Sale on stamps at the Critterwings Zazzle shop!

Yes, I know I promised new art, but Thanksgiving preparations have to come first I’m afraid. In the meantime, I wanted to let everyone know about a sale in my Critterwings shop on Zazzle: $5 off sheets of custom stamps! In addition, I’ve lowered my base price on stamps, so if you like my art it’s a great time to stock up on some genuine US postage. Enter the coupon code ZAZZLESTAMPS at checkout. The sale only lasts for 2 more days! Here are some of the stamps I have for sale right now, but there are more designs, sizes and variations available at Zazzle:


“The Holiday Courier” medium size postage by critterwings

Flying Dove Postage stamp
Flying Dove Postage by critterwings

2010: The Year of the Tiger stamp
2010: The Year of the Tiger by critterwings


“The Dragon of Autumn” Small Size Postage by critterwings

If you want to make your own custom stamps with your own design on them, you can do that too, so check out Zazzle.com today. (And new art tonight, I promise!)

New Store offerings

Swallowtail Butterfly

 This is just a quick note to let folks know about the shiny new offerings over at Critterwings.com, including items featuring the swallowtail butterfly seen above.

My CafePress store has just been upgraded and loaded up with all kinds of new goodies, just in the nick of time for holiday shopping!  In addition to mugs, cards, and tote bags, items unique to Cafepress include:

'Jingle Bells' Reindeer Ornament Ceramic ornaments
(comes with red ribbon for hanging)

''The Holiday Courier' Reindeer Water Bottle Aluminum Sigg water bottles

Swallowtail Butterfly Small Pet Food Dish Ceramic pet food dishes

Flying Dove Keepsake Box Wooden keepsake boxes
(with a ceramic tile on the lid)

Dragon of Autumn Throw Pillow Throw pillows

There’s more of everything; the store is organized according to the image you want so take a look around. Of course, other items with these images and more can be found at my Zazzle Store and in my RedBubble Gallery. I’ll be adding new art and new items to all of my stores through mid-December, so be sure to stop by.

Next update: more new art!

From the sketchbook

TV Sketches

I haven’t been posting too many actual “scribbles” lately,  so just for a change of pace here’s a little something that emerged when I was supposed to be working on another drawing.

One of my “bad” work habits is having the TV on while I’m drawing.  This is, incidentally, pretty much the only way I watch most TV since it’s one of the few times I’m actually sitting still that I’m not in front of a computer. I make a point of picking shows for this purpose that are mostly dialog driven or aren’t actually all that engrossing, so I don’t have to watch the screen. I was doing this the other day and just happened to glance up when there was a particularly compelling scene, a dark room with dramatic lighting on the actor so that you only saw the very edges of his already pretty dramatic features. I had to hit pause and capture it, right on the page I was already sketching on. Extra points* for anyone who can name the show!

So even though I was “goofing off” with this one, this week I committed the last of the Chinese Zodiac series to paper and scanned it in. I still have to add colors, but they’ll be done soon, which means the whole series will be showing up very soon in my new Critterwings store… you know about the store, right?  I’m slowly adapting my existing artwork into new products — I added a few mugs with Butterfly images to the Critterwings Zazzle shop this weekend — so stop by frequently to see what’s new!

* Note: Points have no value except the warm glow of knowing that you were right.

New Store: Critterwings.com

Critterwings Studio

Just in time for the holiday season, the new store at Critterwings.com is open for business! It has links to products with my illustrations at several different print-on-demand venders, focusing on special items for Christmas:

Critterwings at Zazzle.com has a wide variety including mugs, shirts, tote bags, magnets, cards, and real US postage.

Critterwings at Cafepress.com has ceramic ornaments, clocks, and other gift items.

Stephsmith at Redbubble.com has calendars, T-shirts, cards, and prints, and the largest assortment of fine art images for sale.

New products will be arriving soon in all the stores. Needless to say, putting this together has slowed down production of new art, hence the lack of blog updates lately, but I’ll be posting more new art here later this week… stay tuned!

An animated step-by-step

It’s been a busy week, but I wanted to post this little extra tidbit to follow on from last week’s post where I described the process I followed to make this image. Here are the same steps, now in fancy animated gif format. It might take a little while to load, so sit back and enjoy!

Dragon of Autumn — Animated GIF

Feeling that Autumn Vibe…

To make up for the short break in my posting schedule, I have something a little extra today: a work-in-progress breakdown of how I produced my latest image.  All of the images below can be clicked for a larger view.

(Or, if you want you can just skip ahead to the finished product!)

First, after figuring out most of the details in pencil first, I use my light table to help create the ink drawing. I’ve been using a brush-pen lately, using the fixed-width Micron pens only for the fine details.

Dragon of Autumn — original ink drawings

As you can see, the leaves were all drawn out separately, because I think I want to reuse them on a future project.

Next the ink drawings are scanned in and cleaned up a bit in Photoshop. I worked on paper that was 17×12 inches because that’s the largest size that will fit on my scanner. My A3 scanner is my current favorite “toy” because it lets me draw larger without having to piece things together after scanning them in sections, saving me SO much time and hassle. Here you can see where I’ve tinted some of the lines where I wanted a more subtle effect.


Dragon of Autumn — ink drawing scan

Next, I blocked in the color areas with flat colors. Doing this first simplifies things a lot later on, when I can use the wand tool to isolate different areas. Usually I put the ink drawing on a separate layer set to “multiply” so the white areas become invisible and color on the layer beneath it. Keeping everything on separate layers make it so much easier to make changes later if I need to.


Dragon of Autumn — flat colors

Adding details to the color is next. At this point I put an approximation of the final background color in, because a plain white background makes it very hard to figure out the correct tonal range and color balance.


Dragon of Autumn — color details

Now I start adding shadows and highlights on separate layers. This is where it really starts taking shape. I always use the shading I already included on the ink drawing as my guide, but because I knew I’d be adding shadows at this step I didn’t do much crosshatching where the more subtle shadows would be.

Dragon of Autumn — shading

Next it’s time to consider the background. The leaves were all colored separately, so I could arrange them however I liked. Because my file sizes were getting very large, I built the leaf frame in a separate file and then copied it into the main file with the dragon.

Dragon of Autumn — leaf frame

The leaves were overwhelming the dragon, so I faded everything back a little bit to make sure they stay in the background.

Dragon of Autumn — leaf frame part 2

It’s almost done, but I felt there was something missing. I wanted to add a little bit of texture to everything, to give it the feel of real autumn leaves. So I broke out my watercolors and made some nice, crinkly textures, which I then scanned in.

Watercolor Textures

And now, with the textures layered into place, the image is finished!

Dragon of Autumn — final artwork

Smile for your closeup… there’s a good dragon!

Dragon of Autumn — close-up detail

Buy art This image is available for sale on prints, cards and T-shirts at my RedBubble site… check it out!

I learned a couple of things working on this project:

  1. I really like working the textures into my ink drawings, I think it adds a dimension that was missing before.
  2. I also liked working with really bright, vivid colors instead of soft tints all the time.
  3. I really need to invest in a new computer, my little Powerbook was gasping as I was creating all of the colors in hi-res and the extra layers from the texture files didn’t help matters. By the end the file was taking almost 20 minutes to save.

For most of my color illustrations, I have downsampled the scan file to a lower resolution to make the colors, and then upsampled the finished color layers back into the full-resolution ink scan. The full-resolution color file tends to be massive (this one would have been well over 1GB if I’d kept everything in a single file) and that approach minimizes how much I have to work with such a huge file. The drawback is that the upsampling softens the colors a bit giving them a watercolor feeling I don’t always want. This time I tried to do everything in the high-resolution file so it’d stay sharp and bright, but it made my computer run painfully slow.

This was a little divergence from my zodiac series, but it was a refreshing one. Now, back to work!

UPDATE:  If you just can’t get enough step-by-step excitement, I’ve also made an animated GIF showing this sequence… in motion!

Calendar sale!

2010 Calendar: Legendary Tales

Buy art

Great news for those who like to plan ahead: RedBubble is having a sale on 2010 calendars for the next few days! In honor of the occasion, I’ve made a calendar, including some images that are available for sale on RedBubble for the first time. As befitting the title — Legendary Tales: Fables and Myths — all of the images come from either Greek mythology or Aesop’s Fables. Check it out!

New artwork is coming soon; I have a few different pieces in different stages of completion, but with luck there will be some new art up in the next few days…

Year of the Rooster

The Year of the Rooster
click to enlarge

Buy art

The latest in my Chinese Zodiac series, The Year of the Rooster is now available for sale at my RedBubble page, as notecards, prints, and T-shirts.

This image was drawn in ink with a brush pen and colored digitally; in the background is the Chinese character for the Rooster. He deserves a closeup, don’t you think?

Detail from “Year of the Rooster”

This colorful fellow took quite a while, but I can’t help myself. I love all the crazy details birds have. 🙂 There’s another complex drawing on my drawing board right now, but I think one of the “simpler” animals will be the next one finished.

The Year of the Sheep

The Year of the Sheep
click to enlarge

Buy art

The latest in my Chinese Zodiac series, The Year of the Sheep is now available for sale at my RedBubble page, as notecards, prints, and T-shirts.

This image was drawn in ink with a brush pen and colored digitally; in the background is the Chinese character for the Sheep.

Sometimes, The Goat is used instead of The Sheep, but I felt the sheep matched better with the characteristics associated with the sign. Sheep people are said to be sincere, gentle, empathetic, artistic, and creative. I based my drawing on a wild sheep from Asia, the Markhour, a relative of the Bighorn sheep who looks more like his goat cousins than the fluffy domesticated sheep.

I hope you like it… I’m coloring a bunch more right now!