City Arts Fest 2012!

Hey All
I've been on MAJOR blog and picture book hiatus the past few weeks. My husband and I just finished a nearly 300 drawing installation for the City Arts Magazine art festival, City Arts Fest- a four day long festival around the city of visual & performance art, music, lectures and pop up performances. Our installation is in the hub site of the three day long festival, called "Culture Club." 

Our piece titled "Grizzly 1971" is a series of portraits based off of a year book that we found from Seattle's Queen Anne High School from 1971. We drew 280 yearbook style portraits based off of the senior class. We then made up names and titles & clubs for the students, mostly very strange and funny.We created a walk-in year book room where all of the portraits were displayed as well as two small  trophy case like pocket displays that flanked the doors of the venue as you walked in. We wanted to breath life back into an otherwise banal and forgettable account of the past, the yearbook.It took us nearly two months to draw all the portraits.

The show will be up in downtown Seattle at 411 Union Street (between 4th and 5th) through October 20th. The venue is free to enter and is open from noon-11pm Oct 17-19th, then from noon-9pm on Saturday the 20th. If you are in town check it out!

For more info, go to: http://www.cityartsfest.com/

Winter Slow Down vs. 2012 ramp up!

Hey everyone!
Just wanted to quickly check in! It's been a couple of weeks since my last post. The holidays were in full effect and I went out of town. I did in fact get a chance to do some drawing over the break which is good, but I hadn't gotten to upload anything while I was gone. I did keep up with my Illustration Friday work but did not post it.That said, as the new year is upon up, there will be more to come this week! For the time being, here is a piece that I was commissioned to do for a Christmas present:

The gentleman saw some work of mine from our yeti show at work and commissioned me to draw his family at Yetis, something he said he always wanted to see. After some recent experience doing some portraits, I decided that the best thing to do if you are going to draw someone, is to meet them in person. It's so hard to hone in on the essence of someone that you've never met through a stiff photograph. So I went to the house of the family pretending that I was there working on a photography project about families- so the portrait was a surprise to everyone. The family was a hoot and I feel like I captured their essence and likeness pretty well!

I've also made a lot of headway with my graphic novel. I finished the first section. Now onto edits and part 2. I'll post some more pages soon so you can see another vignette from the book. Now I'm off to work on some illustrations for my first portfolio crit with the local chapter of SCBWI this coming week.
Thanks for looking!