Packing and more Packing

A few more weeks to go until Dan and I are settled in our new apartment. We'll have a large portion for a studio, a good sized dining room (no more eating while sitting on the floor), an upstairs with a bedroom and a quirky closet, a living room with a glass door; it leads out to a fair sized balcony which overlooks a HUGE backyard with a fire pit...the list goes on! Best part is that it's inexpensive. All inclusive and only $1100 a month.

Until then, we're dealing with the constant haywire of strangers eye-balling our current home. We're hoping for someone to take over for us, but damn it's a pain in the ass cleaning just about every day to show off the place. The landlord lets us know a few hours in advance that someone will be coming to look at our place, I scramble to clean, the people look...and the cycle continues.

As far as packing goes... it's convenient living next to a large appliance store, just today I was digging through their dumpster to look for some jumbo sized boxes :D Bit by bit we're getting outta here!

So on another topic, my friend and I decided to gang up and start a graphic design/illustration/toy business together. By the *end of October we'll have our website up. We're in the midst of coming up with a business name so we can register that title to the Small Business Centre. We're both working on a few projects as I speak:

- Dinosquare toy tag (including the product name and our website)

- Our website

- The first design in our NEW toy series.

- Ordering eyeballs for the toys

- A tag design for LoopClothing

I had planned to make a new website for just myself, but this way it'll be a little cheaper, also stronger with both our voices in the mix.

I'm off to pack some more.

-Heather

*The website will be up depending on how busy we are with the move

Fruit for thought

So a friend of mine requested that I design her next tattoo.

Botanical illustration with watercolour first came to mind when I thought of what she was explaining to me. She told me she wanted something "girly and pretty" with some "realism" in there.

After the strawberry design, I couldn't help but start on some new projects. So I did a few Raspberries...

These were a lot of fun to make, so the next project I thought could be a warmup for a large illustration I'm planning. Here's a little breakdown on the development:

I darkened this a bit in photoshop so you guys can actually see it.

So in that image I'm drawing a basic outline for the layout.

Next the underpainting is applied. This makes all the finishing colours more rich in appearance.

This is when I start to apply the next layer. The greens, and some of the shadows are being formed. It's important to keep the highlights nice and crisp until you know what effect you want. In this case, blueberries have a matte texture to their skin, which means light doesn't bounce off to make them shiny in appearance. In the raspberry and strawberry painting, I had to reserve the whites with masking fluid because they do have a shiny look.

Next I establish the heavier colours and also make some layout decisions (the bottom-most green berry was added to balance the image better). Some of the veins in the leaf take form.

The final layer of colour is applied, some late layout decisions are made (third from the bottom green berry) This is when the blueberries take on their true colour from all those purple tints in the previous stages.

Inking is a little tricky. There was a phrase in Doug Chiang's book "Mechanika - Creating the Art of Science Fiction" that basically explained the process of inking. Carefully choose what you want to ink and leave the rest for the audience to build in their minds. It makes for a more attractive piece of art in the end.

I've still got shit tonnes to learn about watercolour. I wanted to use it for the first time when I saw a friend's work, Oswald Kenneth Schenk. An AWESOME watercolourist/graphic designer. He's dead now...but he was a real character apparently, that's what my mom tells me. He wanted to marry my grandma originally.

anyway, that's all for now