ZODIAC (IN PROGRESS)

KALI YOGA

 

This thing is giant in person. Giant! That's probably why it took me a month to finish :)

DRAWING LAB #7: MIXED MEDIA MONKEY

I'm getting a jump on my next drawing assignment. Look at me! I'm almost caught up.

This project was a monkey, drawn with four very different tools. I chose an indigo marker, two colored pens and blue watercolor. I was sketching at a coffee shop, so my weird media actually got a bit weirder when I realized I'd forgotten my paintbrush. Paint applied with a napkin turned out better than expected.

Digital imaging really doesn't do this monkey justice, though - his sky blues and pinks are actually much brighter on the page, and I'm surprisingly fond of this drawing, so much so that I decided to rework my first version into the one I'm posting.

This second version has less lines. I'm a very liney drawer; in general it's one of my strengths, but one of the big things these exercises are teaching me is that sometimes fewer lines are better.

NEW PROJECTS

I've had some interesting commissions recently, the most recent of which was my first logo.

It's for "Hello, Baby!" doula service, so I was thinking about cute babies right away, and rabbits just sort of seemed to fit the theme. Also, Google image search confirmed that nursing baby bunnies are truly adorable.

I played around with a few different sketches, though, and in the end we     decided to work both of these ideas up.

DRAWING LAB #2: BLIND GIRAFFES

It's week two of Drawing Lab! This week's assignment was to do blind contour drawings of giraffes - drawings with as few lines as possible, made while looking only at the original (never the paper). I liked this exercise because I've done a lot of blind contour drawings, but this was a fun twist on it. James liked this exercise because he got to take my comment, "doing giraffes sounds like more fun than doing people," out of context. It's so nice to be surrounded by support.

Seriously, though, giraffes do some cool poses. I love the ones where a big giraffe is leaning down to headbutt a little one, especially... that was the first thing I tried to capture, with more success than I was expecting, actually.

The last bit was superimposing a few giraffes and adding color. I'm actually not sure what happened here...suddenly my giraffes got even leggier.

DRAWING LAB #1: CATS IN BED

 I kind of hate drawing practice. Unfortunately I also hate drawing for a few hours, looking at what I've done and realizing that it's all totally wrong.

I really like this book called Drawing Lab for Mixed Media Artists: 52 Creative Exercises to Make Drawing Fun, because they are, and they do. I'm on a mission to work through these exercises with my blog buddies at Making Stuff,  Vinegar and Glitter, and Reports From the Dance Floor.


The first exercise is to do 30 quick sketches of cats on a squishy surface like a mattress. Whee! Then we take one or two of our favorites and work them up a little more. This first little guy really surprised me. This is the exact face of a cat at the moment he leaps up and sinks his claws INTO YOUR LEG.

I feel like I know how to draw cats. I even know how their legs work and stuff, which you wouldn't guess from my sketches. But. They are tricky. They move around and do cat-like things. Good thing I have cats, because my brain totally would not have come up with these kinds of poses.

And then, I had to do another big one, because I felt bad about the evil demon cat. Cats are not all that bad, I promise.

LOVE OCTANGLE

Behold, my first foray into designing fabric!

This is actually a remake of a drawing I did a million years ago. Octopi really do have three hearts, apparently. I think it must make things complicated.

Anyway, now it's an infinitely repeating pattern. Available for purchase at Spoonflower, on lots of amazing types of fabric. I got my swatch in the mail today, and it is lovely.

CROW LOVE

This is the same screenprint image that I used for Crow's Knot, but my original vision always involved embroidery. Finally got it done :)

at Etsy

Mandrake! (New Two-Color Screen Print)

 


(for sale at Etsy)

ILLUSTRATION FRIDAY: FLUID (OPHELIA)

I drew Ophelia last summer, but I don't think I ever posted her here. The theme for this week's Illustration Friday is "fluid", so I guess the time has come.

Yudu Voodoo (and the amazing Cabbyrinth)

So, I like to screen print. I sort of like to go to AIR, but printing involves a lot of down time, and I can't really afford to spend a couple of hours waiting around for screens to dry every time I want to print something.

I read something somewhere about the Yudu printing machine, and I agonized about whether to get one, because it sounded easy. So many good reviews, but so many terrible reviews, also. Argh!

In the end, of course, I got one, or you wouldn't be reading this post.  I made this awesome print of a cabbyrinth. It worked great. Yay!  That's it. You're done now, unless you want to read a technical Yudu review.

The Yudu is a single unit that burns and drys your screen and then you also fit the screen in the top of it to print. The people in the reviews mostly complain about the emulsion sheets that come with the machine. These get dampened and stuck to the screen, and it would be really convenient if they worked at all, but they don't seem to. I certainly messed both of mine up, and it was all my fault, but since they cost $10 each I wasn't interested in experimenting any further.

Luckily, because of the reviews I had read, I also got the Hack the Yudu kit. This is a pretty straightforward liquid emulsion kit that costs $60 for tons and tons of uses, and will cost even less to replace since I'll only have to buy the consumables. Also because of the reviews, I got the Yudu squeegee pro (like a normal squeegee) to replace the lousy fake one that comes with the machine, and I used regular Speedball ink (much, much cheaper than the Yudu brand).

All this modification was totally worth it, because my first screen emulsified, burned, rinsed, and dried out perfectly. I started printing and got twenty (!) totally clean prints before I ran out of paper.

I'm sure if you're handy you could build your own printing set-up cheaper than the Yudu. But for some mysterious reason, I've never gotten results like this, including at art school. I guess I'm pretty sold.

If you're curious about trying it, definitely look around and maybe wait for a sale. I forget exactly how much mine cost, but it was well under $200 (a pretty deep discount). Then check out the videos on YouTube. People there can tell you everything you could possibly want to know about printing with the Yudu.

(Cabbyrinth print available in my Etsy shop!)

I Would Like to Sell Some Art

I like making art. I would like to sell more of it. I do sell prints, sometimes.*

I would like to do more illustrating. I have a portolio website, and I submit it to publishers and agents. I have a few published pieces. I need more.

The art-for-pay that I really love doing is personal commissions. I will do promotional materials, holiday cards, portraits, tattoos, or pretty much anything you can come up with.

I especially love making art as a visualization, meditation or magical aid. I would love to to help create a vision of your dream home, spirit guides, personal yantra, healing visualization, or visual spell for any goal you can imagine.

My standard rate for a commission of the quality of most work in my portfolio is $100, but simpler or more complex pieces are negotiable. I need to pay my bills, but I am also open to barter, time permitting.

Interested? Comment here or send me an email at lauragyre@gmail.com. I am actively looking for new projects right now.


 
*occasionally silk-screen editions, but mostly digital prints right now. Let me know if you are interested in the latter; most of my work is available and prices are reasonable)

October Art

Sub Rosa

 

For an herbal anthology from Copper Cauldron publishing.

Illustration Friday: "Warning"

I'm posting this thing that I made yesterday for Illustration Friday. It was a surprise to me on a lot of levels. The theme of the week is "warning", and initially I had a different idea in mind.

This piece started with a prompt I got from the Random Art Prompt Generator: "hearts resolved and hands prepared". I liked the double meaning of that phrase...hearts resolved not only in the sense of "determined", but in the artistic sense, as well. I liked the idea of starting with something chaotic and using it to create something refined. Hands prepared, I wasn't so sure what to do with. Prepared for what?

Anyway, it got really chaotic really fast. The spills went everywhere except where I wanted them to, the masking fluid tore the paper... a lot of things went wrong, but I was determined to come up with something as "resolved" as possible.

The thing is, artistically, I'm fine or even good at what I do. What I do is, basically, draw: people, things, designs. I'm good at drawing stuff. I think this should be good enough to get me some entry-level illustration work. But when I look at illustration I actually love (Kiri Moth is my new illustration obsession) it's usually much more complicated. It's frustrating. I need more skills, and I want them now. Hands prepared.

Thus, risk. Hearts, unresolved and otherwise.

Warning: things don't always work out as planned.

Mi Amor Mas Pequeña

Crow's Knot

UP

Recent Work: Crow and Deer

Hello

Hi again, to anybody who still checks up on me here!

It seems like the summer is flying by. River turned two in July (with relatively little fanfare, a moderate amount of ice cream, and lots of gleeful jumping around). James has continued to have a lot of work success, with his new contracting business and his DJing, and I've mostly still been hanging out with River and trying to stay alive. I've definitely been exhausted and kind of sick a lot, which I'm hoping will improve over the next couple of weeks. I really intend to appreciate the relative ease of the second trimester more than I did the first time around.

Following a huge wave of synchronicity and inspiration this spring, the summer has felt a little stagnant to me, like it's hard to get excited about much. I'm chalking this up partly to exhaustion, and partly just to some sort of mysterious natural rhythms. This has happened to me enough times that I'm now pretty certain that one day the clouds will just part and inspiration will strike again, and in the meantime I'm not worrying about it too much and am just trying to appreciate where I am right now.

Speaking of where I am, there have been some interesting developments on the relocation front. Basically, we're becoming increasingly certain that we'd like to stay in the general Pittsburgh area, but in a more natural setting. We're looking into an area called Millvale at the moment, which is relatively close to our current location, relatively cheap and safe, and completely surrounded by forest. In the longer term, we've learned of a property of about 300 acres, an hour outside the city for a really reasonable price, which some friends are already looking into purchasing as a group. This is a legally and logistically complicated option, but one we might be very excited about in a few years.

In the meantime, we've got lots of stuff on the horizon. James and I are both participating in the Visionary Arts Festival in early August, for which I feel horrendously unprepared. I've been looking back slightly to how energized and excited I felt about throwing together an art show when River was a few months old, and wondering wasn't I more tired and more busy then than I am now? Of course I was, but right now I just mostly feel uninspired. Oh well. I've got a couple of huge geometrical drawings in the works, and I'm planning to finish them both this week. The show will go however it goes, and at least I'll be there with my work, such as it is. Then, we'll be traveling and visiting family for a few weeks.

In September, the G20 conference will be taking place in Pittsburgh, which is a huge quagmire that probably deserves its own post. After that, who knows? I've got about four free months to fill with interesting activities, so hopefully I can schedule my next epiphany to strike around then.

other potential future blog posts in the works (possibly soon):
river's tooth fiasco (don't worry, it's under control)
unschooling/free school
more on inspiration and art
blog changes
birth stuff
food posts
photos