Meanwhile, back at the Huntington...

Years ago, I did a project that was a mix of exhibit development and science illustration work for the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. I'm always delighted when their team gets in touch with me again for new adventures in art.

This time I was invited to mine their collections (rare books, cool old plants, fabulous sculptures, historic manuscripts, elegant furniture) and cobble together into a sort of fanciful patchwork quilt that would decorate the windows of their new entrance and orientation gallery.

The idea was to make it a sort of filagree pattern, that would be applied to the windows as a giant vinyl decal. I drew the images in Photoshop first, then converted the final draft to vector images that could be scaled up to fit the windows.



I haven't seen it in person yet, but these pics of the installation process are delightfully fun. (Image credit: Karina White.)



The Huntington's blog, Verso, wrote an article about the project with more fun photos. Fun adventure all around.

Mushroom Festival Poster!

Oh my goodness, October is whooshing by so fast. I should probably post how the Mushroom Festival poster turned out, since they are now peppered all over the Eugene and Springfield areas in anticipation of the grand event!

My previous post talked about how I was experimenting with the composition. Having nailed that down, I went into make-it-so-mode. I started off with a fast loose sketch to serve as guidelines...

 Then started settling in on the colors that would go into each area (again, fast and loose).

At this point, I realized that my birds were out of whack! I was so fascinated with the strange morphology and brilliant coloration of the turkey heads that they had become too big for their bodies. It's nice to be able to catch these things before a lot of final detail goes into place. So I went back to my reference photos and started getting serious about those turkey details.

Ah yes. Big birds with tiny pin-heads. Now we are talking.

Now that the pesky heads were figured out, started tackling the turkey-tail mushrooms themselves. The fungi are the stars of the show, after all!

And here we have the final shiny rendering.

Which was then popped into the final event poster! (You can see a nice big version of it on the Mount Pisgah Arboretum website.) Fun!

Turkey Dioramas

As I worked on the Mushroom Festival poster this year, I found myself wresting with the relative scale of things. Turkeytail mushrooms are about 7 cm wide, while a wild turkey is at least a meter long. How best to show them both in one image, knowing that the smaller mushrooms need to be the center of attention?

I took a sheet of foam core and cut out a tree branch and a turkey approximately to scale, and then covered the tree branch with paper mushrooms. Then it was diorama time in the front yard!

 

Even with crude, out-of-focus photos, this exercise helped me a lot with my experiments in composition. From there, I did a few very rough color mock-ups of possible poster layouts in Photoshop.

Sending these rough ideas to the festival committee, the response was overwhelmingly positive for the three-turkey parade in the distant background of the tree branch. Hurrah! Next post, I'll go into the details of how I took that crude scribble and turned it into the final poster art.

Wildflower Festival Update

When I last updated, it was with watercolor in progress on the first layers of watercolor being laid down for the Wildflower Festival poster. Here's how that turned out:

I then returned to the digital version that we're using for the t-shirt and modified those colors to match the watercolor palette more closely.

An exciting addition to the regular festivities this year is that the Karin Clarke Gallery in Eugene, Oregon is hosting an art show devoted to native wildflower paintings, as a way to get even more Wildflower Month activities happening this May. Yesterday I got to work on framing my early sketches and the final painting for this exhibit.

Baby blue-eyes and dance flies as far as the eye can see! If you're in the Eugene area, do stop by the art show--grand opening will be Fri, May 3, 5:30pm – 7:30pm.

T-Shirt Ideas

The poster design for the Wildflower Festival always gets converted into a t-shirt design as well. I often find that starting with a simplified set of colors that would translate well to screen printing helps me make some of the big decisions about tone and contrast, which then inform the more elaborate art for the poster. Here is a record of the day's experiments! * El diseño para el cartel del Wildflower Festival siempre se convierte en un diseño para camisetas, también. Para mí, trabajar con colored limitados que se traducen bién a serigrafía es útil para hacer los decisiones fundamentales sobre el tono y el contraste, lo que guía el arte mas detallado del cartel final. ¡Aquí hay mi documentación de los experimentos de hoy!

Wildflower Month Logo

This weekend I'm cranking out the final poster art for the Wildflower Festival at Mount Pisgah Arboretum. In the meantime, I took one of my early sketches for that poster and converted it into a logo for the Wildflower Month events that will be happening all over the Eugene area. * Este fin de semana, pintaré el arte final para el cartel del Festival de Flores Silvestres en Mount Pisgah Arboretum. Mientras tanto, he estado adapando uno de mis bosquejos para el cartel para ser el logo para los eventos de la Mes de Flores Silvestres en la ciudad de Eugene.

It has been surprisingly tricky to get a good balance of polka-dots on the white petals of the Nemophila! When things are all simplified and graphic in this logo-style approach, finding the right balance of white space to playful dots makes a big difference. (Perhaps more than if one is painting it realistically in a "bug-chomps and all" sort of approach, you know?) * ¡Me sorprendió la dificultad de encontrar la balanza perfecta de pepitas en los pétalos blancos del la flor Nemophila! La combinción de pepitas juegtónes con el forma tan simplificado y estilizado de la flor ha exijido mucha attención. (Pintándolo en una manera más realistica, mostrando cada mordida de los insectos por ejemplo, daría mas flexibilidad para pepitas imperfectas, ¿no?)

Bikes in Space in Progress!

I was delighted to be invited to create the cover for Taking the Lane Volume 10: Bikes in Space! The editor, Ellie Blue, described by mission thusly: "I envision a two-color cover that depicts a super dramatic feminist bicycle beyond-the-atmosphere showdown in the fine tradition of pulp sci fi covers..."  So I busted out the sketchbook and started goofing around. * Fue un gran placer ser invitado a crear el imagen para la cubierta del libro de Taking the Lane Volume 10: Bikes in Space! (¡Bicicletas en el espacio!) Elly Blue, la editora, describió mi missión así: "Imagino una cubierta en dos colores, mostrando una confrontación feminista y super-dramatica, en bicicleta y más allá de la atmósfera, en la tradición divertida de las revistas 'pulp.'" Agarré mi libro de dibujar y empecé a divertirme.

I came up with three ideas that interested me, and I did simple thumbnail sketches to share them wtih Elly.* Llegué a tres ideas que me interesaban, y los compartí con Elly con dibujos muy simples.

Elly decided that the space-shark showdown was the most fun and dramatic. You can see how I developed this idea in the slideshow below. All the art was drawn in Photoshop. * Elly decidió que la confrontación con los tiburones era lo más divertido y dramático. Puedes ver cómo desarollé la idea en la serie de imagenes que sigue. Todo fue dibujado usando Photoshop. 

"Bikes in Space" should be coming out at the end of April 2013--assuming that we can get the rest of the funding for the project by March 23. (Now's your chance to help!) * "Bicicletas en espacio" debe ser publicado a fines de Abril de 2013--si podemos lograr algunos fondos más para publicarlo. (¡Tú puedes ayudar aquí!)

Wildflower Studies

The Wildflower Festival at Mount Pisgah Arboretum in Eugene, Oregon is coming up this spring. I've been invited to do the poster again!

The featured plant is a tiny white flower called  Nemophila menziesii var. atomaria. I've been playing with different possible approaches to the composition-first with digital scribbles, then working out those ideas more in watercolor.

Not sure which view wins yet...I think it will partly depend on how it all interacts with the pollinator! More sketches to come.

kitty

Recently wrapped up a commission to illustrate some fossilized jaws of Smilodon gracilis. Sample of a preliminary sketch above, and detail from one of the finished plates below.

The preliminary sketches were done on the computer, but I inked the final drawing by hand with a steel-nib dip pen. It feels much more satisfying, and (though it seems counter-intuitive) I also feel like I have much better control with a tangible pen.

I did use the computer to do the final edits and touch-ups after the scientists gave their feedback, so the final product really is a hybrid of digital and traditional work.




While I was doing the ink work, I actually experimented with filming the process if stippling. I'll warn you that it's a very slow and undramatic way to work...but if you're curious, here's about a minute of dots falling into place. (And this is part of the reason that I respect well-done stippling so much...it can be so beautiful in its own right, and it sure takes a lot of patience and commitment to make the work happen!)

Wildflower Season

Mount Pisgah Arboretum invited me to do the poster art for their Wildflower Festival again this year. The event, which is scheduled for May 20, 2012, is always a delightful one--great music, great food, great people, and hundreds and hundreds of local wildflowers with botanists galore to tell you all about them.

The featured flower on the poster this year is the riverine lupine, Lupinus rivularis. Since I am such a fan of talking about sketching as a process, here are some of hidden, early layers in the Photoshop file that show me doodling rough shapes and colors before settling in on the final arrangement.

Similarly, the yellow-rumped warbler went through a lot of different poses and refinements before it ended up in its final state.

Keep your eyes open; volunteers will be putting posters up all over the Eugene/Springfield area soon!

More posts about creating posters for festivals at Mount Pisgah Arboretum:

• Lobster Mushroom
• Monkeyflowers
• Witches's cap with banana slug
• California oatgrass

Lines, lines, lines

I'm working on the Wildflower Festival poster, developing the delightfully complex layers of leaves and stalks and flowers that make up the lupine shrub. I'm at the stage where most of the line-work is done, but I need to look it over and tidy things up: cleaning up any wobbles, adjusting line weights, and making sure that things are overlapping correctly--none of the leaves that are in the back should be drawn on top of a stem or a flower that should be in the front, of course.

Which makes me remember a book that I enjoyed as a child: The Borrowers, by Mary Norton. I enjoyed the story as a child, but I also remember being startled by the illustrations. They are lovely line drawings by Beth and Joe Krush. The illustrators use what, to me, was a totally startling and even rebellious approach: they didn't fuss with planning out the foreground/background relationships too much, so that you can see the lines of stuff in the background right through the stuff in the foreground.

See how you can see the edge of the table right through the tiny man's legs? And you can see the edge of the bed right through the table? And you can see the lines of the bedsheet, as well as the chamber-pot, right through the cane?

Scandal! Or perhaps a clever way to hint that this is all in one's imagination? Or perhaps just a really fun, anti-uptight approach to line drawings? Hats off the to Krushes for being starting and delightful in a way that has stuck in my head since elementary school.

(More images from The Borrowers. Seriously, it's worth a pop by the library to revisit this one.)

All right, back to work for me.