Fashion!

Well in preparation for the season premiere of one of my favorite shows, Project Runway, I decided to do some fashion sketches.

The color on this one was a happy mistake in Photoshop...  I generally avoid doing stuff digital because when I do it comes out looking a little forced and flat.  I tweaked a couple settings and decided to play around for at bit.  For once it actually looked a little more natural and had an organic feel to it.

Vector Attack

I have a couple of my old drawings saved to my desktop so when I'm bored they just sit there and stare at me... I know you've seen something similar to these before but they made me do it.  

Drawing

This was a really interesting exercise... There was a lot of back and forth during the process.  One minute I'd be super impressed and happy with where it was going and the next minute I was really underwhelmed.  I think a lot of that came from letting myself overwork it a little.  All in all it turned out okay.  I really do love some things about it... like the feather and the simplicity of the shirt.  

During the early block in stage I thought this would be really fun to play around with using watercolors... Hopefully I'll get to that sooner than later.  I'll post my efforts if they prove worthy.  

On a random side note... A couple months ago I developed an interest in family history and got extremely excited at the thought of putting faces to names.  Over the last couple of weeks I've been gathering and cleaning up family photos and here's a one that I'm proud of.  

Before  vs  After

Patriotic Printable

Long story short I decided I need some seasonal word art to add to my decoration stash... So here is my patriotic piece.  Feel free to download it and use it.  

Please use these images for personal use only and not for resale projects. 

Hulk Hogan

I have a memory of being obsessed with Hulk Hogan when I was younger... There was something about the head wear and florescent yellow that I loved.  I actually did this drawing awhile ago but I found it again just the other day and knew I need to share my love of Hulk Hogan with the world.  It was a quick drawing but it was a lot of fun.

Princesses

As I said in an earlier post I wondered what I'd look like as a mermaid so I took to the internet and found a picture of Ariel.  Once I found the appropriate reference I decided to see if I could do a version of Ariel in what has become my current cartoon short hand.  This little exercise is really what got me going on all the Disney drawings in the first place.

Once I finished up I liked the ideas enough I figured I'd take them a little further.  So out came the scanner and then it was off to working in illustrator to work my magic. 

As with any of my images they're here for your viewing pleasure so please refrain from using them for any commercial project.  Thanks!

Disney Drawing Copies

I always look at other artist works and think "Oh, man I really love how that looks" or "Wow, I've never thought of a head being that shape...".  It's pretty obvious (for me at least) that I tend to stay in my comfort zone when I'm sketching and just draw the same things over and over with a little variation.  Over the years I've heard how educational it can be to copy other artists work, but since I'm lacking in the confidence area I get a little freaked out by the thought of my limited knowledge and skill set trying to replicate a great masters work. So I decided to start a little smaller... I went ahead and tried my hand at some Disney related stuff.   These are all pretty quick sketches somewhere in the range of 5-10 mins max.  

After copying a Bambi drawing I figured what the heck why not take a stab and disnefying my own little creatures.  So here's what I came up with. I spent a little longer on these little guys.

Foxy Lady

Here's a drawing I had fun doing last week.  It was my project runway moment of the week I have the basic 12 color prismacolor set so it was fun to take Tim Gunn's advice and "make it work". I'll be honest though most of the colors I needed were pretty well represented in the set so it wasn't that much work... Well, I hope you enjoy!

This is completely unrelated to the drawing but I grew up watching "stupid comedies" (as my mother calls them) and one of my favorite parts in Wayne's World is when Garth dances to Foxy Lady and does the little fox ear thing... So Silly!

Happy Valentine's Day!

I've been meaning to post this for a couple days and I'm just barely making my deadline with an hour to spare!  A couple weeks ago I offered to help my sister-in-law out by making her kid-lets some custom valentines.  After talking to my niece and nephew she was able to give my some instructions and I got to it.  My niece is pretty into princesses so I came up with this cute idea.  It's pretty straight forward but you're supposed to put 2 slits by her raised hand and insert a sucker as her scepter (as pictured).  I included a high resolution version of the valentine with two per page so feel free to keep it around for next year.

I have excuses...

So I really do have a good reason as to why it's been so long since I posted last... RIGHT before Christmas my husband and I packed up and moved from Utah to Seattle, Washington.  With all the craziness of the holidays we really didn't move into our apartment until right before New Years even though we left Utah on the 18th of December.  The first couple weeks of January were consumed with unpacking and shopping for new things to furnish our apartment.  It's been a very busy couple of weeks but I've still managed to get some art time in there!  I'll be posting some of my latest projects over the next couple days.  

Isn't this little guy cute?  I finished him up right before the move.

Also, check out my new banner.  Being a red head, having a mild obsession with the Little Mermaid since a very young age, and will be living in the rain for the next while I figured I'd see what I'd look like as a mermaid.

It's been a while

Life has been busy busy busy since right after Halloween.  I had a cousin's mission home coming and my brother's wedding which resulted in family being in town.  Thing's have slowed down a little bit for the time being... But it doesn't look like it'll last long. Anyways, here's a quick sketch I did the other night.  

Happy Halloween

Here's some little Halloween Characters I made a couple months back for a mock scrapbook collection.  Maybe I'll get around to posting the rest later.  And yes I stole the witches outfit for my banner...

More Art Time Fun!

Some time in the last week I decided that I wanted to get back into practicing watercolors.  I found this beautiful picture of a cheetah with awesome purples in the shadows on Google image search and couldn't resist.  Plus orange and purple has to be one of my favorite color combinations which probably has something to do with the whole being a redhead thing.  I took the time to draw out the cheetah which took a lot longer than I expected... Well in reality the animal itself went down quite quickly but I was silly enough to draw in each of the spots which I ended up loosing a lot of once I started water coloring.  Pardon the sloppiness of this drawing, primarily in the shading.  It was a rough drawing plus I have a fairly short attention span and was just anxious to start painting.  

I really surprised myself with this one.  I really was expecting this to be a bit of a mess since I don't really feel like I completely understand how to use the medium.  I used "maskit" to preserve my white areas and I was extremely happy with the result.  I have never used it before and I definitely learned a lot in the process.  I decided to add color to the cheetah using water color and then to use india ink for the spots.  I got a little overly confident after coloring the cheetah and destroyed the background... So just ignore the hideous background...

I couldn't handle the background and am a little scared to give it a go again so I doctored it up a tiny bit in photoshop... I think this is a little bit more inline for the value I was planning to achieve.

Wood Letter Crafts

Here's some crafting projects I've been working on as of late...

LDS Relief Society Logo

I was recently worked on a project where I made some decorations for a relief society room... It was a lot of fun and I was pretty happy with the outcome.  I was a little frazzled with the move and all so I forgot to get some pictures.  I'm really bummed I didn't.  I ended up making a burlap "welcome" banner that turned out super cute!  While I was working on it I was surprized that I couldn't find a high resolution image of the Relief Society Logo... So I went a head and got one together.  You should be able to open them and save them at their original size... These are approximately 12" x 12" but if you need something larger or a different color email me.  Please notice the usage policy at the bottom of the post.

Note:  These are vector .png files so if you save it as a .png you should be able to size them indefinitely without any pixelation or graininess.

Original Colors of Seal

Black

Yellow

Blue

Actual Blue of Original Seal

 

Brown

These do not have a background color to them so if you were to print on colored paper it would look like this.

Just the "RS"

My husband had an old shirt that needed to be chucked but he really liked the design on it.  BYU has updated their logo thing and they don't sell this design anymore. So I scanned the shirt and threw together a vector image of the logo for us to have on hand.  When I finally get my Silhouette made I'll try making some stuff with it! 

 here's the shirt

 my copied design

  

 

 **NOTE!!  These cannot be used for retail purposes or anything unrelated to LDS Church activities... Also, please reference the LDS Church Handbook on proper usage policies for any and all church designs, emblems, fonts, and logos.**

LDS Handbook

http://www.lds.org/handbook/handbook-2-administering-the-church/selected-church-policies

Toast's Win a Poster Giveaway!

One of my friend's from school just did his BFA Show and I'm bummed I wasn't able to make it.  He's pretty talented and very dedicated.  I've always been impressed by his willingness to hand ink work before he works it digitally. Definitely one of the most creative people I know... He's got some of his work up on his blog so you should check it out.  Plus, he's giving away a free poster which makes it even better!

Toast: Win a poster!

I'm domestic

For those that know me well they're probably aware that crafting is pretty high up there on my list of favorite things to do.  It probably all stems back to my childhood.  My mom is really big into crafting and sewing and she got me started young.  I remember "sewing" some dresses for my American Girl doll in 4th grade for a project and getting some much praise from my teacher.  In reality my mom probably did most of the work and I just watched but that was kinda the beginning of the hobby for me.

Like two years ago I had bought some fabric and decided that I was going to cover travel cases for baby wipe holders to give to friends when they had babies.  I finally had time last summer while I was cooped up in a hotel room waiting for my husband to get done with his internship.  I had a lot of fun working on them and periodically throw one together when I get the itch to craft.  Here's a couple that I've worked on.  I threw them up on Etsy so when I get the "Oh! You should sell these!" comment I can say that I've tried.  I'm pretty proud of my photography work on these too.  I don't really have any time behind the camera so I was pretty happy with how they turned out.

 If you're interested check out my shop  http://www.etsy.com/shop/dwdecorative?ref=si_shop

Doing what I can...

I redid this drawing with watercolor and I was a lot happier with the outcome.  I'm slowly understanding how watercolors really work.  Life's been a little busy the last couple of weeks so I haven't been able to get as much art related stuff done.  I have finished sewing a couple skirts which hopefully I'll get around to posting a picture of.  We're moving next week so I'll be going a little crazy with all of that business so hopefully I'll be able to have some art time this week.