The Potbelly Pixie

Ornate Marie

Digitally painted in Photoshop and available as a print, for trade.  Please contact me if you're interested, especially if you have 18th Century France cards to swap!  I'm looking to expand my collection on that theme.

DEATH

Scared you, didn't I? :)~

Actually, the title for this post IS appropriate... but in a figurative sense, not a literal one.  See, tonight I completed the first of three canvases for a Tarot deck project I'm part of at www.illustratedatcs.com, and the card I completed is DEATH. 

I don't know much about tarot and am participating for aesthetic reasons, and reasons of curiosity.  But I'm really intrigued by it and I've been doing some reading.  It seems in many ways to be a sort of "Rorshach inkblot test" -- a concept that's very familiar to me from my psych major years at UCLA.  In other words, the tarot deck seems more like a tool for viewing one's own inner processes, a tool onto which one projects the subconscious (via interpretation of the cards), rather than some kind of magical, mystical, witchcraft kind of thing, which is kinda what I (clearly, naively) thought about it previously.  Interesting stuff!  And there are some truly beautiful decks, from a purely artistic point of view, too.  My favorite site for browsing and learning is Aeclectic Tarot... just in case you're curious, too.

Back on topic, though...

Here's my finished card, DEATH.  I worked larger than usual, on a 5x7 piece of board, using inks and some paint and pencil.   When I was finished with all the hand drawn elements and coloring and fixatives, I scanned it into Photoshop and perfected it digitally as the very last step.  I'm convinced I've lost about twenty billion brain cells today, by spraying fixative in my air-conditioned -- and therefore, not ventilated -- house.  That's a big no-no.  I'll do better next time.

This deck has a due date of May 15 and will be printed shortly thereafter.   The theme of the deck is ZETTI TAROT.  The title, per se, is still undecided.  I believe there's a plan in motion to print copies of the deck professionally and make them available for purchase at a price unbeknownst to me, because that's out of my area and purview.  I'll post here when I have more details!  In the meantime, I'm having a grand time watching the deck come together.  There are some fantastic cards being produced by the artists at that site.  Can't wait to see the finished deck!

Edited 4/30/08 to add:  The due date for artwork on this project has been pushed out to mid June.  Decks will be finished (with border and backside) and printed after that.  I'm hoping to have a finished deck to share, and point you toward for purchase, in July or August. Thanks!

Java #3

One of a set of three ATC's for a coffee-themed swap at ATCsForAll.com.

Acrylic, patterned paper, metallic pen.

Art Trader Zine -- Issue 2

Recently released on the web-->  ART TRADER ZINE, Issue 2, featuring artist trading cards and other awesome mail art, much of it from the talented folks at www.illustratedatcs.com.  It's free to view and a scrummy experience choc full of eye candy, to boot.  All you need is Adobe Reader to view it in .pdf form. 

The zine whips into a gorgeous book when printed at high resolution, which I discovered when I had the first issue printed and bound profesionally, at Kinko's.

Check it out!!

Alice, Doomed

For Kristi.

Fairest

For the EVIL WOMEN and BAD, BAD GIRLS swap at iATCs.

Evil Women & Bad, Bad Girls

That's the theme of the second swap I've hosted at IllustratedATCs.com.  Cards are in from all the participants and I'll be swapping these babies out to all the players tomorrow. 

Here are the first two of my own offerings for this swap; I'm to tired to scan and post the last one.  Tomorrow!

"Naughty"
Marker, colored pencil

"Mrs. Lovett"
Graphite, colored pencil

Periwinkle Narae

Made further edits to my Narae digital faceup, and created an art card I'll keep in my gallery, available for trade as a print.

Chunky Zetti mosaic

BIG HUGE LABS is a cool place to create fun stuff from flickr photos.  You can "Warhol-ize" a photo; create a foldable 8.5x11 mini album; make widgets for use on blogs and websites; and make mosaics, as I've done here.  It's just a few quick steps if you've already got photos uploaded to flickr to go from individual shots to a grid of images like this.

Just wanted to share the entire group of my most recent Zetti chunky book pages, all together.

Process

I tried something new with my Gothic Alice triptych. Which isn't saying that much, actually, because I'm really just making this up as I go along!  It's fun to play without rules. :)

In this case, I first created a pencil sketch on paper, which I've done many times before.  The NEW part is that I then scanned my sketch into my computer and cleaned it up digitally with my pen & tablet (which I'm still learning and playing around with; so fun!) 

After making a few digital changes and erasing some extraneous marks (most of them from my dirty scanner glass; ugh) I lowered the opacity of the line art to something very light and gray, and then printed it out on nice cardstock.  Then, back to the studio table I went.  I inked over the printed lines with a very fine Micron pen, and in places, made changes, like adding fur spikes around the cat's face for one. 

Once my line art was completed for a third time (1st, pencil sketch on paper; 2nd, digital work printed to cardstock; 3rd, inked lines) I moved to the color phase and laid down layers of Prismacolor pencil, using thinner to blend for a smudgy effect.  A very, very spare use of white gel pen at the very end of things added back in highlights and accents in places where they had become obscured.  As a last step, I sprayed several coats of final fixative to my work, to prevent smudging over time.

Here's a look at how that played out.  The top image is the cleaned-up pencil sketch, ready for printing; the second image is my inked line art (which for the first time ever since I started doing ATC's, I scanned and saved to possibly recolor and recustomize for additional Gothic Alice projects); and the third image is my final artwork.

Personally, I love it when I stumble on progressions like this; for sure, one of my favorite things in the art world is the vast number of "process" tutorials, demos, books, and videos available to Joe Every Man, like me.  I learn so much from them.  Well, that, or I just enjoy myself silly taking them in; it's so fun to peek into someone else's methods and mindset.  I can highly recommend you visit YouTube and SEARCH "speed paint" whe you get a chance.  You'll see some amazing (usually digital) process art for yourself!