Clowny Summer

I can’t explain why but I’ve been painting clowns all summer. They showed up in a least 2 paintings I was working on in addition to quite a few daydreams and nightmares. It started with These little pals:

I became strangely obsessed with their faces, the simplicity of the horror, the triangle eyes, the red white and blue.  Just the head ended up in this painting:

But I had to go further, I needed more. Then this guy showed up:

And this one:

Well, 3 clowns made it into the final painting, but an infinite number have crawled into my dreams and seem to be setting up a candy shop. Anyone for a lolly?

Where Does Inspiration Come From?

This is the question I seem to get asked the most from young artists, and it is the hardest one to answer. Inspiration comes from everywhere, but it usually starts with things I have read, things I have seen, music that I listen to, and dreams. Those go into the brain filter and come out the other side in the form of sketches, little writings, and finally a painting or drawing.

For the painting I am currently working on, these clowns that I bought on ebay a while back insisted on being featured. Although I usually don’t paint clowns, for reasons I won’t go into, I wanted to do something circusy.

I also recently saw the Mexican women surrealist show, “In Wonderland” at the LA Count Museum, and it was unbelievable. Remedios Varo was one of my favorites, and I became a little obsessed with drawing her. 

I start jotting down ideas about what I am going to do, concepts and symbolism, all the heady stuff.

I also do little rough drawings of characters and little scenes. Some don’t make the cut, but once in a while I find something I can use!

Finally they make the long journey from idea to thing, and end up in a painting or drawing! The strangest combinations are possible...

Enjoy your imagineering, and remember, inspiration comes from everywhere!

For more peeks into my sketchbook process, check out this little feature on the Hi-Fructose Magazine site!  

Check out the movie I created about the making of my Snow White book:

Snowy Brown Christmas

This madness known as “Homemade Christmas Card” started over 10 years ago and I haven’t been able to kick the habit since. Every year I design and make my own Christmas cards, and every year the engineering and production of these tilts a little farther towards the “weird cat lady” end of the spectrum.

This yearly tradition started many years ago, first because I didn’t want to buy and send out a bunch of things that would just end up in the landfill, second because I enjoy making things, and third, because no matter what is going on in the world that is awful, hopeless, maddening, and tragic, putting faces on miniature snowmen and bumbling around in the glitter bin takes my mind off of the noisy collapse of empire. This year’s inspiration came from a forgotten box in my mom’s attic. I went by her house and she had this giant box of christmas cards in her living room,”Oh, those were moms, (my grandmothers), she saved every christmas card she received, from the 1940’s all the way into the 2000’s.”
Being a paper ephemera collector, with my faves being from the late 1800’s to the 1940’s,I suggested we “quickly sift through” the giant box before she gave it away, and pull out all the good cards.

This fat Santa gave me the idea for this years’ card. He’s holding a miniature card! Way cute. I decided to make a snowman holding a miniature book, with a little rhyming story inside. I started by making a prototype:

Because cutting out shapes by hand is the most time consuming, I used an online laser cutting company that cut out the cardboard and felt hats and scarves. I scanned in my drawings in Photoshop, made the shapes using Illustrator, and uploaded them to the site. 2 weeks later I received these perfectly cut out shapes of snowmen, scarves and hats!

I applied a watercolor wash to the bodies:

Then stamped some faces on:

This giant elf helped me glue the hats and scarves on:

I apply some mica glitter:

With these steps done, the miniature book with rhyming poem-story needed to be flushed out. Luckily, I live with a musical genius who rhymes effortlessly and frequently, so I assigned this task to my lovely husband with the vague parameters that it be about Snowy Brown, a not-quite-white snowman. Even though I thought he might labor over it for a good day, 5 minutes later he emailed me the final perfect version. It took me awhile to lay it out in Adobe InDesign, as I was planning on printing it double sided and the little pages had to all be correctly oriented to each other. This proved to be more vexing than I thought it would be. Little-book making is a big job!

Here is the part where I started to worry that maybe this whole thing was a dumb idea. But no, I got the book right and we had it assembled by the end of the day.

A bunch of gluing, stamping, and glittering later, Snowy Brown emerged from scraps of cardboard and felt into a real holiday card!

Here is the final piece, a Snowy Brown ornament with miniature book:

Also, because I live in the woods and our local post office only seems to have ugly stamps, I felt compelled to create my own on stamps.com. I uploaded a photo and within a week these lovely stamps arrived:

After some envelope fancying and addressing, Snowy Brown was ready to debut himself into the world of holiday cards.

Happy Holidays, and have a Snowy Brown Christmas!

Working in the studio

Just finished working on the illustrated Snow White book, here are a few shots of the studio mess.I used a combination of ink and watercolor, and I use an angled dip pen to do all the black line work.