Behind on Onion Boy

So my track record isn't the greatest at the moment, since it's only week 2 and i'm behind already, but I have a good excuse: JURY DUTY! I've been in jury duty for three days this week. Yesterday I worked on painting the snow queen drawing that I used for my final project in visual tech. The face is painted, and the first colors for the background and the clothes are laid in, but the hair and the snowflake have not been touched. I also went to Storyopolis last night and saw a great exhibition of the children's book art of Olga Dugina and Andrej Dugin, a husband and wife team. It was fabulous and I enjoyed talking to the artists a lot. I'll be working on a costume design a la Dugina/Dugin which I have to complete by next tuesday.

Today, I'm in Long Beach as I will be for all the remaining Friday-Sunday's this summer, helping out as needed with Eric's mom's recovery. Onion Boy has been transfered to the watercolor paper, but hasn't been inked, scanned, or colored. Stay tune for 2 Onion Boy drawings next week, and hopefully I'll actually have a full week to work on my art.

In the books Path of Fate and Path of Honor, one of my favorite lines is "We are who we pretend to be." So I pretend to be an illustrator, and thus I shall become one. (Well, with a lot of hard work, too!)

Onion Boy 1

Introducing Onion Boy! Weekly updates to occur. Hand drawn and colored digitally, although I'm also creating a series of watercolors from the hand drawn versions. He started because I fell in love with some sketches of vegetable characters done by Amano, awesome anime artist.

Fledgling Flight

And so my website has begun! This site is to be a reflection of my dreams, thoughts, fears, and my climb towards my goal as a fantasy illustrator. I often feel like I'm taking baby steps to get where I'm going, but hopefully I shall look back one day and be proud of how far I've come. My goals this summer are to finish three projects and do a lot of sketching and practicing my oil painting, which I just started to learn this past semester. Also, I am planning on weekly posts of a little mini-comic of a sorts of my new doodling obsession: a very funny character called Onion Boy (and his little dog, too!).

I was very lucky when I moved out here that I had instant companionship through my husband's friends. Yet I've been missing close female friends for the longest time. I have finally found not only friendship, but shared dreams and goals, with Nahrin. Both of us want to become fantasy illustrators, and we're going to push each other to get better and improve our skills.

A note on the name of the website and blog. I have always loved birds of prey, and considered following in the footsteps of wonderful author Mercedes Lackey and becoming a Raptor rehabillitator (with Eric's allergies, that's no longer an option). The most common character name I use in games is Raven. Ironically, shortly after arriving in Cali, Scott dubbed me NightenGail in a story he was writing. In it I was a ranger, still one of my favorite characters to play, and a healer. Although I have no healing skills that I know of and, unlike my new namesake, I cannot sing for anything, the name (which I'm quite pleased with) stayed. In honor of my husband for all his love, in honor of scott for his friendship and the cool name, and in honor of our friends and family and their support, I present nightengailart.com.