I know, right? It’s been over a month since I last put up a post. I’ve had the winter blahs- I’m doing work,  but I haven’t been inclined to put it up. I took a week off work this week, and I have some stuff to show, like this little 6×6 of a black phoebe that I did yesterday.  And I have a few more days to work on a few other things. I feel like I’ve been creatively hibernating through the winter, but it’s time to wake up and get cracking on some projects. Like these birds. There will be a bunch more birds like this.

Tags: animals, art, birds, birdwatching, black phoebe, drawing, I'm alive!, ink

I got a tip from some of my pals who are recently parents over the Thanksgiving holiday- the kids dig penguins.

I’m told it’s because of a Facebook-like site designed for kids called Club Penguin, which I checked out breifly, but I don’t really know much about it. What I do know is that I am lacking in penguin-related designs in my Zazzle shop, so I made one for my morning doodle today and did a few different colors.

I like these little graphical designs of animals in candy colors. One of these days I might compile them all into a pattern, or maybe just do a series with one pattern for each animal.

Tags: animals, art, doodles, penguin, vector

I haven’t been posting them, but I’ve been playing with seamless repeating patterns since the beginning of the year. While it’s mostly been flowers and other sort of geometric shapes, there was this one file I started with the intention to fill with as many unique, organic shapes as I could, and this pattern of sea critters started to take shape. It took me a three or four sesssions to finish it (over the course of several months!), but it’s finally done!

I learned a little trick while I was working on this one. I kept testing it out and in spite of all of the unique shapes, I was still really aware of exactly where the tiles were seaming. I had overlapping shapes, but it wasn’t until I started using certain motifs over again within the tile that the rhythm finally broke up enough for me and the pattern started to feel more natural to my eyes. The tiling isn’t 100% invisible, especially at this small size, but it’s a lot better than where it started (I don’t see any strong path of  white running through it anymore, for instance), and I’m really proud of this one

Tags: animals, art, ocean, patterns, sea life, vector