Get creative with me!
I had the most fun opportunity to illustrate a children’s book for a college student – without giving everything away, I’m sure my illustrations are a big hint to the storyline!
I started doodling late one night, refined my doodles into line drawings, then colored them in using colored pencil on a really smooth illustration paper – scanned them in and further enhanced them for print using Paint Shop Pro. I’m so tickled with the results, I just had to share.
Which little fishy is your favorite?
Here’s the final scan of these beautiful cats done in a sepia oil monochromatic. The color is really warm and rich, like milk chocolate in the sunlight. I’m late posting it – usually I post the scan before I mail the piece – this one is probably already halfway home. I’zza little excited for their mama to get the painting.
I just completed the lovely composition captured by Debbie of her three cats. This painting is 9×12 on gallery wrapped canvas, it’s a sepia toned monochromatic.
I did fade out the lace curtain in the background a bit, I thought too much detail would detract from the cats – the subtle lace in the foreground and impression of lace on that back curtain feels just right to me.
The digital pic of this painting isn’t entirely accurate, of course – the final scan is always so much more accurate to color, clarity and detail. I’ll capture a scan once it’s dry.
I finished up another project late lastnight, This Eclectic Life is written by Shelly Kneupper Tucker. She’s a sweetheart of a blogger, so you really should stop by and read her way more often than just going over there today to tell her how very much you love her new look (hint hint).
She just recently made the jump from blogger to WordPress, and she even used my extensive How To Leave Blogger post as her guide. And then I kinda helped her here and there as she got her feet wet, but it didn’t take her long to settle in, that’s for sure.
She’s all hooked up with some pretty neat plugins (a couple of them I don’t even have yet), custom graphics (as is standard on all my designs) – and I even cartooned her header image for her (you can see the old one here, as well as the design she had grown accustomed to.)
“All I really told Leanne about what I wanted for design was : cartoon my hands and paint the fingernails red; I want the colors to be red, black, and gray; use Courier font, because I want it to look like it was typed on an old manual typewriter, and keep it simple. I had no idea her imagination would come up with something that is this much fun.”
~Shelly
Shelly has basically undergone a huge blog transformation over the last couple of weeks. I applaud her tenacity to take the jump from one platform to another – to get her hands dirty in a little code and a little ftp’ing, and really take her blog to another level.
::sniffles:: I kinda feel like a proud new mama.
Special thanks to YellowRose, who pointed this super cool chick my way.
Go on over to Shelly’s and have a look around!
You know what I’m talking about?
We went to dinner lastnight, and half of us are sick today. The half that’s sick used different oils in our (Mongolian) food than the other half, and it’s my best guess that the oil may have been a little rancid.
Easter was wonderful. Church services were moving, our biggest little one played three songs on piano before services began and I was so proud of her, she played so well. Our baby quaker parrot birdy boy was just adorable this weekend (see our little pocket pal?), and we had a couple of slumber parties that left us all sleeping on our ginormous sectional.
One of the highlights for me was seeing and id’ing a new backyard bird. Meet Jeepers, our new brown creeper. (Jeepers, creepers. Easy to remember, yes?)
I’ll end my Monday on that note, since going off into tangent-land would probably cause my fingers and wrists to ache, and I’ll be using them in the studio later.
Sometimes I wonder if my readers know how vast my artistic occupation is. From doodles to photography, birdwatching, landscaping, blog designing and back to painting again, I think my interests are either overwhelming or I have too many boring ones to fully entertain my readership. To me, it all feeds the creative side of my brain, so I won’t hesitate to jump from this to that to the other thing. Maybe it’s creative AADD? (ADD of the adult variety?) Whatever the case may be, I think there are a select variety of people who understand it and hang in there on my big ol’ trampoline of a blog.
Back to my sketch, Meet Callie, Annie & Momo. They’re a 9×12 trio of kitties – what a photographic capture, huh? Mom did a great job, and now I get the pleasure of turning it into a sepia toned monochromatic oil painting that she can cherish. I’ll be working on these purrrfect posers the beginning of the week, so stay tuned for another progress shot (or two)!
