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.

Week 3 of the 12 Week Challenge (in retrospect)

I'm still catching up with my posting, so here's what week 3 entailed.

The task was to define your business type and start your marketing strategy. As I've freelanced in the past, I already have my business type so I focused on the next task which ultimately begins with two lists.

The first list consists of 10 art directors/companies that you will submit your art to at the end of the challenge. List two is the 6 portfolio pieces you plan to make.

With the shear number of ideas and interests I have, I've found every step of this challenge to be truly a challenge. My initial list of companies consisted mostly of children's book publishers -- as I tend to think most of my work could be a good fit for that genre. My plan was overturned though after listening to Tara Reed's interview on the zero2illo.com blog. I can't say that it's unusual for me to change my mind - but listening made me realize that my mindset about my work is much closer to a fit for licensing than standard book illos.

So with my paradigm shift hovering in the foreground I decided that list #1 needed to be completely redone. There are a ton of new options and venues to explore and in all honesty I think that list #1 may take me the full 12 weeks to accumulate.

As for list 2 here's what I posted:

Oddballs (character design & image set)
Chubs & Grubs (character design & image set)
'What I Want To Be' Trees (scene/possibly sequential illustration)
Holiday Dragons (character designs & image set)
set of Art Nouveau floral motifs (embroidery design)
series of editorial illustrations featuring high heeled shoes


I mentioned previously that I tend to change my mind 'just a bit' so I'm pretty curious myself to see if I hold true to this list in the coming weeks.

Week 2 of the 12 Week Challenge (in retrospect)

When it comes to the 12 week challenge, the word challenge definitely isn't for show. In week 2, participants are requested to make an OGSM for their business.

An OGSM is a one page summary that lists the Objectives, Goals, Strategies and Measures of your business.

Here's my understanding of the categories:

Objective: What exactly are you trying to achieve? Think long term here.

Goals: List 3 or 4 ways you can achieve your objective.

Strategies: Take each goal and break it down - these are your strategies.

Measures: What can you do to make sure your are progressing? Are you closer to your objective?

I'm being rather simplistic with the explanations here, but for anyone wishing to create their own I encourage you to visit the zero2illo blog and read the in depth description.

Without further ado, here's what I came up with. *disclaimer* I reserve the right to modify this at any time...ha! You didn't think I would actually make up my mind, did you? *disclaimer*

Week 1 of the 12 Week Challenge

A recent bout of determination has inspired my to take part in the 12 week challenge over at the Zero 2 Illo blog.

The challenge for Week 1 is to answer the following question:

What do you want to illustrate?

So after numerous drafts and a whole week of consideration, this is my response:

That certainly seems like it should be an easy question but here I am almost a week later and I'm still trying to figure it out.

I work as a designer so I tend to use whatever illustration skills I have to offset that. I create my own stock art, t-shirt designs and mascots/characters. Sometimes I do manage to draw/paint an image 'just because' but not nearly as often as I should. As it stands currently, I tend to use illustration as a design tool more than anything else.

Since I already illustrate in a variety of ways, it's rather hard to narrow it down to just one. I'm also not entirely certain that I should. As a designer I've found that versatility often comes in handy and I think I'd like to keep my illustration on the same track as my design work. To that end, I'd like to see myself following through with several different types of illustration with the ultimate goal of marketing myself as a designer and illustrator.

That said, I think I'm going to group my interests into two categories: design illustration and fantasy illustration.

The design illustration I want to pursue will consist of the types of things I've already been doing:
- Mascots and Characters
- Stock Art/Embroidery Design
- Illustration for Apparel

Fantasy illustration is something that I would like to pursue primarily for myself. I haven't done very much of my own fantasy work, so I'm not expecting to make a living with it anytime soon. Still, of all the types of illustration work out there, the fantasy genre captures my attention the most.

Social Media & Me

Like all good internet junkies I have a Facebook account. It started out as a way to stay in contact with people I went to school with or friends I used to see every day. Then I was introduced to applications.

Applications I've found are rather insidious. They start out small. A friend forwards a quiz, invites you to play a game or you catch a good looking graphic in an activity feed. Pretty soon at least one of those games is going to get you hooked. For me it's a toss up between Vampire Wars and Mafia Wars. Just when I'm satisfied with my character's skill or maybe even a little bored, a new level or rare item is added. Of course, bonuses are often offered to my fellow gaming friends but only if I post them on my wall. This is great except now my non-gaming friends have all my game related posting cluttering up their feed.

I find myself quite often passing up these bonuses just so I don't irritate my non-gaming friends too much. Considerate? I think so. :P

More recently I signed up for my own twitter account. Now I'm bombarded by a stream of 140 letters blurbs all day and night! Don't get me wrong, some of those blurbs are incredibly helpful and I love to share my own. Still, I find myself drifting over my tweet list more and more frequently. It doesn't hurt that the dang bird is soo cute either and it's EVERYWHERE!

By the way, don't forget to follow me on twitter here.

Vanity Aflame Step 6

I decided to change the bird's coloring and head slightly so that it looked more realistic. I love peacocks and have quite a few photos that I've used as reference. Still, I took some artistic license with the crown of feathers on the head as I liked the longer more flowing version I had already drawn.

Vanity Aflame Step 5

If you are an avid follower I'm sure you've caught on by now that I've changed the name of this piece yet again. I'd apologize, but that's pretty much the way I'm hard-wired. I have a very tough time deciding on names!! Just consider the evolving name another part of the process and enjoy the next step in the evolution of ‘Vanity Aflame’.

In step five I've started to add some detail into the head of the soon to be less-naked birdie.

Vanity Aflame Step 4

I've finally started to work a bit more toward the finished coloring on the clouds and I've now added in the rough shape of the bird itself.

Vanity Aflame Step 3

For step 3, I focused on fleshing out the background and really making it look like clouds. I also decided to change my plans for the opening in the clouds from a town to an island. After all what self respecting fire bird would prefer a city to an island paradise?

Vanity Aflame Step 2

Step 2 in the series is the beginning of the background work.

Vanity Aflame Step 1

If the title doesn't give you an indication, this piece was inspired by the quickie contest entry I showed in my last post. I've decided to help keep myself motivated by showing this work in progression. I've always enjoyed seeing the steps involved in an artwork and I'm hoping you will too.

Without further ado, step 1:


If you compare this to the concept image in the last post, you can see that I've improved the overall composition, perspective and made the bird's anatomy a bit more realistic. The details may change as I go along, but I'm happy enough with this sketch to begin working.

Phoenix/Peacock cross

I stumbled upon an art contest that called for the artist to portray what a phoenix would like like if it were crossed with a peacock. As I love both of these birds, I couldn't help but create a quick doodle. I hope to develop this into a larger scale more complex work at some point, but for the moment this was enough to satisfy my drawing urge.

Bead Organizing Tip

If you've ever bought plastic organizers with compartments to organize beads, findings and other small stuff this tip is for you!

I've literally spent hours separating and organizing all my seed beads so that when a project comes along everything is easy to find. After spending all that time making things organized nothing irritates me more than to have bead spilling underneath the dividers and mingling together anyway!

The quick fix is to run a bead of hot glue along the bottom of the divider before snapping it into place. The glue will keep your divider wall stationary (unless you really yank on it) and it will also keep your beads from sliding underneath the divider.

Handy Organizing Tip

Today I decided to work on a few chokers, which at this point require a bit of high speed sewing. So, my sewing machine gets hauled out of it's box and I set about finding just the right thread color for my bobbin.

What do I find when I open my little bag of bobbins? A huge mess!

The free ends have, of course, had plenty of time to intermingle and now I'm being sidetracked by untangling instead of getting on with my project of choice. I decided to fix the issue and this is what I came up with. All you'll need is one of those misbehaving bobbins and a piece of tape.

I'm using scotch tape, but I'm sure any kind will do.

Cut off a piece of tape and the fold one end over (sticky side to sticky side).

Then take your wayward thread end, lay it on top of your bobbin and place the remaining sticky part of the tape over it. The folded part of the tape will now act as an pull tab for easy removal and best of all no more loose ends!

It's always 'In Progress'

I like to periodically browse through my hard drive looking for files that for some reason or other never got finished or that I abandoned deliberately. I came across one such image the other day that sparked my interest and so I've begun working on it again. It's far from being done, but I'm sharing anyway. I'd love to hear what you think and maybe what you think I should do to finish it.

Transforming Your Face - Digitally

During the latest course of mad internet browsing (the topic was microscope slide pendants this time) I managed to stumble across an interesting tool. Students at the University of St. Andrews have created a tool that will transform a face into a number of 'styles'.

The list of options isn't extensive, but there are a few artistic styles represented and the resulting art would look great as part of a collage or scrapbook. I tested this out with a rather blah photo of myself. Here's my favorite result in the style of Mucha:

Overwhelmed & Undervalued

For a while now, I've been contemplating taking my freelance work to a new level and trying to making a living at it full time. I have to admit the idea of setting my own schedule and not being limited to one place holds a great deal of appeal for me. So, in the interest of this pursuit I've been browsing through the sites online that offer 'help' for freelancers to find work.

To begin let me say that it's a sad state of affairs when you have to devalue yourself just to get a job. It seems to me after browsing through quite a few of these sites and even submitting bids myself that the only one who profits is the customer.

Just today I read a post for a full time graphic designer. This individual wanted one designer to work with him/her to create a php/mysql back end website and work on it exclusively. That's right 9-5, working on just this site and not being able to take any other jobs. The pay? $12 a day. Wow look out world I might managed to feed myself on that!

A Vampyre Prayer

One new design is available in the Inherent Darkness store. Tonight it's limited to clothing only, but tomorrow I have plans to alter it for printing on a bunch of other merchandise. Light and dark versions of the design are available and I'm including previews below. Click here for a direct link to the section should anyone wish to order.

Sand Painting

A long time ago I had the opportunity to watch Tibetan monks paint a sand mandala. It was a very beautiful and tranquil thing to watch. Since then whenever I think of sand painting - a mandala is what immediately springs to mind.

Recently a good friend shared a link to a video on youtube of the artist Ilana Yahav who changed my perception of sand painting.



If you have not heard of this artist, I highly recommend watching at least one of her videos. She paints images with sand the way I would expect to see someone use paint. These images are lit from beneath and projected onto a screen for the audience. A very unusual method of performance art but very interesting to watch.