Showing posts with label experiments. Show all posts
Showing posts with label experiments. Show all posts
Happy and Bright
Wishing everyone eight days of brightly burning candles, more latkes than a person should really eat, and dreidels that all come up gimel.
Teeny Tiny Book
It has been a busy September.
So busy in fact, that I completely and entirely forgot to post this. Whoops. But on with the post...
I must confess that when I'm traveling I have a terrible habit of not drawing. I do use my sketchbook for the usual silly characters and story ideas, but somehow, I rarely break out my pencils to draw on location. Without fail, after each trip/vacation/visit, I lament the lack of a hand-drawn visual record of the time. I vowed that my recent trip to Seattle would be different, and I knew that spending the time with two other illustrators would be an ideal way to do some serious city drawing.
Jessixa, Brooke, and I certainly made time for drawing, but sometimes it's all about the materials and the format you're working in. While we were exploring downtown Seattle, I bought a teeny tiny accordion-bound sketchbook. It was perfect... not too precious and just right for rambling, exploratory drawing.
I actually fell in love with the fluidity of the accordion format and have already started playing with a new one for a future project.
So busy in fact, that I completely and entirely forgot to post this. Whoops. But on with the post...
I must confess that when I'm traveling I have a terrible habit of not drawing. I do use my sketchbook for the usual silly characters and story ideas, but somehow, I rarely break out my pencils to draw on location. Without fail, after each trip/vacation/visit, I lament the lack of a hand-drawn visual record of the time. I vowed that my recent trip to Seattle would be different, and I knew that spending the time with two other illustrators would be an ideal way to do some serious city drawing.
Jessixa, Brooke, and I certainly made time for drawing, but sometimes it's all about the materials and the format you're working in. While we were exploring downtown Seattle, I bought a teeny tiny accordion-bound sketchbook. It was perfect... not too precious and just right for rambling, exploratory drawing.
I used it to draw all over the city--exploring Pike Place Market, picnicking, drinking tea, drawing chez les Bagleys, watching roller derby, lunching, touring the underground tunnels of Seattle... the list goes on. The accordion format let me to play with each page individually but also allowed for a fluid transition between images. This teeny tiny book turned out to be the perfect souvenir.
Fun With Paper
Hallooo all,
Work life has been busy of late. I recently started freelancing in-house at HarperCollins a couple of days each week doing design work in the children's department. Awesome stuff. It's nice to add some variety to my work week. But it does mean less free time for updates and random projects. Much of my painting time these days is for freelance jobs.
I did, however, have a little time in the past few months to make a few birthday cards for a couple of friends who live across the country. My camera is behaving a bit wonky right now (it may, in fact, be time for a new one...), so I only have one of the cards documented. And some of the images that I do have are only so-so.
Anywho, for the holidays, N sent me an AMAZING paper-cut chicken (which will soon be hanging in my kitchen), and inspired me to play around a bit with paper. I had an idea of what I wanted, but I knew it was going to be fragile.
The first card I made was paper-cut text glued onto a solid piece of construction paper. For this second card, I decided to get fancy and do a couple of paper-cuts layered together. First, I cut out the main text.
And the different sets of secondary text.
And because this one was a bit more fragile, I decided that it needed a case.
I'm a sucker for birds, and I just happened to have a bit of old wrapping paper lying around. It wasn't quite big enough, but with a few construction paper additions, I had myself a shmancy looking custom case.
Once I had the case and all of the text cut out, I got to gluing. I love the smell of proper paper paste - it reminds me of sunny, dusty libraries and old books. No photos of in-process gluing - I didn't want to get any glue on my poor, malfunctioning camera. It certainly didn't need anything else gumming up the works.
Ta da!
Work life has been busy of late. I recently started freelancing in-house at HarperCollins a couple of days each week doing design work in the children's department. Awesome stuff. It's nice to add some variety to my work week. But it does mean less free time for updates and random projects. Much of my painting time these days is for freelance jobs.
I did, however, have a little time in the past few months to make a few birthday cards for a couple of friends who live across the country. My camera is behaving a bit wonky right now (it may, in fact, be time for a new one...), so I only have one of the cards documented. And some of the images that I do have are only so-so.
Anywho, for the holidays, N sent me an AMAZING paper-cut chicken (which will soon be hanging in my kitchen), and inspired me to play around a bit with paper. I had an idea of what I wanted, but I knew it was going to be fragile.
The first card I made was paper-cut text glued onto a solid piece of construction paper. For this second card, I decided to get fancy and do a couple of paper-cuts layered together. First, I cut out the main text.
And the different sets of secondary text.
birthday text in process
birthday!
instructions under construction
instructions!
I'm a sucker for birds, and I just happened to have a bit of old wrapping paper lying around. It wasn't quite big enough, but with a few construction paper additions, I had myself a shmancy looking custom case.
Once I had the case and all of the text cut out, I got to gluing. I love the smell of proper paper paste - it reminds me of sunny, dusty libraries and old books. No photos of in-process gluing - I didn't want to get any glue on my poor, malfunctioning camera. It certainly didn't need anything else gumming up the works.
Ta da!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)