All the talented people!

One of the perks of being an artist is you get to surround yourself with other amazing talented people. Mary Weaver, a good friend and past coworker of mine recently had her ADORABLE tshirt design accepted and put on sale on this site.



Unfortunately, as is the deal with this site, it was only put on sale for one day and I missed the deadline to post this link ( I know, I totally fail). However, I do invite everyone to check out her blog and site for more awesome illustrations. I'm getting a t-shirt in the mail for my birthday and I can't wait til the package shows up on my front porch!

I also just received word that another friend of mine's husband's cousin's (ok, so the relationship is a tad distant) video has made it to the finals in the HP You on You competition. Having never met this person but having seen his entry, I have to say that I'm impressed:



I'm always a sucker for hand drawn animation, so this would definitely have gotten my vote whether I was friends with a member of his family or not. I encourage anyone who reads this to also go to the competition page and put in their thumbs up for "Chris Hand Drawn."

Save the Date

While checking Design Sponge yesterday (I do this everyday) came across this brilliant stop motion "Save the Date" video that a couple made for their wedding. I can't get over how awesomely brilliant this is! Such a clever way to get the word out.

Save the Date_9/26/09 from Jason Harmon on Vimeo.

Invitations

One of my very good friends from high school will be getting married in October of this year. As one of her bridesmaids I've been helping her with some of the planning and I took on the task of designing the invitations. I jumped at the opportunity to create something awesome and unique (perhaps a little too enthusiastically actually). The theme of the wedding is "Enchanted Forest" so my friend and I discussed giving the invitation and aged fairy tale feel without going overly feminine and Disney looking.

Around the same time I discovered this wonderful product:



A Pazzles Inspiration Creative Cutter! With this machine you can cut just about anything straight from your computer! It's designed for scrapbookers and hobbyists but the more I read about this machine, the more uses I saw for it. What I would give to have had one of these in art school!

Of course, it retails for about $600 off the shelf (a little expensive for my tastes) but after shopping around a little bit, I found a great deal on one on ebay.

My friend's invitations seemed like a great opportunity to see what this creative cutter was made of. I begin sketching forest inspired designs and we ordered the paper.

An unfortunate feature about the Pazzle is it is not made to work with a Mac, which was a big hurdle for me. After a lot of trial and error however, I was able to get a version of Windows to work on my Mac so that I can run the program for the creative cutter. It's a little time consuming to have to restart the computer in Windows every time I want to use the product, but it was worth it for the result.





It took a little time to cut out each invitation individually, and we had to enlist several other friends to help man the machine while we folded and cut the corresponding reception and RSVP cards, but it is still a miracle to me that we were able achieve this quality without shelling out lots of money to pay for custom die cuts or risking loosing a finger cutting out 150 of these with an xacto knife.

I'm looking forward to hearing how they are received after my friend sends them out.

For the Love of Nikon

I recently purchased a Nikon D90 and several lenses to feed my developing photography addiction. My beloved Konica Minolta Dimage Z6 finally bit the dust and I'd been wanting to upgrade to an SLR for quite some time. This may just be the best purchase I have ever made! Since acquiring it I've taken 3000 something photos and I'm loving learning about how to get different effects and play with the focus on it. Shots that I used to have to set up a tripod for I can now take as regular snap shots!

Since Adam and I are moving in together this month, we thought it would be nice to take some "family" photos.

The "parents" with the furry spoiled baby.



A closeup portrait


And a romance shot.



I also got the camera just in time for Adam's sister's wedding last weekend. Nothing like a wedding to act as an opportunity for you to learn how to use your camera!

So I've been very fortunate over the past few days to have an influx of commissions coming in. The downside of this however is that it leaves me with less time to illustrate for fun, so I have nothing new to share today. I did however come across this AMAZING stop motion video done by a fellow SCAD alum, Bang-yao Liu. I do not know him personally, but I'm always happy to support a fellow classmate. As much as I love 3-D animation, it's always encouraging to see more traditional forms of animation being explored. I'm awe of people who have the patience to put together a project like this. Please enjoy:




Pretty awesome huh!

In the spirit of awesome stop motion, I also had to post the following video, "Her Morning Elegance," by Oren Lavie. I know this video has already circled the blog circuit but I love it none-the-less. Every little detail of this video is a work of art!

Fireflies

Last week I got my monthly edition of National Geographic (it feeds my need for travel when I can't afford to actually go anywhere) in the mail and I just now got around to reading it. Towards the front of the magazine was a brief article about how the worlds populations of fireflies are apparently down something like 70%! It had occurred to me that I had seen far fewer of them in recent years but I hadn't seen anything in writing declaring that there is a problem.

Reading this really drove home for me how you really cant take the small things in life for granted. Having fireflies out to light up the night in the summertime is one of those lovely bits of nostalgia that you really don't know you love until they are gone. Perhaps it's just a small thing, but I'm a little saddened by the fact that my future kids may grow up in a world without fireflies.

In tribute:

Pugs

So my boyfriend and I are going to be moving into a house together in July. Along with the standard excitement of having our own place, having a whole house all to ourselves, etc, we also keep bringing up the possibility of eventually getting a puppy. It's something that probably won't happen for awhile since I don't know if I have the energy in me to go through house breaking a dog right now, but it is nice to know that when we decide to get one we will have a yard for it to run around in. We're both pretty quirky people, so we would want to get a dog with a lot personality. Currently, a pug or some sort of a pug mix is seeming like a good fit. Knowing us, our dog would end up looking (and acting) something like this:



Clearly I've got puppies on the brain. :)

Savannah

I recently spent a weekend in Savannah visiting my old roommate. It's always fun to go back to a place that you used to know intimately well and revisit it with a fresh new perspective. One of the things I always loved about Savannah was how close together everything is. It's easy to see all of the main sites the city has to offer in one weekend and yet there is always something new to discover when you come back for a round two. Living there for four years I loved that I had my bank, my job(s), my school, and all of my friends all within a mile of each other. Everything was within a short biking distance, a feature that is very hard to duplicate in a city the size of Atlanta. I do miss commuting to work on bike and don't think I'll ever truly get used to being in my car all the time.

One of my main goals for the trip was to re-shoot a panoramic I'd attempted to take of River Street back in college. The series of photos I used on the last try were good enough for me to use as a reference to paint this for my watercolor final,



but it didn't stand on it's own as a photograph. Parts of it were out of focus and I'd done a poor job merging the seams in several places. So, on my last Savannah excursion, I took the ferry back over to Hutchinson Island, took a new photo about every ten paces, put them together in Photoshop, and came out with this:




A much better result!

I also got a picture of the Talmadge Bridge lit up at night that I was rather pleased with:

Easter time!

It is a wonderful thing to have a pet bunny around during Easter....

They take the cutest pictures!



Happy Easter everyone!

Sewing crafts

So I'm VERY delayed in posting these, but I'm still very proud of the way they all turned out so I'm going to post them anyways. Last Christmas (yes, Christmas) I got very crafty with my presents for everyone (primarily out of a need to save money this year). First, I found this adorable stuffed bird pattern on Spool, downloaded that and converted my apartment into a bird factory over Thanksgiving weekend. Here are a few of the results:



I ended up making about 20 of these little guys. I added the little wire legs so that they would be able to stand-up on their own. A part of me still wants to make more, especially after I saw this BEAUTIFUL bird mobile idea on Design*Sponge, using the same bird pattern. However, while my crafty heart says "yes," my tired fingers say "no." At least for now.

I had already made birds for my coworkers for another occasion, so I had to come up with something new to give them for the holidays. For them I drew out a simple star pattern and then designed a monogram for each of their initials. Using my light table, I painted each of the monograms onto a nice muslin fabric and sewed them into ornaments. For a very impromptu project, I was very pleased with the results!



The good thing about them is they don't have to be just for Christmas. Several of my coworkers came back saying they were using them as door hangers so they could leave them out all year long.

Snow!

So Atlanta was buried under a whopping 6 inches if snow yesterday. A friend of mine who is living in the UK commented that it was even colder here than it is where she is in Bradford England. It snows so infrequently here that a snow day still feels like a gift to me. In a sense, it's God telling me I need to calm down for a day, go run around outside and build a snowman. I got absolutely nothing accomplished, but who could when you have views like this outside your apartment:





My thoughts exactly.

The Four Seasons

Ta da! The four seasons... all at one time!!

Bathtime!!

Remember when you were small, and the bathtub was really just a small swimming pool?

I miss those days.

Unfinished Business

So I had a goal for myself that I was going to illustrate a calendar for every month this year as an incentive to get me to focus on building my portfolio and updating this blog more often. Well, it's almost the end of February now and while I have done some illustrations for said calendar, I'm far behind and have not been keeping up with posting them every month.

So instead, I'm just going to post the two illustrations I DO have done and hope everyone enjoys them. :)

Here's January!



And February!



I'd like to still keep up with this and then maybe by 2010, I'll have a full year completely done.

Perhaps I shouldn't be so hard on myself. I have had a lot of freelance and other events in my life that have kept me very busy. In January I produced 6 illustrations for this adorable little company called Idbids and they were just now posted to their website. It was rather thrilling to have my work posted on the internet by someone other than myself. :)