Scribbles & Scribings

Ordinarily I try to wait and post my holiday card artwork after they’ve all been received, but a welcome overload of freelance work meant they were printed late and those heading to recipients are either in transit or being hand-delivered this weekend.  Because of this you can probably tell from the caption, I’m sort of thinking of them as “New Years’ cards.”

This year’s artwork is a bit sillier and self-indulgent than usual: a portrait of our older cat Tinkerbell and our new “teenager” cat Simon. The only meaningful difference between this picture and the daily situation at our house is how static and quiet it is. In reality, this tableau would be immediately followed by yowling and a pair of furry projectiles rocketing through the house. The two cats are actually getting along rather well after two-and-a-half months, except when Simon really, really wants to play… whether Tink does or not.

This artwork was drawn with Micron ink pens on bristol paper and colored digitally.

Here’s wishing everyone out there a wonderful holiday season!

I hope everyone out there is having a great Thanksgiving, able to spend some time with family and/or friends to appreciate all of the good things in their lives. Personally, I’m very grateful for having been born into — and married into — a loving family, for meaningful work that supports me, for a comfortable home to live in. These are the things that really matter, more than “Black Friday” and all the other craziness that goes on this time of year.

So what’s up with this somewhat…. unusual picture? Well, one of the things I’m grateful for has been an increase in client work, but it’s been cutting in on my time for making “for fun” work. As a result, instead of something more personal I’m posting a recent piece I produced for Cactus to promote scratch-off tickets for the Colorado Lottery. It should be only the first in the series for a campaign called “Celebrate the Season,” which is already shaping up to be a lot of fun. They wanted an old-fashioned look, so I drew it in ink to simulate an engraving and added subtle tints to color it; the rest of the series should be in a similar style. I produced this one in record time for the complexity of the drawing, and I look forward to taking a little more time to lavish details on the rest of the series.

I wish you all home, health and happiness for this holiday… have a good one!   

Where did the summer go? Oh, that’s right… between client work, an illustration-heavy project at my day job, and general craziness all the way around, I’ve had very little time for “just for fun” drawing. That’s one of the reasons I like the Doodle Swap Project, a little club of artists and designers who all make tiny trading-card-sized artworks for each other. It gives me an excuse to do some quick, small, simple drawings that I don’t have any time to overthink because they have to get out the door fast.

This time around the theme was “hybrid animals” — chimera, creatures made up of two or more different unrelated animals. Perfect timing for me, since:

a) the idea for little gryphons that are a cross between songbirds and housecats (instead of the more traditional eagles and lions) has been kicking around in my head for a while, and

b) “Backyard” and household fantasy creatures are the theme of my Sketchbook project book. More about that one later…

So, this was a little bit of two birds with one stone. Or something like that. Here are the first few of the cards, I’ll be posting the rest soon. They’re all 2.5 x 3.5 inches, drawn with ink and watercolor pencils on bristol paper.

Anyone else think that these will make nice little notecards?

 So, it was inevitable, after going through the entire alphabet in flowers, that they’d all be reunited when all was said and done. I’m now offering “The Floral Alphabet” as a poster and/or art print in both of my shops: at RedBubble and at Zazzle.

 What’s the difference between the two sites? Basically, it depends on what kind of options you want, and if you were planning on buying anything else from either site. RedBubble’s printing is very high quality, but Zazzle has many more options to pick from.  And both companies are very good about exchanges and returns if you are at all unhappy with the quality of what you receive.

 I should be adding more gifts and housewares using the Floral Alphabet art  to my Zazzle store in the weeks to come, with and without the monograms. If you have any particular requests, please let me know!

This was probably the most finished drawing I drew on the beach during our recent trip to Mexico. The rest from the trip are just simple sketches. I’m sure this drawing doesn’t fully convey just how incredibly windy it was while we were there! In fact, the wind was so constant that the palm fronts stayed in the same upswept position the whole time I was drawing.

If you like this picture, you can buy it on prints or on cards from my RedBubble shop!

So, once again I find myself blowing the dust off my blog. Oh my, has it really been so long since my last post? I could have sworn I’d written something here in November at least!

Then again, I was quite busy through the end of 2010: in addition to working on my own drawing projects, I had a few for other people. More about those later! In the meantime the alphabet continues on:

I’m in the home stretch for this series, and am already thinking of my next project. I’ll have more of an update later, hope this big mega-post makes up somewhat for all the lost time!

   
    ….

Hey, wait a minute… something’s not right there.

I have been trying to upload the images in my Floral Alphabet series in the proper order, but when I sat down to the drawing table, I hit a snag. For “F” I’d chosen the tall and elegant foxglove plant, which had worked out wonderfully in another drawing. However, I’d redesigned the template I was going to use for the series so that it was more square-shaped, and I just could not come up with a solution I was really happy with to frame such a tall flower in the allowed space and have it fit in with the rest of them.

So I’m starting “F” over from scratch, but I didn’t want that to hold up the rest of the series. It will show up sometime later, after I’ve decided on what flower will represent it. Right now I’m leaning toward fuschia… what do you think?

On a side note, if you’re reading this, you probably know I use RedBubble.com to display and sell my art, including the Floral Alphabet series. Well, they’ve done some major remodeling over there and while I’m still adjusting to some of the changes, I do like this: it’s much easier for people who want to buy things to preview what’s on offer for sale from my portfolio, like all of the stickers, all of the shirts, all of the greeting cards, and so on.

I’ve also been slowly-but-surely adding some new products to my Zazzle store, in anticipation of the holidays. Things like customizable photo-cards, address labels, and stamps. As always, if there are any images from this blog you’d like to see on an item in the store that’s not currently offered, please let me know!

Simply Snowflakes Photo Greeting Card Option 2 by critterwings

Simply Snowflakes Vertical Photo Card Option 1 by critterwings

Simply Snowflakes Address Labels by critterwings

All summer I’d been planning on drawing an alphabet of flowers — I even posted the “sketch” versions here already. Now the final drawings are taking shape, and as I finish each one I’m posting them to my RedBubble site, as prints, cards, T-shirts and stickers (stickers are one of the options within “T-shirts”… yes, I know it doesn’t really make sense but there ya go) I have about half of them drawn on paper, and the first batch are scanned and being colored.

Speaking of RedBubble, they’re having an excellent sale on calendars this week, more details in the next post….

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.

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!