They Draw and Travel You-Topia map contest

I have entered a submission into an illustrated map contest:

http://www.theydrawandtravel.com/maps/travel-topanga-canyon-blvd-in-los-angeles-gail-buschman

I had a ton of fun working on and creating the map these past 3 weeks and practically created a new illustration style for myself on the fly! More to come...

On the artboard

Illustration Friday: Prepare

He was prepared to enter the water, but he was not prepared to meet a new friend!

I had a lot of fun with this one, even in the initial sketch stage. I think that the only thing that would make this illio even better is a yellow duckie tube around the belly. It's tempting, but I'm not sure if I want to possibly mess up the illio for that.

The scanner is down for a couple of days, so I had to photograph it. I will post a scanned version of this once technology is back online...possibly with a duckie tube.

UPDATE: He has an inner-tube!

(still a photograph)

Illustration Friday: Highlight

Differences only highlight the uniqueness of each and every family.

This was a Christmas gift for a friend who loves both penguins and rabbits.

B3 - Bumble Bee Belly

Just having fun and practicing my new approach to illustrations. I was doing good on the time until I thought he should be fuzzy....and then i undid the fuzzy. oh well. On to the next one.

Bully Bot

I'm trying to explore a looser, quicker technique to my illustrations. Here's my first attempt that may or may not turn into a larger project. Expect more robots to come.

This is also doubling as the graphic for my funny new years party invites.

What do you think? Does it need more polish? More color?

Woodland Nursery gift

My coworker is having a baby soon, so for her baby shower gift, I made her nursery art!

The baby will be a girl and the nursery will have a woodland animals theme, and will include toys from Skip Hop. I had fun trying to put my own spin on a provided theme.

Hungry Giraffe

Artwork! I had fun with this one, and I tried to push the darks more than I'm normally comfortable. The second image was my initial scan before I went back and reworked the dark areas. I'm much happier with the revised image. And this guy has already found a new home, for a friend's birthday!

And to give me a direct tie in to Illustration Friday, I'll pull in what I told my friend earlier last week when it was still in progress, "He's not finished...he just hasn't been spotted yet!" (i know, bad pun)

Illustration Friday: Stay (Prehistoric Surprise)

This little guy has gone to stay in friend's nursery. Their theme is, unsurprisingly, dinosaurs. He was supposed to be smiling at whoever was in the cave, but he ended up looking more surprised than happy. Our friends were very happy to receive him as a baby shower present.

This may be a loose interpretation of this week's theme, but it is a rare occurrence for me to post finished, full-colored art.

I originally planned to crop this much tighter, but when I was at the frame store, I ended up liking the look of the panoramic matte rather than the standard 8.5x11. Luckily, I gave myself plenty of bleed area to try out different framing options.

I feel I've sufficiently mastered the dark-medium-light variant of basic composition. Next composition must be different, so I can study all 6 basic variations of foreground-middle ground-background lighting arrangements.

Avatar! (not the blue kind)

I am finally finished with a project I promised my husband many months ago. A new avatar for his online presence. The direction he gave me: a viking ninja robot. The robot got lost somewhere along the way, but I mostly got the viking ninja, in stereotyped fashion. He was pretty fun to work on, although the drawing got put on pause many times for other projects.

Like many of my pieces, I overworked the rendering and am still not completely satisfied with it, although there are parts I really love, like the folds at the waist and the belt. The rest is kind of stiff, although I felt I learned a bit more about skin tones in the process.

Hopefully the gesture drawing class will help me loosen up on my process/rendering.

Revised recipe

Here is the less-spicy version of the pumpkin cookie recipe, as promised! I also tweaked the sugar levels slightly since it IS a cookie and the holidays should be as sweet as can be.

Merry Christmas!

My recipe has been posted

My recipe has been posted on They Draw and Cook! Yay! It's been such fun watching all the different recipes appear on the site every day. It's like a very unique advent-day calendar: what goodies will opening the door each day reveal. I can't wait to see who the winners are.

What a great Christmas Eve present to me! I had a blast working on the drawing and testing cookie recipes. Below are some photos I took while I was creating the piece. They're not the greatest, since they were only taken with iPhones, but it's always fun to see the process.

The first of three versions of the mouse putting a cookie in the oven. I decided I wanted him leaning over more.

Take 2, but overlapping the center mouse more then I liked.

Final Line drawing

I started by laying in the background elements, then went straight to the foreground, since i'm still hesitant with the dark colors

Then, I started laying in the color on the main pumpkin and the snow in the middle-ground.

And more color...I was trying to mimic a white pumpkin with orange patterns from my reference photos, but by the time I finished tweaking colors to accurately highlight the focal point, this effect got very subdued

Working on the focal point, even though the background wasn't quite finished. The pear-shaped gourd has the door and window in a different position then the final drawing, which I didn't correct until the end. It had created a horrible tangent in the drawing with the pumpkin in the foreground. The carolers were also added to give more life to the scene.

Mostly final color.

The concept for my primary pumpkin.

The reference photo for the primary mouse, so I could get the lighting to look as accurate as possible, while stylized.

it is DONE! or Illustration Friday: Savour

I've been very quite for the past month, but I have been working hard!

I worked all month (read: weekends and sporadic nights) on my recipe submission for They Draw and Cook's Holiday Recipe Contest. Not only did I work on the illustration, I made LOTS of pumpkin cookies in search of my perfect cookie. My coworkers sure enjoyed that part of my project.

It's been fun, exciting, nerve-wracking, and exhausting, because it definitely came down to the last minutes before the submission deadline. I achieved most everything I set out to do with the piece. I have strong characters, strong composition and focal point, and I added/modified things up until the end to make it just right. I also used dark colors, which is still the hardest thing for me to do. I wanted to hand-letter the title, but I knew when to throw in the towel and fall back on my graphic design abilities.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to everyone!

My first post of 2010 is both good and slightly unfortunate. Good because you get a finished artwork post; slightly unfortunate because this is the fleeting turtles illustration that I entered in the SILA Illustration West competition...it didn't get chosen. Oh well...I plan on doing better next year and hopefully enter multiple pieces. I think that will definitely help me increase my chances of getting a piece of work into the competition. I still may enter it into the Communication Arts illustration competition, but i'm not 100% sure i'm going to submit...the deadline is in just a few days.

I feel that I've improved 10-fold over the first SILA submission I entered in a few years back and I'm hopeful that my future entries will show as much or more improvement from the current piece. It probably also didn't help that I was entering into the unpublished category, which is the category with the most entries and the largest range of styles. I can't help thinking that I really need to get some artwork published, even if it is for a small publication.

I got a really awesome gift from one of my friends this year: Do it Later! A 2010 Planner (or Non-Planner) for the Creative Procrastinator. I'm excited to see if I can fill it up or use it to motivate me and keep me going strong with all my plans for the year...including of course keeping everyone entertained by my sketches/doodles/artwork :) It's going to sit right on my desk and glare at me whenever I'm sitting there, asking me why I'm writing on my blog rather than working on art... hmmm... i should go.

Without further ado, the art:

Dragon Blossom

This is my newest piece, Dragon Blossoms, created for our very very good friends Jenny and Philip and their son Gavin. I've been promising them a piece of art for years now, and I finally made good on my promise. We gave it to them today, and they loved it and I got an "ooohh" and a giggle from 2-year-old Gavin. Obviously, it was a hit all around!

The blue pattern/color on her kimono matches a plate I got for them years ago, and this piece is a nod to my first oil painting of a little girl in a kimono holding a giant umbrella while tea rains down and turns into flowers. Philip always liked that piece and wanted it or something similar. I tried a couple of different compositions, but wasn't happy with any of them, and once I drew this little girl, I knew I had the perfect drawing for them.

If only it had a ladybug or frog....well, Jenny, maybe next time!

Huntington Gardens flowers

I finally got out to the gardens by myself to do some drawing. I had a good time. I also went to the zoo yesterday and drew lots of really sketchy animals. I'll get out there a few more times before posting those sketches. I like the colors better in the drawing than the scan, but it still looks good.

Daily Sketch 27

Today's daily sketches. Time for bed.

Daily Sketch 25

So my daily sketch has evolved slightly, due to my animation teacher. Instead of 1 15-minute sketch, I will now be doing 15 1-minute sketches! My teacher wants us to draw, draw, draw; focusing on getting the basic forms down. He doesn't care if the drawings are bad, and says with time and LOTS of drawings there will be a great improvement in skill. I'm definitely much better at the childrens' faces than the adult faces. Maybe one day i'll even be able to draw hair in under a minute. :)

Daily Sketch 23: Male 11-12 yrs

original image.

Analysis: Touchscreen laptop take two. Just as bad as take one. :) I'm going to assume that the draw 100 faces before you START to get good theory applies to the digital touchscreen/wacom pen tool as well. Everyone tells me that it has a huge learning curve, but once they get past the screen, they love it. The way I draw, with a series of light pencil strokes, probably doesn't help matters either. There were a number of times I kept trying to draw a line and i'd get a toolbox popup instead, or nothing at all. grr...2 down 98 to go.

If I have time tonight, I will redraw this with pencil.

Illustration Friday: instinct

"while the hunter used every instinct to take that mouse, the mouse had his own instinct..."

It's hard to see, because the sketch is so small, but the mouse with the cape is a stuffed mouse, not a real one.

update: I accidentally put colored pencil as the description on Illustration Friday, so I felt obligated to color it.