Big, vast emptiness ahead

[Oh, that's really funny. I hit "Tab" and it published before I even started. Given the title of this post, it's even funnier!]

This month of June is looking pretty bleak work-wise. I don't seem to have any jobs coming in. Mixed feelings because I really do need a break from working pretty much nonstop for the past 23 years, but since work has been tapering off for the past six months, I have no funds with which to enjoy that time.

On the other hand I have lots of time to do other things like crafting, drawing and practicing calligraphy! Which is good because my prep for Frankenstein's was pretty disastrous. Starting at the last minute, is never a good thing. Starting at the last minute and having multiple mini-failures is catastrophic. Around 9pm, I had to kinda throw in the towel and just call it a night.

This week I'm revisiting some milestones I've made up for myself and realized that, once again, I'm getting to them at the last minute. When will I ever learn?!

So last Saturday I forced myself to sketch something. It was hard going, but then I found my roll and went with it.

 

I screwed up the perspective on the face a bit, but I liked the energy of the line and don't feel like inking over it and losing it. Then I isolated the linework to throw color on it. Three (saved) passes later, it (digitally) looks like this now...

I'm not sure I'm happy with this one either, but it thumbnails really nicely. Painting this made me realize why I prefer rendering POC. When I paint white people, they come out ashy-looking or too peachy. I should probably look up some tutorials for making the skin more vibrant. Yeah, sure, just another thing on my way-too-long list of to-dos.

I've also done a little bit of craft lettering, but nothing terribly share-worthy. Maybe later I'll bunch some of it all up into a giant image. June is going to be the start of yet another 29Faces sponsored thing. With all-male faces this time: ‪#‎Juneguys‬. Since I'm only posting when I more-or-less have some art or craft thing semi-done, I'm hoping that June will be a busy month of blogging.

Overwhelmed Much?

I caught a cold and was laid up for an entire week.

All my prep time? Gone. My dayjob stuff? Not late for once, but it takes a priority now.

I managed to make this Mother's Day card for my aunt right before I decided that I should hole up in bed with a "Tiny House" marathon on TV.

 Cut file from Silhouette, color is Dylusions spray.

That break ended up lasting for about five days. The only good thing was that I was able to work on one of my books in bed. The idea was to make two cards at once, but that wasn't meant to be. I had to send the one card that afternoon and the other could wait until the morning of Mother's Day. A few days later, I crawled out of bed to make this card for my mother.

Cut file from Silhouette, color is Dylusions spray, poorly edged with Distress ink

When I started to feel better, I looked at the calendar and realized when my dayjob projects are due. I had to hit the ground running on some work here.

Melville's Moby Dick adapted by Chabouté

Ever since I updated my version on InDesign, the internal dictionary is now randomly hyphenating words so I have to really watch what happens when I move the edges of text frames. I mean. seriously, "unders-tanding"? If anybody can tell me how to fix this, please let me know!

Fate/Zero #3 by Gen Urobuchi and Shinjirō

When I took a small break, I went into my hobby room and saw I still had some of these left undone.

These still need to be domed.

 I am officially overwhelmed and seriously doubt I can have stuff ready for the next Frankenstein's Swap Meet next week. Color me a little bummed. These are pictures of stuff I've actually done. There's so much swimming in my head. Some things percolate to the top and go under just as quickly and others stay long enough for me to capture it. Needless to say, I have a to-do list that's as long as two arms and part of a leg. The things that keep surfacing is calligraphy and small illustrations as ACEOs. I just have to get these two books lettered before I can work on those things. Hopefully when I AM finished, they won't bubble under to be replaced by something else (Cardmaking! Decal cutting! Pop-ups! Paper circuits! Dioramas!).

Iris

While I work, I have a browser window open to Pinterest to poke around while my computer processes files, etc. I stumbled across Dawn Nicole and her online art-lettering group class thing. There's a lot of moving parts and I haven't quite got it figured out, but she has a monthly challenge group on Facebook and Instagram (‪#‎DNDChallenge‬) and I just happened upon it on the last week of April. Here's my first entry for the group.

This took me far longer than I had planned and it was killing me. I woulda been able to knock this out in acrylic, but watercolor is so not my thing and I labored over it. I couldn't control the saturation like I wanted.  re-applying a stroke when the paint is still wet results in the pigment spreading. (duh) After a while I gave up, found a broken colored pencil and outlined the flower for definition. The entire process was kinda painful.

The background was pre-primed with Distress mini pads. I'm new to stamping and I don't understand how people can get such juicy colors from them. I was pretty certain my mini-pads were dried out until I heard they should be stored upside down. I tried that for a few weeks, came back to them and hoped for the best. They were wetter than before, but it would take a lot of effort to color a tag with these. So now I'm not sure if I need to re-ink them or buy the larger, normal sized pads. On the other hand, the background worked nicely with this sketch.
If anybody reading this can tell me has any experience with wet or dry mini-pads, I'd love to hear from you!

I've been doing the Artist's Way Morning Pages without skipping so far. Which is pretty incredible since I left for Seattle when I started! They've helped me focus a lot and I've seen little things kinda come together here and there. I haven't done any of the exercises though. I'm sure they're rather important, but I'd much rather apply energy to projects than to sitting and thinking. I already do that for those Pages.

Of course I find out about the latest #100daychallenge one month into it.

This is another thing I'm working on. I did the initial resin pour about a month ago, but finally got my act together and put together the inclusions.

I can't decide whether they'll be pendants or magnets. I guess I'll have more of an idea once they come out of the molds.