More flowers!

E is for Echinacea  I is for Iris  N is for Nasturtium

I’ve finally had a moment to scan in the next batch of artist-trading-cards/sketches for my flower alphabet. What I haven’t had a chance to do yet is start in on the final versions. This spring has been relatively insane, both at work and at home. I’m really missing my drawing table lately, but at this rate I’ll only be able to make brief visits until July.  *sniff* I’m keeping my sketchbook close to console me…

The first set from this series was posted in part 1 and part 2. They’re all the standard 2.5 x 3.5 size for artist trading cards, but they’re still basically first drafts for a series I’m making for my store. This batch isn’t colored yet, but I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to do with them. Perhaps it’s time to start using that dusty and neglected Etsy account, hmm?

Drawing Day… only a week late :)

Drawing Day was June 5. I was excited to join in on the fun, but there was one problem: June 5 I was spending half the day on a plane ride to Denver, where’d I’d be spending the rest of the week at a conference.

Still, a plane ride is a long time sitting still with few distractions, so I whipped out my sketchbook and was faced with the usual performance anxiety when faced with “draw something!” and no other parameters.

Thumb for Drawing Day Doodles at RedBubble The result, a rather imperious cat and some happy little griffins. You can take a look at them in my RedBubble gallery, where there are some much nicer and far more finished works from other participants on display. What do you think? Do they deserve the full treatment and real finished drawing?

Later this week: something that’s not just a pencil sketch, I promise!

Back home from Denver

Someone Wants In

Denver kicked my butt last week. And all I can say is “thank you.”

I had an awesome time attending the InHowse Designer Conference in Denver, and it has left me visually and conceptually recharged. Overcharged, in some ways, since I’m still mulling over things I saw and heard. I attended some excellent speakers on various topics about design process and developed a minor hand cramp from taking notes. I’ll be typing up my notes soon so I’ll be able to comprehend them later. While there, I was able to meet up with some old friends and make some new friends, and had a wonderful time hanging out with all of you at InHowse and across the street at the How Conference. The photo above is me being slightly menaced by the giant blue bear outside the convention center, but it turned out he was just the curious type.

Outside of the conference, I walked. A lot. Denver was a great town to explore, and I’d like to visit again, even if it doesn’t include the massive HOWie pub crawl next time. The day I arrived I was able to swing by the Chalk Art Festival and People’s Fair, which were a nice surprise. Later I stopped by the Denver Art Museum and spent a few hours over at Red Rocks Park before my flight left on Thursday. And I took a ton of photos with my dinky little point-and-shoot camera, most of which are still dumped into a big heap on my hard drive. But here’s a taste of Red Rocks:

At Red Rocks, CO

I’m back home brimming with ideas and inspirations, and more than a little worn out. This week I’ll be trying to assemble all the little bits and pieces floating around in my head and form them into concrete plans for the future. Meanwhile… time for a nap!

Stickers! In Denver!

Yay, stickers

Look what arrived this week, just in time for me to bring with me to the InHowse/HOW Design conference in Denver! These are the new die-cut vinyl stickers from Redbubble, and they live up to my expectations. If you’re there, find me and I might have one to give you!
I’ll have a very limited number of these with me at the conference, but you can always order your own — without the website on them, I made these up special for myself 🙂  Any of the T-shirts in my RedBubble site can be ordered as a sticker instead of a shirt, just click on the “buy/preview” button and choose the Sticker option at the top of the screen. For reference, the dragon is about four inches tall.

I’ve also finished a super-quick but much-needed remodeling job on my main website. (This blog is next in line for a makeover, but it may take a while before I get to it.)

Stephanie Smith Illustration

Between preparations at work and at home for this trip, there hasn’t been much time for new drawings. Hopefully, I’ll be able to make up for in some part in between waiting at airports, spending 5 hours on a plane, and doing some sightseeing in Denver tomorrow. After all, June 5 is Drawing Day! I won’t have my scanner, but I’ll have my camera and my laptop, and will try to post *something* over the weekend on my RedBubble site. See you there!

Sketching at a concert…

… is that weird? Oh well!

Toad Concert Sketches

Last weekend I went to see Toad the Wet Sprocket at a very nice venue in Annapolis, MD, Ram’s Head Live. We had a table right in front of the stage. Between the good view, the nice convenient table, relatively good lighting, and the readily-available paper (namely, the daily specials menus) I just couldn’t help myself. 🙂

I’ve been trying to do more sketching from life instead of photos, but it’s hard with subjects out “in the wild” and moving around. I’m a bit rusty at that, I confess, most of my life drawing practice has been from still, posed models but it’s hard to capture gesture that way. The band was relatively easy since they’re moving but pretty much staying in the same place.  Even so, it was hard to get faces down; the dim lighting and the Strongbow probably didn’t help much either, although there was only minor damage done to my paper, lol. I drew some random pedestrians from a trip to DC last week that came out pretty well too, I’ll post them when I find them. Practice, practice, practice!

I DO have more flower trading cards to post, they’ve been sitting on my drawing board waiting to be scanned for at least two weeks. I’ll try to get some of them posted this week, but odds are slim: I’m heading out to Denver on Saturday for the InHowse Designers Conference, a part of the How Design Conference that’s targeted for in-house design groups like the one I work for. I’ve been trying to get things done at work AND put together a few things of my own to share while I’m there. (Oh, and try to bring a little bit of order to the house, so my husband doesn’t have to spend the better part of a week alone in a pig sty…) I have a feeling my to-do list is longer than my actual available time… isn’t that always the way?

Memorial Day sale at Zazzle.com

Zazzle.com is having a fantastic Memorial Day sale this weekend, good on many of the fine products at my Critterwings shop! In all cases you can mix-and-match styles, artwork, sellers, and even your own custom products, so whether you’re buying mugs, T-shirts, stamps, stickers, and aprons at Critterwings or have something else in mind now is the time to stock up and save!

30% off all aprons, 20% off postage stamps, 50% off posters, and 40% off business cards with sale code MEMORIALSALE, valid through June 1, 2010

There are also a few ongoing sales that are running through the end of June:

15OFFINVITES — 15% off all invitations

TSHIRTS10OFF — 10% off all T-shirts

MUGS15SAVER1 — 15% off three or more mugs

BIZCARDSAVE1 — 15% off business cards

POSTERS1DEAL — 10% off posters

1STICKERDEAL — 10% off all stickers

And remember, Zazzle always offers bulk discounts on almost all of their products if you need a lot of anything.

The Dragon of Winter

The Dragon of Winter detail

It’s a little out-of-season at the moment, but new art has been posted in my RedBubble portfolio! I’ve been working on The Dragon of Winter for a while, a companion piece to The Dragon of Autumn. It took me a while to sort out exactly what I wanted to do with all those snowflakes after I’d drawn them. It was created with the same process: ink drawings, layered together with Photoshop coloring and a few watercolor textures.

The Dragon of Winter

(Also available as one of those cool new stickers RedBubble offers…)

I’ve been working on several new pieces… watch this space!

Illustration Friday: Equipment

 Garden Equipment Sketch
click to enlarge

I finally had a moment to take a break from other things, sit down and do a quick sketch for this week’s Illustration Friday. Nothing fancy, just a fast still life in ink on smooth bristol paper, 9×12 inches. For all that I’ve been thinking about my garden lately, and puttering about in it with this very equipment when I have some time (and the weather cooperates), the yard is still pretty sad. My big accomplishment of the spring was pulling up a bug chunk of the ivy that’s devouring the back yard, but there’s still quite a bit. And it looks like the poison ivy has  made a comeback…

Still, this weekend promises to hold enough nice weather for me to get my tomato plants in the ground, once I clear their bed. And last weekend I had just enough time to plant some seeds before the gentle rains of the past few days started, just what those tiny seeds needed to get a good start. Bit by bit it’s coming together as everything — including me! — recovers from a freakishly snowy winter.

Meanwhile, I’m still hard at work on those flower drawings! Even though they’re not as time-sensitive as the real plants, I can’t wait to add them to the Critterwings store, especially for the new stickers and baby clothes available at Redbubble as I mentioned in my last post. I’m having far too much fun with these!

New Critterwings products from RedBubble

The folks over at RedBubble have been hard at work these days! First, they added postcards to their product list, along with the cards and prints. They’re letting YOU choose what month you want your calendars to start with, so if you needed one that starts any other month besides January you can do that too. Then they added hoodies to their lineup of shirts, and you can choose if you want the image on the front or the back. EDIT: And they’ve also added baby and kid’s T-shirts to the lineup too! RedBubble does some of the nicest on-demand T-shirt printing I’ve seen so this is great news.

But this is one of the coolest things I’ve seen by far: die-cut stickers.

Year of the Rooster StickerDragon of Autumn sticker at RedBubble.com

That’s right, any one of the designs in my T-shirt gallery at Redbubble can be ordered as a large (about 3″) vinyl die-cut sticker. Just click on the “buy/preview” button for any T-shirt and choose the “sticker” option — I’m loving the way the Chinese Zodiac animals look! If I needed any more motivation to add more T-shirt designs to my collection, I have it now… 🙂

Flower Alphabet sketches continued

B is for Begonia C is for Columbine W is for Wisteria

It’s been busy around here with spring cleaning and getting stuff done in the garden. But just because I haven’t had the time to participate in Illustration Friday the past couple of weeks doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy on the drawing board. (In fact, I had an idea for “cocoon” I really wanted to draw, but the week ended way too quickly…)

M is for Morning Glory F is for Foxglove J is for Jasmine

Here are the rest of the first batch of  Flower Alphabet Artist Trading Cards continued from my last post, most of which were sent out as part of an art swap. The remaining cards may very well end up for sale, they’re all 2 1/2 by 3 1/2 inches, drawn with ink on bristol paper with some quick colors added with colored pencil. I’m finishing up the rest of the alphabet in this format to make sure I like the layouts — most of them are just waiting to be colored and scanned — and then I’ll be drawing them all again to make finished art for the online shops. Anyone have any particular products they’d like to see with this art on it?

L is for Lily          K is for King's Spear

I guess it’s a sign of how much I want to whip my garden into shape, but I’ve been having a blast researching and drawing all of these flowers! Some of them have been difficult to find a good garden flower for (like “K”) and others have so many possibilities it’s hard to choose between them. And in the meantime, I need to get some of these planted in my real garden!