I'm Back!: First Summer Project

It's been pretty quiet here on this blog, sorry for the lack of updates! Summer seems to fill up so quickly, with family visiting, work and trips to the shore (of course!) and I haven't been able to take five minutes to update. I have been working on a couple of projects though that I will retrospectively post here.
The first project that I finally finished this summer was a tattoo design I did for one of my friends. Sunflowers are her favorite flower so of course they are the star of the tattoo. She has a degree in biology so asked that one of her favorite things, caffeine, be included as a molecule in the design. This is what I came up with for her.

I first sketched a bunch of ideas and this is the one we decided to go ahead with. First, I painted it with gouache, but did it again in illustrator to get a cleaner effect. She seemed to be pretty happy with the result so I am glad. I have never designed a tattoo before so it was a challenge for me, but I was very excited to do it. What do you think?
There are some other things I have been working on but they will have to wait for another time to be posted here. I feel like I haven't been in my studio in a long time, and I am itching to get back to painting! No worries though, I will get back to updating again regularly.
I hope everyone is enjoying the hot summer weather!

And here it finally is. . .

I have finally updated my website with all the new work I have been doing! I tried to make my website a little more fun than it was, after all, I do want to do children's illustration.
As you can see, I have also updated my blog a bit too. I thought it would be nice to match the new site.
check it out here.

I do need to edit the banner here a bit still. . . but there is always tomorrow for that!

What do you think?

Another Rainy Day

As I mentioned in my last post, the weather here is blah. We actually had a beautiful weekend, full of sun and warm weather; a perfect way to spend Mother's day weekend. I painted a picture of pansies for my mom as a gift, since pansies are her favorite flower. Unfortunately, I can't get the colors to scan right so you will have to be patient before I post that.
So here we are again, with it raining buckets outside. everything is wet and gray and gross. I actually don't mind rainy days; I love the gentle staccato of the rain against the leaves, the glisten of the water against the grass, the feeling that you either need to get a lot done indoors or snuggle up with blankets and a cup of tea. . .I really do love rainy days. However, I like rainy days few and far between. This constant gloom not only literally gives me a headache, it makes me feel depressed and antsy (not at the same time, obviously).

It also, as I mentioned in my previous post, has been coming up in my art. Here is the last of the rainy day pictures I had mentioned. (although, most certainly not the last one I paint!) Hopefully, it will give you some joy on this miserable day. It is meant to be a fun piece. Enjoy!

A mother bird tries to keep her babies dry in the rain. I wouldn't want to be the one on the end!

Rainy Day Magic

The weather here has been kind of blah the last couple of days. I realize this may be coming out in the pieces I have been doing recently. This piece is the third piece I have done recently that I have painted that has to do with rainy days. (I haven't posted one of them yet but it will be posted soon!)

I don't know if this actually has to do with the fact that the weather has been blah or the fact that I loved rainy days as a kid. Me and my sister would always go outside and play in the rain, stomping in the puddles in our driveway. Unlike my illustration here, we did not wear rain boots. I wanted to capture the fun of puddle stopping with the magic of having an imagination as a child, where really anything is possible (maybe even falling leaves turning into goldfish?)
I used the flat style I have been using recently with some more textures in the background and in the puddle. I don't know if I love the result yet or not; however, this is a piece that has been on my mind for a long time now, and has been sitting on my hard drive as a color comp for almost as long, so I decided it was time to give it a go and try and paint it.
Hope you like it!

Illustration Friday: Jump

I am really happy to be doing Illustration Friday for the 3rd week in a row. I know I keep submitting my take on the topics last minute, but hey, I am still getting them in right?
This week's word was jump. I decided to redo a piece that I did last summer for promotional material. I wasn't happy with he outcome then so I wanted to try and redo it. The colors here are a bit brighter than the painting itself; I don't usually paint with fluorescent colors. I think I need to play with my scanner a little more and try to adjust the colors better in photoshop.

Rosie loved to jump really high on her pogo stick

What do you think?

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!