She Sure is {Sketchy} You Drive Me Batty

 Life is exceptionally good these days, pinch me good. When Life is good, I draw birds.

This bird though. This bird made me mad. He was so not cool. However, he reminded me of a bat.

Then I drew a bat.

I liked that a lot better.

Then I drew some more bats.

 

With Surtex growing ever nearer (in the past this time of the year I typically feel as if I'm being chased by my personal version of  The Never Ending Story's Nothing). The end of March always finds me forcing my brain to think so production-y, so market-y, so trend-y.

In a cherished conference call last month, a client pushed Dr. Seuss out of the #1 most quotable things I auto-mantra to myself during 3am jam sessions. Here is what she said, "What I love best about these little guys, and actually everything you've shown us, is that your drawings are utterly disciplined but totally carefree.  I look at everything that you do and I think, "Let's march headlong in to recess".

So this April I am focusing on returning to what I love most about my work, and remembering that when it is good, I am trying -- when it is great, it just happens--that's when it feels like somersaults at the beach.

In summary, this post is about how birds become bats, and how Surtex is gonna rock this year.

My Creative Space

It's been five years since I've had a job interview. You know how they always ask you your greatest weakness? I've been thinking about that a lot lately, and the true answer is, thank you cards.

Case in point. My great and wonderful friend, Rachel, first grade teacher extraordinaire, not only baked the most delicious cup cakes for my birthday, but also gifted me one of the most perfect gifts ever. These Boylan glasses are venn diagrams of perfection.

They are vintage. They are brightly colored in my favorite colors. They are upcycled (they used to be the actual bottles that you buy Boylan soda in! AND while I hate almost all soda, I would trip that lady in the building at job-job that stares at me like a little crocodile bird for a Boylan Root Beer on a hot day, OK...let's be honest,  I'd trip her anyway.) These gorgeous glasses perfectly match my 1950s kitchen, and I love everything that matches my 1950s kitchen. They are in a word: wonderful.

I am making an attempt at righting a very wrong, my weakness to send thank you notes.  So I am making one! I declare that it will be so spectacular that I will be forgiven the long months that have spanned since my par-tay! 

Well, at least I hope it will.

Here is how I am starting.
I am shutterbugging
my lovely gift x 4.etc.

NOW I WILL DIGITAL IT! Then I will sketchy, sketchy, sketchy it!

It is time to color it!

Next I print it!


Now I pull out this magical tool! I Score Pal it!

Fold, and we've gone full circle. Time to Shutterbug it! 

WOOT! Now to stamp it... I am going to report to you when it's in the mail. I need that level of accountability.  Afterall, it's not easy overcoming weakness. 

Pushing Pattern

Before It Was Something

There are 3 major ways the sketchiness you see at She Sure is Sketchy becomes marketable art. Usually I do a sketch. I look at it. I put it aside. I think, "meh..." Weeks, months or years later I am woken at 3 am with a sudden knowledge of WHAT IT NEEDS TO BE!

Sometimes I go through my box o'paper (the bane of my mother's existence in my childhood, now a tax asset). I find snibbits of long forgotten sketches in this idea house -- even if it looks like it houses a gerbil. They suddenly speak to me. From nothing - something.

Sometimes, - the best times, I do a sketch and I just know. I know exactly what it will be. I know exactly how it will look. These flamingos are some such sketches. They're the 'OH man, this is gonna be SO good' kind of work I do.

One great thing about this "Oh man I know exactly" process is how funny it is to witness. Even when I'm the only one staring into my full length mirror to my immediate left in my studio. I watch that girl there in the mirror bite her lip and scribble as fast as she can. Sometimes it looks like the page is going to combust. It's like when a little kid tells you an imaginary story. You know the kind. The kind that run off in rambles:

"THEN THE DRAGONS WOULD COME INTO THE GROCERY STORE AND THEN THEY WOULD JUMP ON THE BREAD! "
Genius.

You're staring at them and they're so excited they're half laughing while they speed talk to make sure they get all THESE GREAT IDEAS out of their heads. The brilliance is just coming so fast. These stories make you grin even though they're beyond reason. You love them all the more because they're little bundles of lunacy.

I am often a little bundle of lunacy

SERIOUSLY THOUGH, OH MAN - THIS IS GONNA BE SO GREAT!

A Change of Pace

What do you do when you lose your creative thread? Do you stop and take a breather? Do you reevaluate? I feel like my creative energy is my life force, when it wains I'm left without much breath to take a breather.

Luckily years at fancy art school, and then years at job-job and various other 'live or die' gigs have taught me that sometimes a dip in creativity is flat out not an option. I've learned that for me, the best thing when I'm just not feeling it is to do something else. As long as I'm being creative, the dip will usually right itself of its own accord.

This week I've been working on some new layouts, new texture maps and new life paths. Did you know we're staring down the barrel at 11 weeks 'til Christmas? I can't quite think about it with my full brain, because it's hard for me to think about snow. Who wants snow?! If you say you do I'm using my favorite modified GLEE phrase of all time. "Snow!?! KILL YOURSELF!"

Incidentally you're looking at barrettes I've been crocheting for one of my favorite fans, albeit one of my littlest.

I'm counting down the holidays by being more resourceful and more Little Woman-like' than I've had the leisure to do as of late. Nicest side effect, other than having some cutesy barrettes ready to wrap, is that I'm itching to get back to my other gigs, the ones that require my 2D skills ;)

What do you do to get back your 'creative mojo' when you feel it packing for holiday?

Snakes on a Blog

That's right! Monkey-Fighting snakes on a Monday - Friday blog!

When I have a concept for illustration I grab the closest piece of paper I have and I scribble random lines on it. I know that my memory is not as awesome as it should be. I'm only 27 but I forget some of my best ideas if I don't make a note. I think when I'm old I'll be one of those funny red-hat ladies with yarn bows tied on all my fingers. The digital age and Google Calendar has made life much, much better. Regardless, I like things tangible and scraps of paper are my preferred medium for note taking or scribble drawings and sketchy thinking.

These snakes first happened at Joya's on Court Street.
Nothing says snakes like a writhing bowl of mundo-delicious flat noodles. I love Joya's because the food is delicious and the service is bad. They have paper on all the tables and if you're a sketchy Brooklynite who always has a pencil tucked behind her ear this is a great place for inspiration while you wait forever and ever for your yummy food -- hence the snakes.

First snakes were sketched in itty bitty scale - around 2x4".
I liked them enough to give them some time and I hit them with red pencils on 10x10" paper.

These are done with my preferred Col-Erase red pencils in cadmium red.
I recommend buying them and trying them out - well that is if you're not in the Brooklyn or Manhattan Burroughs. Finding them here is getting harder and harder. If you must buy them in New York please just stay away from Chelsea's Utrecht and Lee's Art Shop across from Carnegie Hall - those are my haunts and I have dibs.

I always think better when I see my art in red line. I realized these snakes were almost cool but that their faces weren't entrancing. Snakes need entrancing faces. I played with them in pencil once I loved their mugs I attacked them with pastel, watercolor, gauche and digital ink.

When I got to this "finished" stage I was so disappointed with these guys. I thought they were going to be awesome when they were in that very first thumbnail stage. Now they seemed to be missing some face-punch snakiness. I uploaded dirt and grass variations and called my brother. Ashton starts every conversation we have about my work with "OK, but what's my percentage?" ;)

One of the best lessons I learned in college was from a professor who said "If you want to know how your art is going to be received ask anyone you trust. They don't have to have any artistic inkling to know what's wrong or what they think. After all, they're your audience." We looked at them online and I talked about the pros and cons of dirt vs. grass. I was weary of grass because The snakes were already green and I didn't want to lose them. At this point Ashton really wasn't earning his keep. Then he was like "Nah they look great, keep them on Grass. Just do something to make them different than the grass, like you know something artsy you can do." 2 points.

I suggested we add more rocks. He said "yeah, rocks can be good, just make them artsy." So I started scribbling in pastel while we kept chatting. "Kid, you've got to give me something better if you're going to earn that ten percent, yo."

"What if you gave them scales?"

This is where working with younger brothers becomes exasperating "Butch, they already have scales!"

I pictured him shrugging when he said undaunted in his Hawaiian boy attitude "Dude, give them more scales." I hung up exasperated, grabbed a glass of water and came back to the drawing board when I realized,
gee that kid is genius. Meet the snakes, in all their "more scales" glory.

listening to right this second: "right round" -- flo rida

Vermin and Strigiformes Revisited

You know what my favorite thing is?

Like my very, very, favorite!?
Progress.
Word up, yo. Word up.
listening to right this second: "its all been done" -- barenaked ladies

The Night the Fairies Came

is still a blur....
a childhood memory lost in gossamer and light.

I've had this done to this stage since Friday. I was hoping I'd get to watercolor it but you know, deadlines deadlines, deadlines. It'll be a treat to find the time for painting in a few weeks when things calm down. In the meantime I get to animate a Bollywood inspired theme for a project and I get to draw animals having an off the hook party.

I started with rough pencils:
Here are some fairies and dust:
Make sure to enter to win She Sure is Sketchy blog candy!!!
listening to right this second: "32 flavors" -- ani difranco

My Creative Space

You know that book, 'If you give a Pig a Pancake'? --far superior to 'If You Give a Mouse a Cookie' -- To your right you'll see photograpic evidence of 'If You in a Moment of Weakness Share Your Watercolors with a Five Year Old.'

You can see more great creative space at Kirsty's Space.

Return of the Bambini

Sometimes I put something away on a shelf for months and months and pull it out to get a new perspective. If I'm really, really excited about something I'll jump on it as soon as I get a spare second.

This lovely Monday found us the time to revisit the Zucchini Bambini

All my sketches happen fast. I'll usually take the sketches, put them on my light-box and do a final drawing on cold press watercolor paper - for the most part I keep this at 140lb. In redrawing my sketches I work as hard as I can to make it easy (which may seem like an oxymoron, but I assure you it isn't). My sketches happen so fast that I try to keep the final line drawings fast too. I don't call this tracing, I call it cleaning-up or redrawing. If you trace you lose energy - guaranteed. My traditional animation roots really help me keep my head in the right place when it comes to this part of my process.If I keep the drawings happening quickly I don't lose the energy. Because I redraw my sketches and then watercolor on top of the final drawings I don't ever have to worry about ruining a promising drawing when I move onto paint. I always have the unmarred original sketch in my back pocket. I think just the mere removal of this kind of pressure keeps the work fresh and spontaneous. When I first started painting my work I'd go back and redo a drawing over and over if I messed up when moved onto paint. Now I do that less than 5% of the time - if that. Plus, I've grown up a bit and I really like the little imperfections that the paint creates against the paper. I think it makes for richer illustrations.
After I scan my finished watercolors I cut them out with the pen tool in Photoshop. Yay for the pen tool! I LOVE the pen tool. For the most part my deliberate thinking process stops after the illustrations are cut out. I don't know what the surface design I pull together will look like but I know it will be fabulous.
I just kind of toss them together like a salad - or like a vegetable medley in this case ;)
Listening to right this second: "She Wolf" -- Shakira

Why So Sketchy?

My sketches fuel me. I sketch the way a drummer taps on the furniture - constantly. Sketching happens every day. Even the seemingly insignificant sketch can usually yield exciting end products. I can put a sketch down or pin it on my idea tree. When I pick it up in two months or two years time it will take me somewhere else entirely.

Here's one of the end projects from the retro sketches I posted earlier this week. Fun, huh? I'd love to see this as a big over-sized pair of late-Fall pajamas
with chubby star buttons and arms that are a little too long.

All in due course my friends, all in due course.
Listening to right this second: "Back to the Start" -- Lily Allen

Retro Moment

Sometimes late at night, when my eyes water and I fight sleep I like to pull out old stuff.

My watery eyes make it look glam-fab and I have ideas about it I didn't have when I originally penned it.Tonight while streamlining my office I unearthed this old everything book - Circa 2007
These designs were all tossed aside as 'meh.' Something about them make me happy now though, two years later. So I'll develop them and use them to wow my clients.I also like going through my old everything books because they help me ready my answer when people ask me "Have you always been so cool?" After looking back at past me with future me eyes I can quickly answer,
--"Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes!"Now I'll turn these old sketches into current, hip, sassy, sexy, sweet bits of sought after design.But first to bed.

Grooooooorrrrrrlll

That is a sound a lion makes.

Particularly, this lion:

These are some terrifying death-defying color study feats.