Elvish Trees

Hello again,

Tonight, I am pleased to share with you my latest personal project - "Elvish Trees", in which I was inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth Elf culture. For stylistic reference I looked at the illustrations in The Lord of The Rings novels but created my own original designs which I could imagine to be on things like banners of the different elvish families.

I started out, as usual, with pencil sketches.

Then, I finessed each sketch in Adobe Illustrator and established my colour palettes. After which, I brought the rendered trees into Photoshop to add some texture effects.

Alda
“Alda”, in Quenya meaning "tree"

Ornë Ornë in Quenya meaning 'slender tree'

Lûth Galadh
“Lûth Galadh”, in Sindarin meaning "Spell-Tree"

Prints can be found on my Society6 and RedBubble shops. More merchandise will be made available in the following weeks. 

That's it for now. :)

Ostara Tarot Card Designs

Hello and Happy New Year!

I hope everyone had a great holiday. I had a pretty busy one. But it was a good kind of busy, so it was a pleasant time.

One of the projects I was working on was for a Ostara Tarot, which is collective of lovely illustrator ladies from Vancouver who are making their very own tarot card deck. They will also be having an art show, where there deck will be launched, in late March.

What they hired me to do, was come up with some designs to go on the back of the cards. I was given a generous amount of freedom with my designs, so I was very excited to get started. My inspiration came from Norse and Celtic knot-work, and the word "Ostara" itself, which is one of the names applied to the celebration of the spring equinox. For the most part, I chose colours and shapes which alluded to the blossoming of flowers and to the hues prominent during dawn and dusk.

I chose to render my designs in Adobe Illustrator because I wanted to learn how to better create knot-work art with vector shapes. Also, I wished to achieve perfect symmetry because I thought it important that the backs of the cards do not prematurely reveal that the face card may be upside down - a variable some tarot readers an important part of their fortune telling.

As always I started a handful of thumbnail sketches, which I'm not showing because they ended up scattering all over my notebook and became to troublesome to scan.

Then, I picked out some of my favourite ideas and drew them a bit bigger.

Then, one by one, I worked on each idea in Illustrator, with some coming along quicker than others. Design A was the fastest out of them all to come to completion.

Design A

Design B, which is actually the last sketch in that picture, took the longest, and was the last to be finished. After working on it and feeling dissatisfied, I decided to temporarily move on to the next idea.

Design B Works-In-Progress: Initially, I liked the shimmering light idea for the background, but just quite wasn't happy with the look 

Design B WIPs: many new thumbnails and experiments later, I ended up with a much more different look, but one that was more harmonious with the other two designs.

Design B: Finished (Or is it? Dun...dun...dun)

Design C might look most laborious in regards with intertwining the knots (which is more tedious to do digitally in Illustrator, than transitionally with paint), but it came together fairly quickly after I was satisfied with the colour scheme.

Design C

And here are all three illustrations together. They've been cropped to how the cards will be trimmed, and I've given them a subtle paper texture (in Photoshop).

Here are some close up shots.

(click to enlarge)

And that's it for the art, for now anyway. There may be some subtle changes in the future, but today I feel like these pieces are finished. Which design is your favourite and you think would look best on a tarot deck? Please let me know in the comments! :)

*Edit - decks are now being printed, and you can pre-order one right here at the Ostara Tarot Shop.

P.S. - If you're interested in learning how to create knot-work in illustrator too. Here are some of the tutorials that helped me:

"Three Ways to Create Celtic Knots in Illustrator" - by Iaroslav Lazunov via Tutsplus
"Drawing celtic knotwork 1" + "Drawing celtic knotwork 2" by Greg Kulz

I feel like I should write a tutorial on subject myself because I've picked up a few tricks throughout the process. Hopefully I'll make it happen sometime!

Hope you enjoyed this first blog post of 2015. Happy January!

 

The Nessie Award

Hi! Oh look - something not on paper!

Today I'll share my feeble attempt at making a 3D toy for a recent assignment. We were given 3 wooden parts - a rectangle, a rod, and a ball and we had to come up with a character and make a toy. We could change the parts and add to them as we saw fit. Imagination and skills were the limit. And Amanda Visell an Michelle Valigura were our class mentors, if the project wasn't daunting enough.

The way I went about this project though is by staying faithful to the given parts and letting them help dictate my character. (I'm also not that great with using my hands, and I'm quite weary of power tools. But I honestly did like the approach of keeping my original shapes somewhat candid)

At first I came with with some creatures like an ornately patterned giraffe, a fancy ostrich, a Loch Ness monster and a 'dragon-fly'.

Then I decided to go with the Loch Ness monster idea and sketched out some variations of what it could look like:

I picked the Celic Nessie. Surprise, surprise, as I have a deep fascination with the Celtic and Nordic cultures and art.

I also thought that by going with this option I could make up with painting knot-work that which I lacked with carving and molding. And if there were flaws they would actually work with the theme. You know -- if something was hand-made a long time ago, it's bound to have some bumps and scratches right?

So in the end I ended up with this, as I've posted at the beginning:

I give you my interpretation of the Celtic depiction of the fierce Loch Ness Monster, immortalized as the "Nessie Award".  Each year all the Celtic clans would gather for a great feast and award the Nessie Award to the clan who has sunk the most enemy ships at sea. Although the mystic Nessie was most frequently seen at Loch Ness, it was also rumored to be spotted roaming the salty ocean realms.

I created the general shape of character by trimming, sawing and sanding the provided parts. I then molded the muzzle, horns, tongue, scales, legs, and tail out of air drying clay. I also created some ships as accessories. I painted all the parts with acrylic paints and then super-glued them together.

And look - I made some tiny ships to go with it:

I'll see if I can fix it up some more later (for my own sake of mind) and take some photos with it outside.

*Now I'm off to relax and celebrate my birthday. I'm 22 today! I like the sound of being 21 better, but maybe this will be a better year nonetheless!

Happy Sunday to everyone!

Epic Celtic Keds

So, for our 3rd Surface Illustration project we had to design a pair of keds-shoes using the PRO-Keds shoes from Zazzle.com.

I decided to create a fiery Celtic bird-of-prey motif=)
We also had to order the shoes we created, and so I can't wait till mine arrive in the mail!

side profile

tongue

heel accent

Linework:

These designs were first hand drawn. Then they were Live-Traced in Illustrator, and then they were Live painted in Illustrator:)

Soon to be available to the public purchasing on Zazzle. I'll keep you posted:)
Happy Friday!

Hawk of Achill

Here's the 2nd project of the semester.

The objective was to create two illustrations based on a piece of text that relates to a culture. The two pieces also had to relate to each other.

So..due to my love for all things Celtic. I illustrated the following pieces on the Celtic Hawk of Achill.

The information I used I found on this Celtic Symbols page which said:  

Celtic tradition lists the oldest animal as the Hawk of Achill.  As with many other birds, the hawk is a messenger of the various worlds. However, it is noted as being more skillful and stronger than most others of its species. To hear the cry of a hawk during a journey is an indication that it would be wise to be alert to upcoming situations that require boldness and decisiveness in order to keep from being thrown off-balance.  The hawk was considered a noble bird that brought the sun within his feathers, and enabled recollection and the ability to progress.

size: 8.5 x 11 inches | colored inks & watercolor

size: 8.5 x 11 inches | colored inks & watercolor

some detail

another detail shot

 How much time did I spend on these? Well...let's just say they were my priority and sleep was not an option, haha