Christmas :)

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas with their family and friends. This is my favorite picture from this holiday. Me with my Pappy Chet. I always have a wonderful time with my grandparents.

Danny Meadow Mouse pages

Here are some illustrations from the story "Danny Meadow Mouse" that I have illustrated. This makes 2 children books that I have completely on my tablet.

New book Cover

Here is another Children Book cover that I have completed.

Funny Faces

Sometimes you just need to make funny faces. This is my nephew Toben, and I having fun with my phone. He loves copying faces so I took advantage of it and started making silly faces and he copied.

Finished Double Irish Chain Quilt

Here you can see me finishing up the sewing of the quilt. I took the entire finished top, along with the batting and the back to my aunts house in Bedford county. There, along with my grandmother, we used her new quilting machine to finish up the quilt. Normally I would have my grandmother quilt it and I would attempt to hand quilt along with her. She is very fast at it but I wanted to have it done in a day. Plus I had never used a quilting machine before and I wanted to see how it works. The finished product came out really nice. You can see where I quilted and how I need to learn to make smoother lines but I like how it came out. Hopefully the person receiving it as a Christmas gift thinks so too :)

Velveteen Rabbit Cover

I've been working for a new site called Great Stories 4 Kids as an illustrator for children's books. Here is the cover for the first book I completed. The site is not up and running yet but I'll keep you posted for when it is. The site's goal is to encourage children to read along with online books. The Velveteen Rabbit was my first project and I am very pleased how it all turned out. The second picture is the first page in the story. I'm doing all of the illustrations on a Bamboo Tablet and I'm loving it. I've been doing 1-3 drawings a night. It's a great feeling finishing these books. Soon you can check them out at www.greatstories4kids.com.

Keeping up with sewing projects

As it comes closer to Christmas time, one of my gifts is going to be a quilt. Hopefully the person I am making this for doesn't look at my blog in the next few weeks. It's a simple pattern called the Double Irish Chain. I plan on finishing it this week and spending a day at my aunts house next week and using her quilting machine to finish it. I'm excited to use her machine, I've never seen or used one before. You can see the pattern start to come together in the image on the right.

Finished Tablet Drawing

Here is the finished drawing from before. There are some parts that I really enjoy like the tree in the background but I also feel I still need to work on my nature scenes.

More tablet drawings

Here is another tablet drawing. It's not finished but it looked pretty cool so far. Sometimes unfinished work looks better than finished work.

Tablet Drawing

I finally got myself a Bamboo tablet. I recently was asked to do some drawings for some online children's books, and to get me started, they bought me a tablet. It just came in the mail a few days ago and the first thing I did was a self portrait. Something they can put on there website with a short artist bio. Overall, I feel like I captured my messy hair pretty well. It was done fairly quick so I might go back in and work on the skin tones. But all in all, I think it was a good start with my new drawing tool.

Egg-spiramenting

My dad got some giant eggs off of a farmer friend of his so we emptied them out and cleaned them up. I took a dremel tool and slowly worked at carving a small design. You can see where I got to close in one of the flowers and the pedal of the flower and the stem merged together where they should have been separated. I need to clean up my edges but for my first attempt at carving an egg I think it went well. I learned a lot from my first try.

Wood Burning

Thought I would try getting into a little wood burning again so I started with a simple tree. There is a lot that I can work more, but it is a start. I need to work on gradients more, maybe that will be my next exercise.

High School Statement

So I was digging through my closet today and I found my portfolio from high school. I went through it just to laugh at the things I used to think were really good until I came across a paper I had to write for one of my art classes. I don't remember why I had to write it but it reminded me why I love doing art so much. Here are some of my favorite quotes that I wrote 5 years ago during my senior year of high school.

"...I create art because I see things in a different way then most people do. I look at the humorous side of the glass and I paint it."

"When someone looks at my work I don't want them to try and analyze what my feelings were at the time. I hope that the see something happy or somewhat comical. The whole "depressed" artist thing is overrated."

"I like to look at the bright side of life because not doing that is just to much time wasted."

Quick Poster Designs

Here are a few band poster designs I did for a friend. He just needed something quick and simple to print out and hang around to get word out about his show. My only limitation is that it had to be black and white and be able to print on 8.5 by 11 paper. They are in older in which I completed them. The last one being the one with Pointe Shoes. It is still a work in progress but it shows how you can sketch using the computer. Throwing images together in different ways to get a certain feel for the finished product. I think the last one is pretty close to what the finish will look like. Now I will just focus more on the type and make sure just as much care is put into the type as was put into the image.

Final 2 hour painting

Here is another painting I've done in less than  two hours. It is a quick still life painting done in acrylic paint.

We Danced, by Brad Paisley

This was a senior project that I did. I wanted to practice story boarding and it seemed like a good idea to do a story board to a song. I chose a song that didn't have a music video so I could make my own thing out of it. It was an interesting experience. Now that I've done this once, I can experiment more and take more risks. 

Another Old Animation

This is a video I did my Junior year. It's based off of an illustration I did my sophomore year. The illustration assignment was to do a narrative. So I made a silly story, illustrated it and then made a short animation using Photoshop and Final Cut Pro.

Flashback! Jumping into Paintings

This is a video I made my freshman year of college in 2008. Wow, seems like such a long time ago. My first time experimenting with aftereffects and photoshop and final cut pro. And naturally I used myself as my main character:) It was actually an assignment to make a video about ourselves with a superpower we would want. Hopefully it is obviously what power I would want.

Another 2 hour painting

Here is another 2 hour painting. It may have been a little less than 2 hours but you get the idea. This one is a seascape. The picture isnt the greatest but I think that I am getting back into painting again. It's exciting to be excited about painting again. I even bought some watercolor painting supplies from work the other day in hopes that I get better at watercolor again. At least that is a step in a direction.

2 Two Hour Paintings

Here are 2 paintings I did in under two hours each. In a few weeks I'll start giving painting classes where I will have two hours to give a lesson. So I thought that I would see how I could do if I gave myself 2 hours to do these paintings. I haven't really painted with acrylics in a year or two so it took a little while to warm up to them again. I need to complete 4 of these; a landscape, a seascape, a floral, and still life. Hopefully you can tell that these are the landscape and floral paintings :P

Still Sewing.

I have one row of stars finished, only seven more rows to go. May go faster than I thought. I've recently gotten more hours at the frame shop that I work at so my quilt may slow down a little but I'm still working hard on it on my days off. I'm excited to earn a little more so I can invest more in fabrics and paints. Maybe I can really start to experiment more using both paint, thread and fabric.

Air Brush/Saw blade experiment

Here is my first project using the airbrush. Although I only used the airbrush for the sky in this piece, I thought it was good practice. As for the saw blade part.... I had it lying around and my sister had been bugging me to paint it for her. This is only the second time painting on a saw blade but I don't mind it. They are used saw blades from my dad so he gave them to me. I think it's a good material to practice on so I don't mind. I think it's kind of ironic that I am painting something so delicate on something that is more dangerous. I was air brushing two saw blades at the same time. The first picture shows me practicing getting down smooth movements.

Showing off the Sunflower quilt

I took my quilt and paintings to Pittsburgh a few weeks ago to show my grandparents and their friends some of my work.

Airbrush:)

To take a quick break from my quilt, my parent's me an airbrush with an air compressor for my graduation/birthday present:) The kind of airbrush I got is an Eclipse CS and I finally got the paint today and played around with it until I had a cramp in my hand. It will be something to get used to but yet another thing to keep me busy. I've been checking out airbrushing online and I've come to the conclusion that I want to paint my gun stalk. It will be a great summer project along with my quilt. After playing around for a while with my new airbrush I covered it up with an attempt at making a gradient from black to green. Looks like I have a lot of practice to do. Don't worry, I'm not putting my quilt to the side, I'm still sewing like crazy trying to get it together so I'm not taking up the dining room floor anymore.

Still Cutting Fabric...

Day 3, still just cutting fabrics. Tomorrow I hope to get a better idea of how everything will be laid out. Although I will probably change things around once I start sewing.... so maybe I should just start sewing :)

New Quilt :)

So I wanted to start a new quilt only using scraps from fabrics I already had. As I was putting the pieces together they started to reminded me of a painting I did.

So I decided to make another quilt based on one of my paintings. Hopefully this one is a little smother since it is more abstract. Although, I'm not sure how I will place the people on it yet, but I am sure I will figure it out. 

After putting out all of the scraps I cut out I found that I still need some more fabrics. So I bought a few more on sale. So far I put in 2 days worth of work. Tomorrow I will start by cutting out the new fabrics and laying out more of the quilt. Soon I will actually be able to sew!

Quilted Book