Not Posted Until Now: The Eldest Magician

This is an illustration for one of the Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling. This story is "The Crab that Played with the Sea" about how the crab got its claws

Joel Grothaus

this here is a portrait of Joel Grothaus I did for children's book illustration. It is a watercolor with ink

The imaginary client would be whoever it is that is publishing the "so you're going to be a grandma . . . " book that Joel has been working on these last few months. Its a proposed book-jacket illustration. Never mind the impracticality of having a book jacket illustration of an illustrator done by some other illustrator.

Check Joel out, he's in the blogroll.

Vonnegut

heres a blast from the past

this painting is from way back in 2008, but I only just now got around to properly documenting it and disseminating it throughout the internets

its my portrait of Kurt Vonnegut. The assignment was to do someone famous and meaningful to me, but who was dead. I almost didn't do Vonnegut because it seemed like such an obvious choice, but no matter how much I brainstormed, doing anybody else seemed insincere.

The Heartskull

So as you may recall i showed you the sketch for this one a few weeks back. This isn't the crop that we will be working with for the final edition, but this is how she turned out.
In case anybody wants to assign meaning to this, it pretty much means that I only think with my heart these days. What a sap, right?

so this week I attended the Southern Graphics Council printmaking conference in Chicago
here are some highlights that I saw while there
there's my print on display as part of the conference's portfolio exchange.

this is from Columbia's book arts gallery. Some of those really are rocks, but most of them are books that have been sanded into rock shapes. every podium in the book arts gallery has gloves and they encourage viewers to put them on and handle the books

Columbia student's handmade papers

I don't know how well you can see whats going on here from the picture I took, but this box contains 15 or so screenprinted sheets of plexiglass suspended with an inch or two of air in between each of them. The effect is pretty cool.

Woodblock printing applied to 3-dimensional art.

Manifestation

This is the print that I editioned for the portfolio exchange at the Southern Graphics Council conference taking place in Chicago this week (http://www2.colum.edu/sgc/).

I printed in sepia because the image reminded me of 1920's style spiritualist visuals, and I thought the color might evoke the photography of that era

Somerset Bags

These are illustrations for reusable shopping bags we are designing for Somerset Mall.  The contest isnt due for another 2-3 weeks, but Lebarre is making us do it as a project and he wants it NOW! I'm hedging my bets, so I did 2.

They were watercolored and inked, then livetraced in Adobe Illustrator