day 18: needle felting

I keep not blogging about what I am actually working on. Mostly there isn't anything to show. At Imagine I've been working on bug fixes or game art. I don't think it's appropriate to show my in-progress freelance work until after it's published. And I've been too busy with that to do any personal work. I do have a little snippet of something I will show in a couple days, but in the meantime, more random things from me!

A favorite TV show: That's Clever. Not on anymore which makes me sad. Each episode shows three craftspeople making a project. They show the gamut from glass blowers, metal workers, ceramic artists, scrapbookers, to woodworkers, bookbinders, soap makers, etc, and etc. (This is where I discovered encaustic painting.) I love watching people be skilled at their craft. I learned about needle felting from this show and had to give it a try. So I made some Christmas gifts a couple years back.

A deer for Jim, an avid bow hunter:

Kringer for Nate, fan of fans of He-Man*:

And an "envelope" to hold a gift card for my mom to get herself a new coat:

It's a pretty fun craft. The instructions are essentially: take a loose wad of wool and keep poking at it with a needle until it turns into something cute! 

 Here are some beautiful skeins of natural wool roving.

Brightly dyed wool.

 Felting needles. The little barbs catch the the wool fibers and lock them together.

So the more you jab at it with the needle, the denser the wool becomes and it holds its shape. Look! I've made a Kringer hairball!

Thanks for joining me for Maryn's Crafty-times!

*PS - Nate posted some epic news for himself yesterday. Congrats Nate, the ol' castle never looked better!

day 17: early influences

Yesterday at Imagine Learning we had our first group discussion of Steal Like an Artist. I hate to be so evangelical about it, but it really is an inspiring little book. At the end of the discussion we went around and each named some of our biggest artistic influences, who we admired, and who we "stole" from the most when starting out. Here's my list:

Mary Blair
One of my favorite illustrators ever. I love her sense of design and rhythm. It's whimsical and colorful and of course it's freaking cute!

William Joyce
Admittedly, this was the illustrator I flat out copied while in school. I was especially drawn to the pre-WW2 and 1940's aesthetic and he has the best robot and vehicle design. I also admire his use of space in his illustrations. He paints scenes like they are from the epic golden age of hollywood movies and I learned a lot about space and using foreground elements from him.

If you haven't seen The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore (won Best Animated Short Academy Award earlier this year) at least watch this trailer.

Richard Hull
This is the guy who taught me how to paint. I think everyone in class copied his technique. Richard's paintings are full of fun little details, beautiful color and intricate composition. I got really good at noodling tiny details because of Richard.

Drew Struzan
I always kept trying to figure out how to copy his technique. I used to paint with acrylics, then I tried combining that with colored pencils once I researched how he worked. I never quite got his technique down exactly, but I came up with my own thing by trying to learn it. Which is entirely the point.

JC Leyendecker
The predecessor to Drew Struzan, this is the guy Struzan tried to copy when he started out. Leyendecker's illustrations are luxurious and shiny and elegant. I love the sharp angles and bold brush strokes. I could never come close to imitating him, but he was my favorite of the old school illustrators.

NC Wyeth
Favorite of the Brandywine illustrators (Howard Pyle's school). Great composition, great drama, beautiful color.

A few other artists I love: Jessie Wilcox Smith and Rose O'Neill and Minerva Teichert

day 16: owl and horse-thing

Entirely random doodle I did last night while taking a break from painting English gardens. Have no idea what these guys are on about, but it's probably a fascinating conversation.

day 15: spb6 dancing diva

Dancing Divas, the sixth and final book of the Sugar Plum Ballerinas Series. This one is told from the point of view of Epatha: half Italian, half Puerto Rican, all fabulous!

So, this maybe has been out since May 8. Super slacking on the promotion bandwagon, sorry bout that book. Epatha is my favorite of the sugar plums. She is very dramatic in everything she does, so she was fun to add flair to all of her gestures. All the girls are great little characters in these books, Whoopi and Deborah did such a great job with them. Congratulations to them on a wonderful series! Thanks for having me!

day 14: bevels

I think Sundays will be good to do some kind of tip or tutorial or some such thing like that. Make it a weekly thing. That being said, today I think I'll talk about the Bevel Blending Option in Photoshop. I used to avoid it like the plague. It always made me think of bad logos and ugly UI buttons. But I've been using it more and more lately. Maybe I shouldn't, but I'm kind of liking it.

Puppets made in Photoshop for animating in After Effects

Right click on  your layer and click Blending Options... or just double click on the layer's thumbnail.

If you've never used the bevel tool, you can find it in the Blending Options palette for a layer. I try to keep it on the subtle side so it's not too obnoxious. It's usually in the 1 or 2 pixel range. In addition to adjusting Size and Soften, don't forget to try Depth as well.

Kind of a tangent, but I thought I'd show the steps of how I made those animals above. These were made to animate, and the bevel, along with a little drop shadow, gives them just enough dimension to seem more like actual little paper cutout puppets. Sort of. Anyway...

Original sketch. I was looking at Oaxacan folk art when designing these guys.

I brought the sketch into Flash and made all the separate pieces on different layers. Then I exploded them out so nothing overlapped, and exported the pieces as a png. I reassembled in Photoshop, lining up all the pieces on separate layers.

I have folders full of textures and fabrics. Mayang Textures is a great resource.

Here's a piece of tweed I found and then played with different colors and layer properties until I got something I liked.

I want to add the texture to the top shell. When I hold down the Command key and click on the shell layer thumbnail, it selects the shell. (The shell layer doesn't have to be selected to do this.)

Making sure you have the texture layer selected, click on the little gray box with the white circle at the bottom of the layers palette. This makes a mask from your earlier selection. If you click on the chain between the mask and the layer thumbnail, then make sure the layer thumbnail is selected, you can move the texture around beneath the mask to position it just how you'd like. Then add your blending options, and you're done!

Here's another example of using the bevel tool. The illustrations in this project were meant to be those chipboard type stickers in scrapbooks. So after making the characters in Flash, I brought them into Photoshop. I Command clicked on the layer thumbnail to select the image and then in Select>Modify>Expand... I expanded the selection about 10 pixels or so, then on a separate layer filled it that cream color. I then added the Bevel to the cream layer.

And one final little step-by-step with bevels. Sometimes the bevel tool isn't enough and I have to paint in my own bevel.

Finished illustration for three rhyming words in Russian: Picture, Car and Tire (or was it Wheel? don't remember.)

Character imported from Flash.

Standard Bevel and Drop Shadow applied to the layer.

Because this guy wasn't in lots of pieces like the armadillo, the standard bevel wouldn't cut it. I had to go in and paint some of my own bevels and shadows. Then I added a little bit of shading and accents to finish him off.

 And thus, there is how I use the Bevel tool.

day 13: ghost bees

The Misadventures of Dr. John H. Watson

Nobody hates Holmes like Sir Arthur hates Holmes.

You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism.

The Cabin Pressure Crew

A sort of companion post to yesterday's entry: some fabulous Sherlock Holmes and Cabin Pressure illustrations by a chap named Basil with a tumblr named Ghost Bees & Consulting Detectives. (I'm kind of jealous of the awesome name.) It's delightful stuff, and if you are a Sherlock Holmes nerd like I've recently become, so funny. I really like the style, his clean linework, the little cropped heads at the bottom of the space, and his watercolors are quite fun. They remind me of the old Jeeves & Wooster* book covers that Steven Guarnaccia did. Also, I really enjoy that occasionally he draws little pictures of what he wore that week. Dapper fellow!




*Drive by rec for anything written by P.G. Wodehouse. Or if reading is not your thing, watch the old tv series starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. And thus ends my weekend of overt Anglophilic gushing. Apologies.

day 12: cabin pressure

Super exciting party girl me is partying it up this Friday night. Yep, I'm sittin' at my computer working on some freelance. Shake it up woot woot! Actually, I have a silly grin on my face while working because I am listening to some John Finnemore. I can't always listen to audiobooks or tv shows while I am working. It depends on what I'm doing. If it's just straight-up painting without too much brainwork, I like to mix it up and listen to something besides music.

So earlier this year I maybe got a little obsessed with the whole BBC Sherlock show. Which introduced me to a BBC radio show called Cabin Pressure. It's an old-school style radio sitcom about a small crew of a charter jet airline. Or rather as they only have one plane, it's more of an air-dot.

It's written by John Finnemore, who also plays the resident idiot Arthur (see photo above) and it is HI-larious. Basically go to YouTube and type in his name, and listen to anything that comes up. (link to YouTube channel that has all the Cabin Pressure episodes) His Souvenir Programme is also quite entertaining.

Alrighty! Back to Qikiqtarjuaq and painting! Happy weekend to you!

day 11: quackers

From today's Vision Conference event...

day 10: field trip

Every July at Imagine Learning, we have a week-long Vision Conference. There are motivational speakers, company updates, training, teamy togetherness, fun-time activities and lots of food. Today the Art Department went on a field trip up to Salt Lake. We spent the morning at the new Rio Tinto Natural History Museum at the University of Utah. It was fabulous! It just opened in November. Beautiful architecture and engaging well-designed exhibits made it a great trip. I'm not a natural history or dinosaur buff, so while it was interesting, I didn't looooooove it. But it was a nice visit. I'd definitely recommend taking the fam to it.

After lunch we headed over to The Leonardo, a new contemporary art museum in downtown Salt Lake. We met up with the Writers and split up into teams to go on a scavenger hunt through the exhibits. We were a slacker team, and ultimately gave up and did a multi-tasking experiment. We each spit into our own cup for about 5 minutes and then memorized letters while doing math problems. The idea is to see if multi-tasking is a genetic trait. We'll have to wait until October to find out the results. Btw, I am not an excellent multi-tasker.

The museum was lovely. There were some neat exhibits. But I kinda don't really care all that much about contemporary installation art. So no big rush to go back, but I'd be interested to see what new exhibits pass through.

day 9: kites

I just realized I've never posted this. I did this earlier this year for a cover for The Friend Magazine. Always a good gig. Looking at this again, I'm amazed at myself for drawing so many individual blades of grass. Must have been in a grassy mood that day.

Also, this is another good example of a Photoshop cheat that I like: gaussian blur the heck out of the background so you don't have to spend so much time on details (when it's not important). Saves a lot of time.

day 8: sneak peak - santa dolorosa

Here's a little something I've been working on here and there. This is the digital painting/sketch for a big encaustic painting. I've transferred the face to the wax to use as an underpainting for pastels and then the rest will be a built up monochromatic wax texture. Well, that's the plan anyway. I'm hoping to have time this weekend to work on it some more.

day 7: shadowbox-dimensional artists

Magda Trzaski
I love her pieces. They make me wish my brain came up with this style. Hopefully someday I'll at least own one.

Joseph Cornell
One of the pioneers of assemblage. 

 

Rednose Studio - Chris Sickels
Love this style, the detail and mix of sculpting and found objects.

Yulia Brodskaya

Beautiful typography and clever elevation of the art of quilling.

Graceann Warn
Encaustic and found objects. I just found this while looking for a different encaustic assemblage artist whose name I can't remember. I'm a sucker for any astronomical type pieces like these.

Alex CF
Makes really cool realistic cryptozoological boxes and specimens. I'd love to make stuff like this.

day 6: neil gaiman graduation speech

Neil Gaiman Addresses the University of the Arts Class of 2012 from The University of the Arts (Phl) on Vimeo.



A must-see.

day 5: freelance v. inhouse

Imagine Learning inhouse flyer for trip to Soldier's Hollow.

Today is my seven year anniversary working at Imagine Learning. It's a good gig and I work with some great people. The art team has doubled in the past year and a half. For the longest time it just just me, Jim Madsen and Nate Baertsch. Then Jed Henry came along to spice things up. And last fall we hired Hollie Hibbert and Jake Parker. All very talented folk. Check 'em out, they've all got really interesting things going on.

Illustration for The Friend Magazine.

One thing we all have in common besides working at Imagine Learning is that we all do freelance. Students like to ask which is better: freelance or inhouse? I guess ultimately it comes down to opportunity and personality. I prefer having to get up and go somewhere else to work. I like having the security of the paycheck and health insurance. But some people prefer to be their own boss and like the flexibility that comes with the freelance life. I, personally, was terrible at it. I was bad at dealing with the financial side and was always broke. And was maybe going a little stir crazy being by myself all day every day.

Anyway, not much going on today. I've been flat on my back most of the day, which was annoying as I have a lot to do. At least the cat was being cuddly and made for a nice heating pad on my side.