the survivor cat

Years ago the newspaper ran a story about a cat that had been thrown off a bridge in Portland and had survived. This was the cat. The photo stuck with me. Scornful, but needing a home, needing someone to trust again. I originally painted her in water color and now here she is color enhanced with Photoshop, but still just as accusing as ever. I like to think of her finally in a home that brought out the purr in her.

Carpe diem

Seize the moment, idea, inspiration, head picture, dream,
fleeting thought. . .
and to be prepared to do this, carry a notebook, put it by your bedside, in your bag, and keep it with you. There are times in life when ideas are bursting all around, keeping you up at night and it's exhausting, BUT, there are dry times too. So my notebooks and little scraps of paper are my pantry of tomorrow.

disappearing act

I'm working on a brochure for the Sandy Action Center and was given information that included some photos. Busy busy busy! I took out a bunch of details with the clone tool and then lightly brushed over those areas with a blending color. Next I made a copy and selected the ladies keeping them sharply in focus, and then applied a slight lens blur to the surrounding areas. I'll only use a small part of the photo in the publication, but it still makes a subtle yet important difference.

flapping in for a repeat performance

a raven detail I did last year at this time. I used a mixture of illustrator, photoshop, back to illustrator for the letters and the background. So Many Options! But this is where I stopped for tonight.

a good morning

What could be better than time. Time to have a cup of tea and sketch before really getting serious about tackling what will end up being "my day's accomplishments". I've always been partial to yellow cats, Coriander is not. Today he becomes a cat of a different color, via Photoshop.

On second thought, how would it look live traced and colored in illustrator? Oh, okay!

Ahh, maybe these colors . . .

Queen Jenn!

Jenn, a shift at my Starbucks got transferred to another store and last night was her LAST NIGHT - sad. Anyhow, I made her a crown which she wore throughout the evening as she waited on customers, and pins for us to wear declaring our intention to thoroughly miss her!
So, yes I'll miss Jenn and that's just a fact!
(The terrible picture I took of her wearing it would be terms for the end of our friendship if posted, so I took the Illustrator file I made it in, made it a symbol, made a circle and did a revolve and extrude applying the crown symbol to it with Map Art, then turned on the Invisible Geometry so it could show through from front to back. )

notebooks!

I used the artwork from the entries in my blog to make blank notebooks, how fun! I printed out 2 per 8.5" X 11" coated one side heavy stock paper, filled them with unlined blank paper and gave them a sturdy board back cover, trimmed down, coil bound and they are ready and waiting for inspirations to be recorded.

stroking the cat

Another pencil drawing from breaktime at work, scanned and live traced into illustrator then pasted into Photoshop. Multiple layers of brushstrokes building up to a soft fur. Using a brush with many points, low opacity and stroking it as I build the cat colors presented endless possibilites, but you have to stop somewhere, right?

subtle differences

What was originally just a grey background looks much more interesting with blues and textures scattered in and around. The slightest of texturing comes up and over the leaves themselves suggesting the shadows within a shifting leaf-filled tree environment.

see da cedar

Same techniques as before (with a few new things: I intensified the colors by adding an inner shadow, and took it off the page with a bit of a drop shadow. How handy is the "X" key when switching back and forth with the hide and show while working on the mask . . .  very!



























Next, I grabbed the jpeg off of my blog and dragged it into illustrator, did a live trace with 9 colors and eliminated the lightest shadow to get this infinitely scaleable version of my drawing.

sweet dreams

A little drawing of my daughter and her household's cat Clarence. He only gets to sleep this way when she is asleep; as soon as she wakes up, he's out of there.

I left some extra room at the left of the illustration for spiral binding it into a notebook. I made separate layers for all the main elements allowing  quick coloring once the ground work was layed. These little drawings have always been fun to do.

snowfakes or snowflakes?

Snowflakes have 6 points or sides or whatever you want to call them, six . . . not four . . . not eight, SIX! There is endless variation from that one requirement - "no two alike". However, as a starting point, this is foundational and only forgiven when school children make four sided cutouts, because lets face it, it's harder to fold the paper in half and then in thirds, than it is to just fold it in half and then in half again before snipping commences.
Maybe not everyone has seen a real, perfect, unmelted snowflake that's just fallen and sits fragilely to be appreciated for a moment. My many years on chair lifts only produced a handful of these memories because the conditions have to be just right to see an illusive specimen. - a moment of reflective silence -

So yes, this is personal. Get it right folks; six is where it's at with snowflakes.