Saturday, January 26, 2013

meandering thru January

It's been bitterly cold here lately. It's to be expected, it is January after all and this is Michigan. That means a lot of indoors time. Which either means aimlessly watching tv or procrastinating on projects...

So, I went grocery shopping a couple weeks ago and found myself standing in Hobby Lobby. Don't worry, I don't cook with craft paint. Anyway, I'm a sucker for garden statuary, and low and behold they were setting up that section of the store... so, some critters followed me home. And since this stuff is just mass produced resin - I decided to repaint them to better match my decor and taste...




And then I decided to paint some watercolors. Evidently it's been a while since I had to vacuum salt up off the carpeting. For the uninitiated - you can see my watercolors here. I work with color and salt, and I mix in some gouache for kicks.

I have subsequently named all 22 new paintings, and will eventually get around to scanning them and adding them to the shop... eventually.

At the present moment my stuck-indoors-spree-of-projects has meandered on to working on a series of illustrations. So, I've scanned a bunch of sketches and printed them out as blue pages that I am in the midst of inking...

If you're also stuck indoors, hopefully your time is productive : )

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

new year, new me

New year, new me. Well, kind of.
I'm 33. When I turned 18 way back in 1997 I left home and went off to college where I met something that would become part of my life forever: the internet. My generation made the message boards, the forums, the chat rooms... and really, to do those things, you need an avatar.
So, one night while I was on break at work I sketched out a caricature of me and colored it in with prismacolors. And that's been my avatar for 2 or 3 years now. People who know me in person who find me online always seem to be amused that my little rendering of myself looks like me; well, me-ish. I decided it could look a little more like me. So, I sat down at my desk yesterday and went about updating my avatar...

The progression - from current to new...
I took the old avatar, enlarged it, got rid of the color, and added a new face. I printed that out as a blue page, inked it, scanned that back in - colorized it and then printed that out to color over:




 So, now I suppose I should get to work on the rest of the projects I have lined up. Hopefully your new year has gotten off to a productive start!

Monday, January 7, 2013

Picture Story: bear ride

I needed an illustration for January for my calendar. We have the four seasons here in Michigan, so, January is usually a picture of something cold and snowy, because that's what it is. Somehow I decided on a girl and a bear trekking through the snow for the picture...

And so it was sketched:
Then sketch was scanned in photoshop, converted to a blue page. That was printed, 
inked, scanned into photoshop and cleaned up and converted into  a file...
That file was filled with color and then printed off to be colored by hand.
 Once the entire page was colored it was scanned into photoshop.
 Where I began to add other elements, like the snowy ground and the sky...
The sky needed a little more visual oomph, so, I added a layer of a 
scan of one of my paintings: sunkissed alchemy phantasmagoria
There was snow on the ground, so there should be snowflakes in the air. 
The issue was to leave them behind or on top of the girl & bear...
 I decided to leave the snowflakes on top, so, I selectively deleted some of them...
And there it is: bear ride

You can find "bear ride" at sarahkdesigns or sunshinesight