Made With Love

This looks very much like a Christmas whatever-it-is, but it is actually a belated birthday present for a really good friend of mine. I know that she likes pink, floral and angels, but she pretty much has everything when it comes to decorative things, and is actually trying to get rid of stuff, not accumulate more stuff. However, she did need an address book, and instead of just giving her a plain one, or choosing a pattern, I decided to make her a DIY one-of-a-kind book. I bought a regular black Moleskine address book and put together a cover mixed media picture using gesso, acrylic paint, a glossy angel, a washer, molding paste, a rubber stamp, Mod Podge, glitter, an old stamp, some bits of patterned paper and some glittery paper. The image consists of layers of paper, gesso, fabric, paste and paint, sealed with a couple of layers of Mod Podge.

As is the case with a lot of mixed media pieces, this cover is also put together with pieces that have been found and gathered up from various places. I bought the glossy angel from a museum gift shop in Denmark, where they came in little sheets of 8-10. In Norway we call them glansbilder, and when I was a kid, most Scandinavian girls collected them. I had a box of old ones that my mom had collected when she was a kid, but who knows where they are now. I have traveled and moved around from country to country so much that my belongings have been scattered everywhere. I am not sure if anyone collects glansbilder anymore. This angel was, according to sheet, made in West Germany (!), so maybe they haven't been produced for a while? When I moved to Britain in the late 1970's, I was surprised that nobody had even heard of these glossy paper collectibles. When I see them now, I realize how nostalgic they are, a bit like those sweet little figurines that people collect, or Christmas decorations, for that matter. If this had not been a present, I would probably have put some punk/goth influence into the image, if nothing else then just to temper the sweetness of the angel.

The washer was an object I found on my bedroom floor that day. Who knows where it belonged. Some of the lace on the left side was from a whole roll that I bought for 10 cents at a tag sale. The other lace originates from a baby shower decoration that I found out on the street on recycling day somewhere in Brookline. I don't remember where the shiny silver-colored ribbon came from, probably a present or something. The old Syrian stamp was in a ready-packed collection of vintage labels and stuff from Paper-Source, and I grabbed a few pinches of glitter from the kids' arts & crafts box to sprinkle over the image as a final touch.

If I had had more time to do this, I would have made the book myself rather than buying a Moleskine. That would have made the gift far more unique. Also, notebooks and sketchbooks don't have to be expensive, so a customary decorated one can be made pretty cheaply for anyone who is creative and either doesn't have much cash lying around this time of year (who does?), or refuses to buy into the overly commercial aspect of the holiday season. Regardless of what goes into DIY gifts, they are usually made with love, which factory/sweatshop-made products definitely are NOT. If you don't have time to make your own gifts, then visit one of the many holiday crafts fairs this season. Here in Boston, there is the Holly Fair in Cambridge, and Bazaar Bizarre at the Cyclorama, this upcoming weekend. There you will find a lot of neat and unique crafts made locally and with love...and you'll probably find me there too, at either one of those places on Sunday, manning the comic-book table with fellow members of the Boston Comics Roundtable!

Voyage Fantastica

This is my very latest illustration, designed by Troy Minkowsky to accompany his steampunk story, Voyage Fantastica, a brilliant adventure story about a boy genius and a cast of unforgettable characters.

Based on Troy's descriptions and mockup-version of the poster, I put this illustration together using a mixed media page as a base (old pages from a book, plus gesso and acrylic paint). I drew the stage part, including the characters, air ship, island and ocean, with ink, then colored it in with watercolor pencils and acrylic paint before I cut it out and stuck it onto the base page. I rubber stamped half of the stars, and then I scanned the whole thing. Because it was a large piece, I had the worst time trying to get it scanned using an oversize color scanner (not a flatbed, but the ones you feed the image into) on short notice. Some places would not let me do it myself, either because that was their policy, or because their scanner was broken. Since I was leaving for Denmark the next day, I didn't have time to wait the few days it would take the places to scan it, so I ended up scanning it in pieces on my own little scanner, then patching the image together in Photoshop.   I used Photoshop to create the rest of the image, including the altered clip-art horses, the color adjustments, ornaments, fonts and the rest of the stars. The original artwork is therefore very different from the finished illustration, as it remains very "unfinished."

As you can tell by earlier blog posts, this is by no means my first project with Troy Minkowsky. Another piece of good news is that Troy's version of the Hansel and Gretel fairytale, which I illustrated earlier this year, has been selected for Gurukitty's next anthology, Once Upon a Time, and will likely come out at the end of this year/beginning of 2013. More on that later!

Another piece of information: my drawings at the Brookline Town Hall will stay up for one more week, as the next exhibitor in room 103 has scheduled to put up her work on August 7th. In this way, there won't be a gap in the continuing exhibits on the Town Hall walls. So if you still want to see the drawings, but just haven't gotten around to it, there is still time!

Mixed Media Orchids From Denmark (With Love)

I just returned from a quick trip to Denmark. I am going to post some sketchbook pages from my travel-sketchbook, but before I do that, I'll share this mixed media piece that I did over there, and that my father will now have to find a frame for and add to his (not-so-small) collection of his youngest daughter's creative expressions. Like most parents, though, he appreciates his children's' work (unless I include him in my semi-autobiographical comics) and always displays it around the house. 

I had forgotten how beautiful Denmark is in the summer. Most of the days came with warm sunshine, but without the extreme heat and humidity we get over here. The inspiration for this piece was my father and stepmother's orchids in the big living room window with all the sunshine and blue skies outside. My parents' houses are full of plants and flowers, and in their gardens and greenhouse, there are tomato plants, cucumbers, herbs, roses, berry bushes, fruit trees, and plenty of brightly-colored flowers. All meticulously cared for with love. And here I am, someone who can't even keep a cactus alive, and I have no patience for gardening and plants anyway. Instead, I inherited my creative urge from both of them, and prefer to draw flowers rather than care for the actual things (though, to be honest...I don't draw or paint an awful lot of flowers either). 

The background is made of cut-outs from local newspapers from the Sallingsund area, pasted on bristol board with gesso and paint mixed in with it. I drew the flowers with pencil, painted them with watercolor and redrew them with ink. The zipper on the upper left hand corner is something I found out on my father's porch, and nobody could figure out who had lost it. I think it must have been my friend, Lis-Anne, who came to visit a few days earlier. Lis-Anne: if you are missing this object, you now know where to find it!

Mixed Media: A Few Quick Thoughts, Illustrated

Lately, I've been having some fun experimenting with mixed media techniques. It seems to be the new craze right now; I've found numerous blogs, websites and magazines offering advice, materials, community and other resources. I absolutely love the stuff I find out there, it is all so very inspiring and shows what you can do with relatively inexpensive materials and a lot of imagination! 

The challenge of this is to make something uniquely different, something which stands out. A lot of mixed  media art does not seem to reflect the artist's unique style, and there is a tendency among creatives to adhere to a certain "look," often very feminine-looking hybrids of Victorian and modernist non-figurative. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely dig this style, with all its lace and flowers, shabby "found objects,"vintage yellowed pages with brightly-colored rubber stamps, splashed paint and so forth. I have also found artists who do let their personal style shine through. I am just still looking for more variety in contemporary mixed media illustration, an area where everything is permitted and thus possible. 

Don't look at me, though! I am still just experimenting, as I mentioned earlier. These two pieces are the ones that I have liked enough to keep around so far, and as it often happens with the things I make, the comics influence seeps in everywhere...