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!

 

Freebie Friday - Paper Textures 2

Happy Friday!

This week I'm continuing with the paper theme. Well, sort of. Today, I've thrown in some funkier textures that aren't really paper, but that have come into my possession rolled up, cut up, or packaged like various papers would be.

In this set there are: watercolour paper, canvas sheet, cream matte board, red velvet paper, bubble wrap, and paper towel samples.

(* Colours are more vibrant once you save the files. Blogger is making the preview images more grey 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.

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

Previous Freebie Friday posts:

Paper Textures 1
Stained Coffee Textures
Layered Lace Textile Textures
Colourful + Abstract Textile Textures
Branches, Berries and Blossoms
Blue Pattern Textile Textures
Black and White Textiles (part 3)
Black and White Textiles (part 2)
Black and White Textiles (part 1)
Coffee Stained Paper
Fanciful Florals
Fanciful Florals 2
Fanciful Florals 3 
Vintage Inspired
Green
Red
Denim

Have a great weekend! :)

Letters Can Become Reeds

Happy Wednesday!

I  got back from a trip to New York recently and there's lots to show and tell there. But that will have to wait till later this week, or possibly early next week. Right now I'm swamped with different projects here and there, so bear with me.
In the mean time though - let me share with you a little something I've been working on on my breaks. I'm trying to do more illustrated type and here's the result of a sketchbook doodle I started while the song "Smother" by Daughter was stuck in my head once, especially my favourite bit -

 "Where all my layers can become reeds
All my limbs can become trees"

And, eventually this happened:

This is simple a digital piece - a vector image layered on top of my textile textures. Nothing too fancy, but I like it. :)

And of course, some process steps for you:

sketchbook drawing

vector text/image layer

I decided to just work with the quote.

finished piece

I made the colours a little less saturated and earthy, and layered a leaf textile texture in the background.

I also played around with a darker background, but I think I prefer the light version.

Prints available at my Society6 shop {here}

The Ishirthara Test

Hi! A quick post today, I think.

Lately I've been super preoccupied with a summer science course that I'm taking. It's really interesting but a real black hole for time since there is a lot of reading and writing involved. But...but there's also illustration involved. Not necessary anatomical illustration (thought it could be for anyone interested), but more of any type of illustration you want to do to help make your research papers more interesting. I've been going with a more digital graphics type of concepts with my pieces. They haven't really been my usual style, but I thought it would be good to try new approaches.

Today I'll be sharing one of the pieces I did for my latest paper which was about colour-blindness, or more accurately "Colour Vision Deficiency" (CVD).

I call this illustration diptych "The Ishirthara Test", playing off the Ishihara test that are used to determine whether a person has CVD. It was inspired by a humorous story I heard from a red-green CVD affected individual who has troubles finding the right shirt out of their green and brown wardrobe. To stay faithful to the metaphor, for my colour palettes I picked out swatches from real Ishihara circles.

 

Left = Regular Vision        Right = What red-green CVD may look

This is simulation of vision with a red-green colour deficiency. Brown, tan and green hues can seen as variations of dull, olive green. But this also depends on the individual because CVD is quite a personal condition, with many potential variables.

And here's the sketch I started off with:

Oh yes, the illustrations are done in Illustrator. Pretty fun to do, though filling in all those circles took longer than I expected. But I think it would be interesting to do a bigger, more elaborate piece to bring attention to CVD.

While working on this essay I also came to wonder how good my colour vision is. It seems like it should be good since I'm an artist, right? So I took this Colour Test to find out. To my relief I had a perfect score! My eyes, though a touch near-sighted are fantastic at discerning hues. Yay!

Happy Wednesday! 

Pattern Craze

Well, actually it's not craze for me, it's more of a form of meditation. Drawing patterns is extremely soothing for me and a great way to do something with my hands while planning my next illustration in my head.
Anyways, a little bit each day last week I've started cataloging and digitizing some of the pattern designs I use in my work.

It started by brainstorming with my microns right here:

Now I'm moving on to making them into vectors.
I've decided to sort them by geometrical shapes. Here are the triangular ones:

And I think they pretty neat on iPhone cases and such:

found in my Society6 shop

Update: August 1st, 2012

Square patterns!

Circular Patterns!

Add caption

Merchandise on:

Society 6 
RedBubble

Hedgehog Tales

Happy December, first of all!


For the last little while I've been working on some digital illustrations=)
You might remember these little hedgehogs from my older posts
-- http://mariyaolshevskaexpressions.blogspot.com/2011/05/hedgehog-cactus.html
-- http://mariyaolshevskaexpressions.blogspot.com/2011/05/hedgehog-pine-cone.html

Anyhow, for my final Digital Illustration class project I decided to turn them into digital pieces and add some more hedgehogs into the series to create a mini story.

I think the story can be read in any order, but this one is the one I had in mind when I created the works. The gist of is that in the future world of extinction two little hedgehogs go on journeys to see if there are any others of their kind. Along the way they encounter a variety of other objects and animals....

See for yourselves:

Hedgehog + Pine cone

Hedgehog + Cactus

Hedgehog + Sea Urhcin

Hedgehog + Porcupine

Hedgehog + Hedgehog

And in case you're wondering about process, here's how it all went down.

1. Made a sketch:

2. Inked the sketch using the "pen" tool in Adobe Illustrator:

3. Painted the general colours using the" live paint bucket" tool in Illustrator:

4. Placed the image into Photoshop, where I added subtle gradients to each section, painted the background, and started to add a little texture to the grass with some grass brushes:

5. Applied various natural textures to the hedgehog, pine cone, grass, and overall image. I also adjusted the levels of the picture and ta-da!

*I also like this more papery version of the two hedgehogs together:

Credits:

Wrinkled Paper Sheet --- "Paper Sheet 002" by reflected-stock
Grass Brushes -- "The Ultimate Grass Brush Set" by charfade
Grass -- "Grass Stock" by Rai-Stock
Marble -- "Marble Texture" by hitorokiwa
and other paper texture --> "Parchment Paper"

Coffee & Tea Show

For my Digital Illustration class we had to create a poster for an event. Browsing the web I found this "Canadian Coffee and Tea Show" which I thought sounded amazing! I would absolutely love to go! And who knows, maybe I will, since it's still about a year away.=)

Anyhow. Here's my poster process below. I'm not wholeheartedly satisfied, but working predominantly digitally is still fairly new for me and I have a ton of other work to do too. =)

1st came the thumbnail sketches, which I'm not posting and shall remain a mystery:)

hand drawn line work, afterwards live traced and digitally inked with the pen tool

playing around with the colour palette

Adding some background textures and stuff

rethinking the colours...

experimenting with patterns...

rethinking some stuff

That's it!

Used my own texture resources +

Credits:

Grungy Coffee Rings and Stains: by onthinair
Coffee Stain Brushes: by korn-field- 102
Texture: Tea Stain I : by frameofthoughts
Paper Pack 5: by dierat
Garton Font: by David Rakowski

Happy Sunday!