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!

Playing Outside With Imagination and Pride

Happy Saturday!

So, today I'm sharing with you a revisit of some ideas and themes I worked with last spring. My inspiration comes from my childhood memories of enjoying imaginative play-times outside. Currently I'm using those ideas and themes and reworking them into a collection of illustration + poetry spreads which will hopefully turn into a nice book sometime =)

"Little Lilac Ladies"

Ancient myths say mystic powers
Are given to some lilac flowers.
Those having five petals or more
Store magic wishes at their core.

This piece alludes to how my friends and I would comb through lilac bushes in search of 5 petaled flowers because supposedly they had wish granting powers!

 And some process steps:

Inked floral work

Painted floral work

Again, the finished piece

"Helping Hands"

When spring returns back to the land,
Little birds could use a hand
With making cozy, tidy nests
For themselves and for their guests.

This illustration reflects how in the spring my friends and I would build nests out of grass to help the birds out :)

(rhymes + illustrations are all by me)

Size: 11x17"
Media: Waterproof inks + watercolour + gouache + microns

Best of Both Worlds

Of digital and traditional illustration techniques that is:)

Firstly, I have to say that I think that it takes tremendous amounts of talent to skillfully utilize both the traditional media and digital tools. Both have their value and neither is inherently (for no obvious reason) better than the other. And when both digital and traditional techniques are applied together, wonders can happen! Yes, yes they can:)

Now, I'm not implying that the following pieces are the wonders I spoke of, but I think they're pretty good examples of digital and traditional techniques can have a happy marriage.

So, for this project we had to make "Greeting" card type of patterns.
To create a uniform feel for my vine shapes I decided to first quickly draft out their basic outline in Illustrator, and they looked like this:

I then traced over these shapes and filled them in with my design. (Sketches of this step will be added sometime later)

I then coloured my patterns with waterproof coloured inks and they looked like this:

I then scanned these and brought them into Photoshop where layered and blended them to make my patterns which ended up looking like this:

Art Nouveau inspired style and colouring

So, in the end they have a hand drawn appearance yet they are still fairly similar and the vine outlines aren't tremendously crooked. Not to mention - I didn't have to paint dozens of microscopic identical flowers:)

Happy Thursday!