Illustration Friday: The Return of Spring

The return of fresh asparagus to the produce department is a sure sign that spring is here. I love the tidy bundles—I even love the lavender rubber band that surrounds them. 

I left this piece unfinished...or is it? I actually like how it looks, and may leave it like this. I find work-in-progress shot very appealings, and sometimes they have a vitality and movement that makes the "finished" piece looks kind of static by comparison. To my eye, especially with pencil drawings, the unfinished image seems to be emerging from the paper. 

What do you think? Does it look unfinished to you?

CP Magazine!

Last month, I received an email, out-of-the-blue, from the amazing Ann Kullberg. (If you are into colored pencil art, then you're no doubt familiar with Ann. She has a fabulous website devoted to colored pencil art, has published a number of books, and even publishes CP Magazine.) Ann was emailing to ask if she could use my delphinium drawing in the April issue of her magazine, which would feature botanical art!  I was thrilled, of course, but quite humbled. Would my little drawing, created to illustrate "gesture" for Illustration Friday, hold its own among pieces by well-known artists? Well, I've just downloaded the digital version of the issue, and I'm happy that Ann chose this piece—it's not your "textbook" photo-realistic botanical art, so I think it helps to illustrate the range of styles in botanical drawings.

So, check out the April issue of CP Magazine—it features the amazing Ann Swan (my idol), a fascinating step-by-step by the talented Susan Jones (her work is exquisite) and includes one of my all-time favorite botanical pieces, that astounding Savoy cabbage drawn by Janie Pirie. Thank you so much for including my little bouquet, Ann!!

Marshmallow Peeps

A toast to Google image search!

I'm a bit obsessed with Google image search. It all started about a year ago when I received an email from a graphic designer in NYC. He had a client—a very small Napa Valley winery called Gofessel Vineyards—that was looking for an illustration of a magnolia to use on a wine label. They'd done an online image search, found my magnolia drawing, and wanted to know if I'd be interested in licensing it. I was thrilled, of course! We worked out the details, and I emailed the file off to him. I was beginning to appreciate the benefits of online image searching.

Months later, I realized that I hadn't heard anything further. I checked in with the designer and learned that the wine was actually bottled, labelled and available for sale. It was great fun to order a case of these babies for Christmas gifts.

Well, my love affair with Google image search continued when I read that it's a great way to check and see if anyone has used one of your images without permission. Really?! You just go to the Google search site, click on "images" and there's a little camera icon that appears in the search box. Clicking on it allows you to upload any of your images, and then it'll find matches on the internet. I tried my magnolia drawing as a test case, and lo and behold, it immediately found my blog and the aforementioned winery website!

But the really fun part—if you're as easily amused as I am—is that it will show you  images that it considers "visually similar" to yours. For instance, here's what popped up when I entered my red onion drawing (seen below as the first image):

or how about when I entered my purple beans?:

Isn't that a hoot?

But all silliness aside, Google does seem to provide an amazingly in-depth image search. I did find that a small non-profit used my drawing of a Starbucks cup on a one-time online invitation to a coffee hour meeting. Of course, I'd never care about something like that, but if your images are being used commercially and/or extensively in ways for which you should be compensated, shouldn't you know about it?

So if you have some time, do a little sleuthing via Google images...but I warn you, it's addicting!

Illustration Friday: Shades

Prismacolor colored pencil on pastel paper, 5" x 7"

Charlotte and May love how the mandarin orange tree shades them 

on a sunny afternoon.

This drawing could use a little tweaking, but since I'm working the rest of the week, I wanted to get it posted. I almost always work from actual objects, but since chickens don't sit still for very long, I worked from some photographs this time. May (the golden one) is actually the bigger of the two girls, but she was letting Charlotte upstage her when I was taking pictures.

Speaking of shades and chickens, I was watching one of my guilty-pleasure shows, "Storage Wars", this weekend, and learned that chicken sunglasses actually exist! So, I went online to try and find some photos to share with you, and found a great blog with a wonderful post about that very episode. The photos are hysterical.

Owning chickens provides a pretty constant source of entertainment. The other day, I heard them chattering loudly in their "upset" voices. My husband went out to check on them, and saw nothing unusual. He decided to check their nesting box for eggs while he was outside, and when he opened the little door, the neighbor's cat was sitting on the eggs!