scared kiddos

Recently, I've been trying to participate in the Bi-weekly Challenge (I say "try" because this is my first, official, complete piece). I was excited to do the Grimm's Fairy Tale challenge. We just had to create a piece based on one of the stories.

I based my piece on "The Water Nix" (quick read here). I liked the idea of drawing terrified children. A "Nix" is basically a sprite. That creeping dark thing in the upper left corner is the Nix.

This is my first complete vector illustration in a long time. The last time I made one was back when I was a student at Miami Ad School. Adobe Illustrator and I haven't had the long relationship that Photoshop and I have had, so any and all work in the program is a great learning experience!

I think my favorite thing about working in Illustrator is the ease of replicating elements. For example, I created the boy's body, and then just copied and pasted it for the girl.

Here are some preliminary sketches.

redheaded kiddos

I'm still obsessed with drawing ginger kiddos. I probably will always be obsessed with drawing them since my nephew & niece are cute little gingers. They both have beautiful red hair, fair skin, and "blueberry eyes" as my nephew says.

I posted these kids before - they were drawn with markers. I decided to digitize them (vectorize, to be more exact). Not quite sure what I'm going to do with them...I've toyed with the idea of turning them into a repeating pattern. However, I'd like to have more of them, instead of just these two. I'm also not sure they're done yet. I may push them further.

flower doodles

redheads

I'm very drawn to drawing redheads. :)  My brother and sister-in-law have two redheaded kiddos, so that might be why.

Some little redhead kiddos.

She is based on a model from the BHLDN site, but I think she looks like
a cross between Julianne Moore and Drew Barrymore.

handlettering & illustration

I've been playing around with putting decorative stuff around some handlettering.

Lou & Dex doodle

Louie & Dexter in marker. Because I can. <3

doodle-a-day november

While browsing illustrations on Instagram, I came upon the Doodle-a-Day trend. Rhianna Wurman (@ellolovey) creates a monthly Doodle-a-Day for people to follow. I thought I'd give it a try for the month of November. I also signed up for NaNoWriMo, but that's a different story...

I was determined to draw something related to each day's subject. However, I started off in failure as I completely missed the first day's doodle. I gave myself the deadline of midnight of each day to create a doodle & upload it to Instagram. I realized that if I didn't have an idea for a doodle that came to me rather easily, then I wasn't interested. And it's not that I couldn't come up with ideas, but it's that I wanted to come up with clever a/o unique ideas.

Anyway, I failed. After I got a few days behind, I kind of gave up.

The Doodle a Day November list created by Rhianna.

Day 2 - "Classic"
Classy redhead in a little black dress.

Detail.She reminds me of Elizabeth McGovern.

Day 3 - "Medieval"
Little friar with his severely-angled halo.

Day 4 - "Roots"
Happy [creepy] baby carrots on brown paper.

truth

Sometimes, I think even the little Zoloft mascot has a bad day.

dog doodles

I've been drawing a lot of dogs lately. They don't require too much brain power, so they're a relaxing subject to render. Drawn with Copic markers.

flower illustration

Once in a while, I draw flowers. It's rare because I don't like flower art and it's already been done extremely well by others (such as those created by Robert Mapplethorpe and Rachel Ruysch). I decided to go this route for this illustration, which was for my cousin's bridal shower invitation, because it seemed appropriate for the shower and because I was partially inspired by the lovely work of Anna Rifle Bond of Rifle Paper Co. I looked online for bridal shower invitations and most of them had cakes and stylized brides and wedding dresses on them (Puke - we already know the bride is getting married, don't we?).

I had also decided that I was going to save the original illustration and give it to my cousin as my bridal shower gift, along with a frame for it. So, in summation, it had to be really special.

After taking a trip to the crafty/art supply store, I made a concept sketch:

From my Instagram feed. Copic markers & gold acrylic paint.

The concept sketch above is more loose without the outlines. True to my personal style, I decided to make everything relatively tight. This is the final design I came up with:

Copic markers on bristol.

Detail.

Another detail.

The final illustration that I gave my cousin had some gold paint embellished on it, and I wrote her name and her fiance's name in the center. And of course, smarty here forgot to take a photo of that.

children's book

After dabbling in bookmaking in college and being a fan of children's books (for life), I've always wanted to write, illustrate, and physically make my own children's book. It's kind of funny, actually, because I'm not really a fan of the kiddos - but they got the good books. Anyway, this has been something I've wanted to do for years, but haven't ever had solid inspiration.

Well, as luck would have it, while "camping" in an air-conditioned RV in the northern woods of Minnesota over Fourth of July weekend, inspiration finally came to me. I don't have the story really fleshed out yet, but I do at least have a notion. And some initial concept illustrations (below).

Without giving too much away, it's about about a bear who can draw.

Thank God I remembered to bring a sketchbook and some drawing tools on that camping excursion!

Thursday Throwback: Feminist Comic

A tampon comic created as a teenager, for the high school newspaper. This comic caused such a raucous that from then on, the principal had to approve all content for the newspaper before it was printed. It was a very proud moment for me. :) Seriously.

Thursday Throwback: Oekaki Drawings 2

Last week, I posted some old oekaki drawings. Here is another round of them. Oekaki applications got more sophisticated when they added more painterly tools, so everything didn't have to look like it was done in Microsoft Paint.

At the time, making dark/violent/suicidal references in my art wasn't a big deal in high school. But looking back, sometimes I wonder what I was thinking.

Thursday Throwback: Oekaki Drawings

I used to frequent oekaki boards as a teenager. What is an oekaki board, you ask? Wikipedia has a page dedicated to it here. Basically, they were message boards but with a drawing application (like Microsoft Paint, but a little more robust). You'd create a small drawing, post it on the boards, and people would comment on it. Back then, comments were fairly benign and along the lines of: "This is really good!" They were fun, especially if you had a Wacom tablet - it's so hard to draw well with a mouse.

I was sifting through some old art files tonight, looking for self-portraits for a project, and I came across some of my old oekakis. Oh, they take me back. :)