night song : shadowbox

It's finished! What do you think?

I wish I could have figured out how to take a good photo of the stars glowing, because they do and it looks very cute glowing in the darkness. My camera is still fairly new, so... I'm still learning.

night song : shadowbox for a nursery

I'm currently working on a commissioned piece from co-owners, Christy & Sherri of Paisley Place Designs. Christy was privy to seeing the "owl's tree" shadowbox at a baby shower, that I made as a gift for my good friends Kelli & Chris Taylor of Purple Tree Photography. She liked it so much that she contacted Sherri and together they decided they had to have a commissioned piece done for a nursery. The piece is called "night song" and is still in progress. I'll post the finished piece once it's done but, I know some people like to see artwork in stages.

I did two concept sketches for them. Here's the preliminary sketch they chose to go with. The major colors will be greens, browns and yellows, with a few accent colors and details. The bird itself will be needle-felted, a real-wood stick for the tree branch, tiny modern shaped stars & clouds. The background will be done in a patterned-modern paper, by a paper company that I just adore called Cosmo Cricket.

After the sketch, I decided to make the shapes of the clouds and stars in Illustrator. Since I was already creating vector-based art, I decided to sort of lay out the whole thing as a quick flat graphic. I printed it, cut it out, and slid it into the shadowbox frame to make sure I liked the proportions of everything. Now the fun part... creating all of the pieces!

More to come soon! Stay tuned...

inspiration : birdy illustration

A few weeks ago, heck... probably a month or two ago (because time goes so fast, it's hard to keep track), I did an illustration in my sketchbook of a frilly kind of bird. I've been thinking about turning it into a watercolor painting for quite awhile. Today I scanned it so that I could transfer it to my watercolor paper.

A few friends have commented that they like to see the progression of my previous paintings in my blog entries, so in continuing with that realm of thinking, I'm going to post the initial sketch.