Scribbles & Scribings

One of the things I like about being at RedBubble is the great community of other artists there. I recently had a chance to collaborate with a whole bunch of them in a project to make a child’s alphabet, each of us illustrating one letter or number. The project is wrapping up and soon a set of prints will be making a grand tour of various schools and child care facilities starting in Scotland.

My contribution, as you can see above, was the letter “F” and it was great fun to make! It and all the rest can be seen in this thread at RedBubble, where you can buy cards or prints if you like. In the meantime, I’m working on my own somewhat simpler alphabet project and hope to have it done soon.

Chinese Zodiac 2011: The Year of the Rabbit by critterwings

Before today is over, it will officially be autumn. To celebrate, Zazzle is having a sale through midnight (PST) Thursday Sept 23: use the coupon code AUTUMNZAZZLE to get 50% off cards, 40% off invitations, 30% off calendars, and 10% off shirts! This is good on all of your purchases at Zazzle, whether they’re from Critterwings, another Zazzle seller, or your own custom items.

Chinese Zodiac 2011: The Year of the Rabbit by critterwings

To celebrate the change of the seasons, I’ve added these two new calendars from my Chinese Zodiac art series, updated for 2011: the Year of the Rabbit. There are also a bunch of brand new mugs, and I’m adding updated pieces every week from this series and from others… get ready for your holiday shopping! If you prefer the vertical one-page style of calendar, I’ve also added these calendars to my RedBubble site — the RedBubble calendars look fantastic. And, as always, if there are any images from this blog, my portfolio, or from my RedBubble site that you’d really like to see for sale on a particular type of gift, let me know.

Here’s a quick piece of new art from my RedBubble site! Sometimes I’ll jump into one of the many challenges or drawing jams there to try something a little different with my style and tools. This time, instead of using inks I made the drawing entirely in pencil, and colored it all in Photoshop. It’s just a quick little study, which is why the background is so very bare.

I’ve been busy dusting off some of my art to make some new items for the Critterwings store… keep an eye out for new announcements very soon!

I haven’t talked much in this blog about comics, but it’s true… our house is full of them. My husband has been collecting since he was 12, while I discovered them later in life. I’m not a big fan of the traditional superhero genre tho, I usually prefer fantasy stories instead, and have become a voracious reader of various online comics. So while he was eager to crawl through the bins at Baltimore Comic-Con a few weeks ago, I’d been saving up my mad money for this past weekend, and my annual pilgrimage to Bethesda, MD for the Small Press Expo.

SPX is one of the longer-running conventions for independent creators and small-scale publishers of comics of all kinds, and increasingly the webcomics folks have been joining in to sell their own “dead tree” editions. This year I also made a detour to a brand-new conference taking place just up the street, Intervention, which was focused more exclusively on the webcomics crowd. Both had authors in attendance I wanted to meet and books I knew I’d want to purchase — Intervention had a few folks who rarely come to this area — so I bit the bullet and paid the separate entry fees… and then spent WAY too much on books! Both also had their share of vendors selling artwork, small crafts, and other fun stuff. The set of tetris magnets I bought is already racking up points on my refrigerator.

Yup, I’m glad I brought the backpack! (I was also hauling around my own sketchbook and camera… not that I ever took either of them out, I guess they were just there as extra ballast) If anyone I ran into this weekend is reading this… HI!!!! It was great meeting and talking with all you wonderful artists/writers! I envy all of you with the drive and dedication to your artform, especially knowing how hard it can be to make a living at it. Kudos!

Would I attend both again next year? Well… honestly the higher entry price for Intervention made it a little hard to justify for me. I don’t generally hang around for the programming at these things. I think I’ve attended 3 panels/presentations in all the years I’ve been going to SPX. I do a round or two through all the tables and then call it a day. And this year in particular I had to leave around 4pm to meet friends for “The Day the Earth Stood Still” which was showing that weekend only at the AFI Theater. Yes, it was an all day geek-fest. I guess I’ll have to see what happens next year. For now I just have to figure out where on my groaning bookshelves these are all going to fit!

If there’s any interest, I can go through my stack of books in more detail…

It seems like I turn around and BAM realize I haven’t made a blog post for over a month and a half. Blame it on the crazy, hazy days of summer. This year it’s been the crazy HOT days of summer around here: we’re officially tied for the most days over 90 degrees in a single summer, and it seemed like we definitely got more than our usual share of 100+ days too.

I spent some of the time I was hiding indoors where it’s air-conditioned at my drawing table, working on my flower alphabet, playing around with materials, and keeping my hand in with sketches, including some rather silly ink drawings and experimenting with watercolor pencils, like in the small piece above. Most of that work has been posted directly to my RedBubble portfolio, I’ll try to remember to cross-post here as well.

I’m also slowly adding new products and upgraded artwork to my Chinese Zodiac series at RedBubble and at my Zazzle store, generally trying to get ready for the holiday season (I can’t believe it’s already time to be thinking about that!) As always, if there’s a particular product that you’d like to see one of my images on, just let me know!