Sunday, September 25, 2011

Recent Publications

This month I had a couple of fun items arrive in the mail! Below is a piece that I did for the October issue of Spider Magazine. Such fun, and they are so lovely to work with!


And this one is a cool story, and a good lesson on tagging blog posts/images! A woman contacted me from a French educational publication called Eingana, asking if they could use this image that I did as a project for the collective blog, Running with Paintbrushes. I did a Google Image search for Baba Yaga, and sure enough, my painting popped up. It's great that my work was discovered this way, but even greater that she actually contacted and offered to pay me!

Experimenting with Technique

In July I became a student again, at the Low Residency MFA in Illustration Program at the Hartford Art School. I came home full of inspiration. One of the things I wanted to focus on straight away was my technique. I have been working in watercolors for a long time, but I have been wanting to try something different. Not to change my style, but to mix up my way of working so that I feel more confident in my technique, even as I experiment. Below I outline some of the steps for a new process I am working on.

I begin with a solid drawing using a dark brown Verithin pencil on hotpress watercolor paper


Next, I seal it with a few coats of matte medium, and begin glazing over it with oils.

Finally, I go back in with the brown pencil to strengthen some of the line-work, and there you have it!

So far I am really enjoying working this way. It's fun to mix it up!