New Year. New Projects to Share.

Goals are part of a NEW Year, right? Well, sometimes life’s, life gets in the way of sharing all of the projects, comings and goings. I spend a lot of time doing, creating, designing, working and less on the sharing. This year, I’m going to try and change that. 🙂

Share more process. Share more technique. Share more glimpses into what’s happening in the Studio. I’m a technique junkie and I’m always exploring it in my work.

So here’s what’s happening in the Studio TODAY:

I’m amping up my illustration portfolio, so the last years worth of sketch work is NOW going to come alive. Today, I’m completing work on this mixed media piece I created.

This SEAshell piece was illustrated at 7 3/4 x 3 3/4 on Stonehenge paper. Paper is important. Whoosh, I LOVE PAPER! Ask anyone who has visited my Studio. 🙂 Using colored pencils (Luminance and Prismacolor), NeoPastels and NeoColorII, I took this project from sketch and brought it to life using HEAT on THIS.

Icarus Art Drawing Board – Invented by Ester Roi

I bought the Icarus Art Board awhile back and I have practiced different techniques using it taking quite a bit of time to figure out how I wanted to integrate this tool into my art plans. I LOVE the results. The board heats up on one side (warm zone) and has a cool zone. I can move my project back and forth between COOL and WARM to blend wax based mediums like colored pencils, pastel and watercolor crayons. So, I can draw on the cool zone, apply color, build up color and then move it to the warm zone to blend it out and give it a painterly look. It cuts down on production time and I’ve found a real rhythm working with it.

Let’s walk through the evolution of this piece. Here is how the background came to life.

Below is the final. Notice the speckled background. I used the grated shavings from the colored pencils (white, blue and brown) and sprinkled them on to the finished drawing. Then, using the heat of the board and a brayer, I placed a piece of tissue over the drawing and rolled the brayer over it embedding/melting the shavings into the art.

HOW stinkin’ cool is that?

The top illustration is the finished piece. The bottom version was digimixmashed with typography to create the FINAL print. I have a little TYPE tweaking to do and then I will be getting a canvas print. I’ll share more about the canvas print and it’s final stage in another post. So, follow the progress.

Get your Art on!