ring of blue

Hooray for personal illustrations!! This is the tight sketch/color study for an illustration I am starting based off of this poem:

I sing to you, I bring to you, a ring of blue, my love.
Through swollen sky no bird could fly, but I alone would come.
This gale may claim my feathered frame, though my heart belongs to you.
For it cannot be, my love, you see - no bird may love a man.

I'm thinking mixed media - mostly acrylic and digital, but I may print it out on a nice high quality textured paper and embellish it with embroidery.... Or I was thinking I might just go ahead and embroider the whole bird (as in my North American Review illustration) and do the hand and background acrylic and then put it all together digitally... We'll see.

final pezzettino posters

Final poster designs for the lovely Margaret Stutt.

September

My last calendar illustration for the month of September. It has nothing to do with the month but I liked the idea so I ran with it.

character concepts

Studio Sunday is writing a fairy tale of sorts - that will possibly translate into an installation at a local art gallery. Woohoo for keeping busy!! These are studies for a protagonist... She's a young girl, wears the head/skin of the wolf. Still doin studies for what her clothes would actually look like...

rikki tikki tavi

Rikki Tikki Tavi is a short story in The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling (one of my favorite authors). I did this about two years ago in a "painting for illustration" class. It's done in watercolor and colored pencil and it's actually cut out of a piece of paper and kinda just hangin out by itself because the background I did sucked... I brought it out to see what I could do with it because I still really like it - so that's another project I'm working on at the moment.

ireland panorama

I found this while cleaning up some files on my computer... forgot I had it! This is a picture from the 4 weeks I spent in the town of Ballyvaughan, in County Clare, Ireland. It is located in the Burren and right on Galway Bay on the west coast of Ireland. This was taken from the back road that eventually lead to the school, which can actually be seen in the image if it was bigger. And a few of us climbed that huge bluff in the picture and it was the single most inspiring thing I've ever done in my life. Utterly amazing and I'm still speechless! That was about 4 years ago now I believe... It was such an amazing experience. It was through a school program and we each had to create artwork by the end of the 4 weeks that was inspired by our time there - you can check out my work here if anyone's interested.

calendar stuff

So two calendar images completed for Studio Sunday!! I have one more on the way but I left the file at someone's house so I haven't been working on it.... woopsies. Anyways, the bottom one isn't going to be in the calendar - it's just a joke - just for you Jackie! The top two are January (very top) and May. The May illustration was inspired by this German tradition that I read about - on the night before May 1 a guy will plant a birch tree in the yard of his beloved and adorn it with ribbons and such. I thought it sounded cute so that's that...