Illustration Friday: Heights

Hooray! I am doing Illustration Friday for the second week in a row. It helped that this week's theme fit in with a project I was already working on. I am also happy to be getting it done before Thursday at ten.

As a kid I always loved flying kites. Once a year, my street use to have a day where all the little kids would go to the end of the street (we lived on a cul-de-sac and there was a field there) and run around, getting our kites up in the air and seeing how high they could go. Of course they got tangled often, but as long as you could untangle them, that was part of the fun of it.

Hope you like it!

Illustration Friday: Puzzled

This is totally last minute, but I FINALLY did Illustration Friday again! The word for this week was puzzled. Since two of my sisters are totally obsessed with pandas, they were the first thing I thought of for this piece. So, I did a red panda (yes they really do look like red raccoons) looking at a giant panda (what most people think of when they think of pandas.) I thought it could be a cute and original idea. What do you think?

But I'm a panda!

Promotional Materials: Business Cards

So I have decided to put up the paintings I did for my business cards as promised in my last post. It was time for a new set. I may or may not use all of them, what do you think?

Spring: New Beginnings

I love that Spring has finally come! I get so discouraged by the winter, being cold all the time, gray skies. . . it just gets depressing and is very much not a motivating season for me. But Spring! I love all the flowers, especially at this time of year, so many of them are yellow! My family knows I am OBSESSED with this color. It's just such a cheerful and hopeful color! Soon, I hope to do some more flower paintings like the poppy painting in my last post (and yes, many of them will probably be yellow). I took a lot of reference pictures yesterday, so hopefully those paintings will be popping up here soon!

Any way, I am hoping that with this new season in the air, I can start a new season of creativity. I am hoping to get much more done, which of course I will share here. I thought a good way to start would be with some new promotional materials. I have started working on some paintings I hope to use for business cards, and I think they are coming out nicely. They are a bit more representative of what I want to do than my last bunch was, which is a good and needed change. I have painted three of them already, and will share them all with you eventually. For now, this is the one I just finished.

 

The colors didn't scan perfectly which I have to figure out. The orange is lighter than it shows up here. The rest are almost accurate. If anyone has any suggestions about getting accurate scans, I am all ears!

Now, I am going to go enjoy this lovely weather. Maybe I will get some more reference pictures, maybe I will bring my sketchbook out and draw. However, I think I will most likely lay in the sun and soak up the inspiration nature and Spring always share.

If you are in the New York area, go outside! enjoy this beautiful day. 

 

Poppies for a Cause

My sister every year organizes Coffeehouse for A Cure; a coffeehouse and raffle to raise money for the Children's Tumor Foundation (a cause very near to our hearts). Each year, I like to donate a painting to be raffled off to do my part in helping. Of course, I always decide to do things at the last minute, and so couldn't post a picture before the actual event. I did decide to document my process a bit with this project so you could see more how I work.

the thought process

First I started with a sketch in my sketchbook. This was quick, and unfinished, but I wanted to scan it in and do a color comp (yes I am impatient with that). The first row of the above picture is the original picture of the flowers I took a couple summers ago, the quick sketch and the quick color comp.
The second row is a cleaned up sketch that I did with tracing paper and pen, from there I got the color comps to the right. The gray background was a happy accident. I went to fill the background in Photoshop with a blue but had scanned the file as a grayscale file so it came out gray. I liked the way that looked against the orange so I kept it. I also decided to keep the grass in the background gray as well, simply outlined in white so that the flowers really popped. I was really happy with this as a color comp.

the painting process

After I had printed this out, I mixed my colors and got to work. For this piece I used gouache. Gouache and watercolor are my favorite media, and for this, since I was going for more of a graphic look, I decided to use gouache. Basically this is all the different stages of the painting.

the workspace. Pretty neat for me actually. and of course my coffee is always near.

the final painting (before I signed it)

Unfortunately, I forgot to get a picture of it when it was framed and looked all nice and pretty. I did scan it before I framed it, so I put a black frame around it in photoshop so you could get the idea of the final project.
I was really happy at the event because the painting seemed to get a lot of tickets, more money for The Children's Tumor Foundation!!! The winner was my younger sister's friend, who was ecstatic (she told me afterwards she was one of my biggest fans).
I love being able to share my talents to raise money for such a cause, and actually had a lot of people come up to me afterwards to say how much they loved it (always a good ego boost :) ).  I would love to be able to do this more in the future. But back to the drawing board. I hope not to leave this blog for as long this time without a post. Also need to get the much promised revised website up. Well, as an illustrator, your work never seems to be done.
Hope you enjoy the painting!

Pandas, Pandas, Pandas Everywhere! (and a hippo)

One of the things we did often in school was draw from life. Unfortunately, I've fallen out of this habit a bit since then. However I have decided as a New Year's Resolution to do more drawing from life.

Therefore, the other night I was sitting on my bed looking at my twin sister's bed. She LOVES pandas (and that is an understatement.) I think she has about twelve pandas at the end of her bed, all in a pile.
So I pulled out my sketchbook and a pen and drew them. (there is also a hippo, a tiger and some sort of brain cell there. yeah she's a science nerd too)

"my sister has a lot of pandas. sometimes it's hard to tell where one begins and another ends"

This was a fun ten (maybe fifteen?) minute drawing. It is just a inky pen drawing. I thought people may like to see some informal art, as opposed to the finishes I keep posting. Hope you like the pandas!

Illustration Friday: Grounded

I realized that some people who read my blog might not know what Illustration Friday is. I was so proud that I actually got something done in time for it last time that I didn't even bother to explain what it was! My apologies.
Illustration Friday is a website on which there is a weekly Illustration challenge (given every Friday, hence the title of the website). Each week, illustrators who wish to participate illustrate the theme for that week and post links on the website to their blog where they have posted their version of the theme. At the end of the week, a piece is chosen as the pick of the week and a new theme is posted.
Last week's word was grounded. I had an idea for this, and then unfortunately got sick so was unable to post it in time. However, I was happy with the result so I decided to post it here anyway.

Sammy's mom said he could have a komodo dragon for a pet when pigs fly. Much to his disappointment, Delilah remained very much grounded. 

I used collage as the main medium for this piece, with micron pen for the facial features. I am really enjoying collage, let me know what you think!