!

This week we're taking a break from textile textures and instead I'm posting some coffee stained paper textures.

And an extra, 7th one for luck!

This one actually looks more ominous than lucky...oops!

Again, feel free to use these resources for personal or professional projects but please:

Do not claim the original resource images as your own,
Do not redistribute commercially. Basically, don't save and sell the resources as your own, but by all means do share the link to this page with others. :)
Do not use these textures as a base to create your own stock art/resources.

Now go spill these textures on your art! And send me a link if you indeed do. I'd love to have a look! =)

Some previous Freebie Friday posts:

Fanciful Florals
Vintage Inspired
Green
Red
Denim

A good weekend to you all!

Wordy Wednesday - My Typographic Trials

Hi! Before you do anything else:

Now you may read at your leisure.

So, this past month of so I've taken more of an interest in experimenting with some illustrating text, hand-drawn typography, popular sayings and so forth.

Once I've worked digitally, using existing fonts and my textures to make a fun, quirky poster: "Keep Calm and Pattern On".

Another time, I enjoyed working mostly traditional - like when I entered Moo.com's calligraphy competition with my "Stop and Smell the Roses" piece.

Afterwards I decided to digitize it by cleaning up the scan in Photoshop and working with the Live Trace and Smooth tools in Illustrator:

black + white + red version

black + white + pink version

That's usually my preferred way of digitizing my letter line-work. If I neatly ink my letters the process of smoothing out any jaggedness from the live trace goes pretty fast. That's also how I completed my "Merci" piece:

Simpler version

At first I just concentrated on getting the letters into the shapes that I liked. Once I was happy with the letters, I scanned the image in, and printed it out. I then sketched over that in pencil the floral details. Then with the help of my light table (Also known as my window...I don't actually own a light table) I traced the sketched over image on to my good piece of paper. I did this extra step because I wanted a pretty original to keep. So...then I scanned that back into my computer and vectorized it.

I was quite happy with this "Merci" piece. I was going for an Art Nouveau feel and I think it came out to be a nice nod to that.

Looking back at "Stop and Smell the Roses" I thought it would be nice to turn that into a little series that would encourage me to work on my typography more, and so I went ahead and began to work on "Stop & Smell the Coffee". This piece didn't go as smoothly as the other one at all.

For some reason I thought I could wing it without doing any compositional sketches and instead just sketching it out a few times on to my good piece of paper...yeah, not the best plan. I ended up with this:

It had some good ideas, but the layout turned out to be awkward. At first I thought I could just fix the layout issue digitally by just nudging things around, but it wasn't as simple as that.

attempt #1

Then I thought I'd just move the top part down. A bit better, but definitely didn't feel right.

attempt #2

In turn, I decided to go back to the drawing board. I liked the "coffee" lettering so decided to draw the other letters with those kind of proportions. And then, after a whole bunch of fiddling I felt better. I was more calculated and methodical with this piece - vectorizing the letters using the precision producing Pen tool, as well as aligning and proportioning things in Illustrator. Finally, I also made some coffee stain textures (which I'll be sharing this Friday) and finished the piece off.

Currently I'm enjoying focusing on the lettering and adding a more illustrative touches, like a simple roses and coffee beans here and there. I'll save my detail-crazy tendencies for other things =)

Thanks for stopping by!

Don't forget to check out my:
Society6 shop
Etsy Store