Fancy Dress(and Hat)

Somewhat Victorian, somewhat random design

Adorable Blog Award

Exciting news, people who read/look at this blog! I have been awarded the Adorable Blog Award by Caitlin and Laura the ladies behind the sweet webcomic Girrl!!! Thank you Caitlin! Thank you Laura! It is an honor.

Here are 10 facts about me:

1. I once had a dream that I was Doctor Who's companion and we were traveling to the starship Enterprise

2. I had a recurring nightmare before the seventh Harry Potter book came out that I had bought the book, but it was locked shut and no matter how hard I tired I could not get it open.

3. I only have freckles on half my face.

4. I have collections of lions, pigs, small decorative boxes, and hedgehogs.

5. Last November I participated in National Novel Writing Month for the first time. I succeeded in writing 50,000 words by the deadline, but my novel still does not have an ending.

6. One of my favorite things to do while making art is to sing along, loudly, to Disney songs. Seriously, out of the 25 most played songs on my i tunes 18 of them are Disney songs.

7. I have a notebook recording and rating every book I've read since January 1st 2003.

8. In elementary school I liked to cut up my(previously broken) Barbie dolls and reconstruct them in new and unusual ways. I would then have and art showing of my creations for my family.

9. The first time I used watercolor, my favorite art supplie to use today, I didn't like it at all.

10. My most hated art supply is, and always will be, conte crayon. First your like, "Oh look, it's like charcoal but a fun color" and then you start drawing and conte's like, "You want a range of tones? Well too bad! I'm only gonna give you three" so you think, "Fine then, I'll just erase you!" but conte's all like, "What? Erase? You fool! Once you put down conte it is permanently affixed to your paper FOREVER! Bwa Ha Haha Ha!

Here are three other blogs also deserving of this prestigious award:

Ayae's Brain

Erin S. Tripp | Visual Artist

Mai Mai Pie Studio

If you choose to accept this award, rules are as follows:

-Thank the person who gave you this award, and link back to them in your post.
-Tell us 10 things about yourself.
-Nominate your bloggers.
-Contact these bloggers, and let them know they received this award.

Ariel

Sketchbook doodle

Assorted Hipsters

Figure drawing practice. All drawn from LookBook

Shrimp Dress

So far this is my favorite [random thing] inspired dress. The random the object the more I like turning it into an outfit.

Broccoli Dress

Broccoli was a very easy food to turn into a dress

Goblin

This goblin desperately wants to be human hence his somewhat ridiculous totally awesome style choices.

Cupcake Dress

Sometimes a game I like to play in my sketchbook is to choice a random object and then to create an outfit inspired by that object. This is the cupcake dress

Steampunk Burlesque

Once upon a time way back senior year at MICA my friends and I created a prompt blog which sort of dissolved as we reached the end of the year and everyone was really stressed out about finals/graduation stuff. My greatest regret from that blog was never finishing one of the final prompts: burlesque. I quickly sketched a steampunk themed burlesque dancer(because those two things obviously need to go together) but I never finished the final color version.

The hardest part in getting to the final watercolor and gouache version was finding a way to get my very detailed sketch onto the watercolor paper. It was impossible to see everything when I attempted to lightbox the sketch. So I ended up printing the sketch on to light weight watercolor paper. This time I printed the image the night before I started painting which made the ink run less. 

And, yes, those are gear shaped nipple pasties.

Uniform

Formal military uniform of some steampunk-ish world.

Belle

Fan art is an excellent way to practice digital painting. From an image I actually started over a year ago now finally finished. It became quite a challenge near the end as the bigger the file got the more photoshop crashed on me.

Guy with Awesome Hair

Sometimes I also draw guys too. Scan from my sketchbook.

Girl with Two Birds

A very Mucha/Art Nouveau inspired design. Watercolor with gouache(now in multiple colors)outlines. This piece was also somewhat of an experiment for me as instead of lightboxing my sketch onto the watercolor paper(a tedious process) I scanned the lines and printed them, very lightly on the paper. It seemed to work pretty well, though the ink did run a bit in places where I put the watercolor on really wet. But that was only obvious on really light parts like the skin tone and once I put the outlines on I couldn't tell at all. I think the process worked pretty well for this piece. I am curious to see how it would work on heavier paper or a more complicated image.

Bird with Five Chicks

For my mom's mother's day card.  Watercolor with gouache outlines again.

Queen

This lady is clearly a ruler somewhere. The image in from my sketchbook done in watercolor and outlined in gouache. You may notice a similarity between her outfit and that of the Queen of Hearts from the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland(the animated one) cause that's what I was thinking of when I colored it.

New Blog

So I made a new blog. I had planned to start posting last night but blogger was not functioning. Now I am starting on the auspicious day of Friday the 13th. So if this blog turns out to be cursed(and by cursed I mean that I fail to keep posting) that's what I'm blaming.

But I digress. The point of this blog is to focus on the art I do for fun and not necessarily what I think will make a great portfolio piece. The posts will be a combination of things from my sketchbook, experiments in new techniques, and maybe some in process stuff from larger projects. Or it might turn out to be a bunch of character designs of pretty people wearing pretty clothes and some fan art. We shall see.

On that note here is a sketch a girl in pretty dress.