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.