Cover for The Last Legend - Final

...and I can check another project off the list! The book cover illustration for The Last Legend by K. Writerly (available soon on blurb.com and lulu.com) is complete.

I rarely keep records of the exact time I spend on each piece, but I'm going to estimate that this took between 15-20 hours of hand painting in Photoshop. I am really in love with the new color mixer brush in CS5! All total I think I also created 6 new brushes for the texture work, which was quite a bit of fun to experiment with.

I'm pretty happy with the end result and I'd love to hear your comments.

Here's the finished illustration:


Here's the illustration with the book cover title, spine and flap design added in:


and here are a couple random detail clips:

Cover for The Last Legend - In Progress

One of my very best friends, contacted me recently about doing some illustration work. With her permission, I am posting the progress I've made on one of the projects - a book cover/dust jacket.

The preliminary thumbnail:




and a sequence of progression following that:






As you can see from the progression, I still have quite a bit of work to do on the castle and there is a tree line/woods section that has yet to be added. I will be sure to post the completed image as soon as it's ready. In the meantime, now is your chance to visit the author's site: K. Writerly

Bookmark it, check out all her incredibly awesome stories and don't forget to buy a copy of The Last Legend as soon as it's available!

MI Renaissance Festival 2010

It should also come as no surprise that in the 'off season' I spend a lot of time thinking about which costume I shall wear next and what I need to make it.

This year I chose to make a griffin costume... enter mass quantities of fur, feathers and assorted yarn, lots and lots of planning and some very lucky thrift store purchases. The mask, bra and fur/feather belt were made by yours truly. Kudos to my mom though for the crochet work along the top of my yarn skirt! (One of these days I really must learn how to crochet.)

My sister went with a phoenix theme and we decided to use a lot of different colors of fabric to simulate a fire effect. In the end it's a bit different than I think either of us was thinking, but I still think it turned out great!

So to commemorate what I believe to be some pretty successful costume designing this year my sister and I had our pictures taken professionally on site by Medieval Memories. The photos below are posted with permission by Medieval Memories - I highly encourage anyone attending the Michigan Renaissance Festival to have their own photos taken! (ps. if you need garb - they'll even dress you up first!)

New Product Line

I just wanted to drop a little note to let everyone know that I launched a new product in the cafepress store. I could be descriptive, but I think the picture rather says it all. I know I've had this thought often, have you?



ps. coming soon, several new masks, a new header for the blog (please excuse the current incompleteness, and hopefully some new content on the portfolio

A little less melodrama

So this post is comes on the tail end (I hope) of my cold from heck. I have been seriously lacking energy lately but this week I did manage to accomplish a submission for the Ripple blog. If you haven't been there I heartily encourage you to visit. All the artwork (most in the form of artist trading cards) are for sale. For a $10 donation to either The Institute for Marine Mammal Studies or The International Bird Rescue Research Center you can buy an original work of art.

Well without further ado, here's the first of what I hope to be many submissions.

a tale of woe

The last couple of weeks have been pretty rough. My desktop power supply was fried during a storm, I caught a major cold that I'm still trying to kick, hit a deer with my car, fell holding my camera so now the anti-shake on the lens malfunctions and had to complete wipe the drive on the desktop after a virus issue. I've had the desktop back up and running for a couple days now and I think I've almost got all the software back on it. *sigh* Now, of course, both of my Seagate external backup drives are acting funny. I think I really hate Seagate. I need to try and find a high capacity Maxtor drive, the Maxtor I had never gave me a minutes trouble!

All this bad luck I've been having has got to be paving way for something good to happen. I hope so anyway!

Now that I've got all that off my chest, here are a couple of the latest sketches.

Weeks 4, 5 & 6 of the 12 Week Challenge

Lists - check
Business plan - check
Now it's time for some artwork!

The goals for weeks 4,5 & 6 was to create 2 pieces of art each week. I didn't get nearly as much work done as I'd hoped to, but I like what I have so it balances out.

I had a lot of art on my 'to do' list, but what I focused on in these weeks was a character group I've name the 'Ittles'. With the ultimate goal of licensing, I wanted to first make a character sheet for each one and then make patterns, and objects to mix with them to create sets.

I don't know what the norm is for a character sheet, but I decided to make four standard views of each character: front view, side view, back view and suprised.
So without further blathering... on to the art... (are you happy now Michelle?)







There are plenty of character sheets to go and one little guy that's not even on the line work page yet, still I'd be happy to hear what you all think about what I've got so far.