Quick Update

Good morning!

Wow, it's been a while since I've posted. Ooops!
I think with each year, I've become progressively busier with different parts of life and it becomes harder to consistently blog.

To catch up, here are some highlights of my last few months:

1. New cards - I've designed and printed some new postcards with a "Happy Birthday" and "Thank You" message. They can be found at my Etsy shop.

2. "Naur Loth"("fire flower" in Elvish) - I've made a new illustration inspired by the elvish realms of Middle Earth.
Available through my RedBubble and Society6 shops.

3. I've recently finished a private pet portrait commission of this lovely cairn terrier.

Media: Pigma Micron + Prismacolor fine line archival marker pens, Koh-I-Noor (waterproof) drawing inks, watercolour, Acryla gouache on Strathnore "Mixed Media" vellum surface paper.

If you're interested in commissioning me to paint a portrait of your pet, please contact me through my website. Thanks!

 

close up

close up

That's all I can post about for now. I'm working on a few other projects at the moment, but hopefully I can share those a little later.

For more up to date art news, please follow me on my:

-Instagram (most active)

-Facebook Art Page

-Twitter

-Tumblr

Thanks and have a great day!

RedBubble Postcards Review

Good morning!

Today I'll be sharing with you my impression of the postcards from RedBubble.

On February 2nd, RedBubble celebrated it's 10th Birthday and to thank their participating artists they were giving out vouchers respective of the sales made that day.
I was thrilled to receive a $10 voucher and in the end decided to spend it on getting postcards made with some of my latest artwork.

These are:
-$1.58 USD each in "artist price" (Meaning if you have a RB account and order postcards of your own work, that's what you'll pay)
-300gsm card with a satin finish
-Discount of 20% on every order of 8 cards
-Discount of 30% on every order of 16 cards

*Postcards do not come with envelopes

I had ordered pieces from RedBubble's greeting card category before and wasn't too satisfied with the quality, but as that was 6 years ago (in 2011) and there were many improvements on the RB site since then I thought I'd give cards another go.

I ordered my cards on February 16th and they arrived on February 23rd. Impressively fast considering I chose the standard shipping option!

Now, lets evaluate the quality.

Accuracy Verdict: Mixed Feelings
At first glance they seemed pretty solid, but once I had a closer inspection I was a little less happy with the product.
-Looking at the cards with my Illustrator and Photoshop made vector trees that have really smooth curves in the original file, on the printed postcards they appeared to have a more jittery appearance. Given how much effort I spent making the branch curves smooth, it made me sad to see them with these jitters. If I had to guess, I'd say there was some compression issue.

My  original image

Original image closeup: as you can see - nice and smooth lines.

The RedBubble postcard. (Click on the image to view larger)

Close up of the jittery lines (Click on the image to view larger)

In comparison, cards featuring this style of artwork printed from Moo.com, don't have this issue.

Postcard printed from Moo.com. Zooming in to view the full sized image you can see the lines are very crisp in comparison.

-However, the jitter was much less apparent on the postcards with my painterly artwork, without outlining or heavy straight lines, such as "The West Wind". As the artist, I can still see a little bit of it, but I wouldn't be too worried about my customers noticing it on postcards featuring this style of art.

RedBubble Postcard with "The West Wind" Illustration.

Colour Verdict: Good
The colour correctness was very good. The hue was accurate for all cards, though I noted that for the Elvish Trees series cards the printing came out darker and some of the subtle colours in the textured background were lost. (This is easier to see in person vs on the photos due to the interference lighting causes.)

My tree elven images. (Click on the image to view larger)

RedBubble Postcards (Click on the image to view larger)

Paper Quality Verdict: Good...but watch out for scuffs
The paper has a nice weight to it and a smooth surface. Like indicated under the product info: a satin finish. The back side of the card has the nice classic postcard layout, making it really easy to see where (should you use the postcard in the traditional way) the recipient's address and stamp should go, as well as clearly printed artist's name and their RedBubble url.

(The downside, is that if you're an artist ordering your art as postcards and aren't happy with your RedBubble artist url, then that's just too bad for you, there's no customization available for the backside of the postcard. Then, you can be like me and regret becoming active online during the time where everyone had weird pseudonyms instead of using their names. Please don't ask me what ozureflame was supposed to be.)

HOWEVER...it seems that the combination of the ink and this type of paper make the edges of the cards prone to scuffing if the image goes to the edges, particularly with a dark background. Knowing this, an easy fix would be to upload images or order pieces which have a white border or a light coloured background.

Scuffs appeared shortly after I received the postcards.

OVERALL VERDICT:
The product has very good potential. My suggestion would be to invest in postcards if the art you're printing has a painterly style, rather than something very simple and graphic in style. Also, I would again advise in adding a subtle, white border to your works in order to counteract scuffing.

At this time I'd like to note that I haven't experienced any issues I described today with RedBubble prints outside of the greeting card category and was very happy with the results of my prints. To see my review of their art prints, check out this post.


Thanks for reading and I hope this has been useful to some of you. If you're enjoying my reviews and impressions type posts, stick around because next time I'll be reviewing Society6 ceramic mugs.

Bye 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!

 

Pattern Pastimes Part II

Hello there and happy autumn equinox!

Alrighty! So amidst working on projects I can't show just yet, I've started a new mini series of patterned images.

They've become my turn to work when I'm falling short on optimal creative brainpower but still have enough energy and will to create something fun and finished.

I started with this umbrella and a desire to make a simple and seasonal design.

(Colour motif variations)

Naturally, a pattern also had to be made :)

Then, one night a pumpkin appeared.

(Again, exploring different colour approaches)

A pumpkin patch!

And then, I thought it might be a cute idea to come up with three of such stylized, patterned images per season (autumn, winter, spring, summer) and maybe make a mini calendar or postcard set or something at the end. So, that's what I'll be doing. Yay! Another excuse to add even more patterns into my work and life! =)

Here's the latest, Halloween inspired image:

These are all vector illustrations drawn mostly with the pen, line segment, and shape tools.

(Subtle variation)

(More subtle variations of ears, line weight and nose size with an inverted colour scheme)

And another simple, half-drop repeat pattern!

Oh, and for fun - above is what my patterned images look like when I'm working on them in Adobe Illustrator. I like to use lots of colours so that I can see well if lines are overlapping where they shouldn't be. Psychedelic! =)

Be well and till net time!

All images are ©Mariya Olshevska and may not be used or re-purposed without the artist's consent.

Mail Me Art 4: Open All Hours - Celestial Convergence

Hi there!

Today, I'll be sharing with you a small piece I created for Darren Di Lieto's Mail Me Art: Open All Hours show/book. 

Last year I had taken part in Mail Me Art: Short & Sweet and I was quite excited to get to work on my piece for the 4th installment of this mail art exhibition project. I had several ideas rolling around in my brain for what I might want to illustrate, but in the end something convinced me to integrate a part of the book project I'm working on right now into this piece.

You see, recently I've been working on creating characters, scenes, props, and much more based on Norwegian folktales and Norse artwork. I was really enjoying the research but I've become a little stuck in the sketching stage - not feeling quite satisfied with what I've been producing to take things into the painting stage. What I did feel confident about was designing patterns and decorative motifs, so I decided to choose one and bring it to completion. Luckily, my MMA4 submission was still untouched, so I decided to use it as an additional incentive to push out some finished work I could share. The theme was "Open All Hours" so I chose to go with a sun and moon motif, to connect to the concept of continuity I inferred from the theme.

And here's what I ended up creating:

I've fancily called it "Celestial Convergence".

 

Approximate dimensions: 6 x 6 inches (14.8 x 14.8cm)

Media: Gouache + ink pen + gold acrylic paint

And here's how it all came together:

1. I started with a pencil doodle in my sketchbook

2. Then I turned my ideas into vector shapes and lines in Adobe Illustrator. (This was the final line-work after many experiments with scaling of the different elements)

3. Played around with potential colour schemes. I knew I wanted gold and silver like colours for the design and I fiddled with the hues till I felt they were 'right' and would look good against numerous background colours.

4. After choosing to work with a dark blue background for this project, I properly knotted my foreground lines.

5. Then knotted my background lines into the foreground ones and applied some watercolour paper texture over everything to give the piece a more traditional look.

And this is approximately what I planned to paint on the paper that was provided to all the Mail Me Art 4 artists. The only changes I had planned to make was to add an additional outline in black around all line elements and perhaps add some subtle shading for more volume and depth in the background. 

But that wasn't going to happen apparently.

After I inked my piece of paper I took out my colour inks and mixed my first colour. The paper looked nice and thick, like the paper I usually used, and since there was no extra test paper provided I was really hoping everything would be fine. Nope, no such luck. When I applied my ink it became blotchy and I realized I'd have to re-strategize.

After some deliberation, I decided to rethink my colour palette a bit and leave the background white.

Something along the lines of this, except I would make my painted version have a golden and silver shine or shimmer.

I pulled out my gouache paints and painted the base colours.

Then I used my 0.05 micron pen and added some stippling in black around the outside of the elements.

To finish off, I decided to use some gold acrylic paint to go over top of the darker yellow gouache and add some stippling on the sun. I also used some white paint to do a little stippling over the lavender-grey areas. I decided to not use silver paint because my brain at the moment was shouting "less is more!".

Side by side comparison of the two resulting images.

In the end, I was pretty content with the piece and enjoyed it's more delicate and detailed look. The scanner doesn't really do it justice because it can neither show the sheen of the gold as the light hits it, nor the chameleon quality the gouache has. Depending on the light, it can go from appearing light grey, to slightly lavender-grey, to a more saturated lavender. Here are some photos to show you what I mean:

Oooh, shiny!

And here's one more shot of this mail art piece being sent off. 

 

In the silliness of holding my umbrella, whilst also holding the painting and trying to take a photo, I didn't realize that I was on the verge of pushing it through a crack, rather than the proper slot. A slot which I needed more hands than I had to hold open and photo-document the process. Alas...

Hopefully it'll make it to its destination without damage. =) To find out more about Mail Me Art please check out the Mail Me Art website.

Be well my friends!

***Nov 7th Update: I'm happy to report that my mail art piece made it to its destination. Unfortunately, for some reason the mail service decided to print that bar code on the front, However, it now forever carries the processing date. At least it didn't get lost! Check out the other arrived mail art works here!