The Verdict is in!

Omaha was getting ready to shut down on Monday night but Snowmageddon didn't happen. I think we got about 6 inches total, but we did get 2 snow days = 2 nice long uninterrupted work days for me.

Need Some Fresh Painting Inspiration?

I've been saving color swatches from Design Seeds on a color board I have on Pinterest for a while and today I decided to use one as inspiration for a new butterfly baby painting to add to a collection I'm working on.

I know designers make inspiration boards all the time and I've made a few when I have designed scrapbook paper collections, but I think this is a great exercise if you need some fresh painting inspiration.

As you can see, I went for really simple and I got lucky. My butterfly reference is very similar to my  inspiration palette, though I'm not convinced that this is a real butterfly species. I think someone may have tinkered with their butterfly photo. Anyway, if I hadn't found the right color, I would've just used my reference for the drawing and then painted it with my inspiration colors.

This was a very satisfying little experiment and I hope this gives you a little encouragement if you're ever stuck on what to paint. Just go to Pinterest or Design Seeds and find some inspiring color palettes and reference photos. You might want to set a timer though so you have time to paint. ;)

Pink & Yellow Butterfly Inspiration Board

The finished baby butterfly

May has been a fishy month

The prevailing theme of my May was fish, Fish and FISH.

It started the first week when my husband and I traveled to Kearney, NE to spend two days volunteering with the Nebraska Game and Parks at their Kearney Fishing Expo. We were assigned to the Fish Prints Tent where we helped groups of school kids make fish prints on newsprint. I was excited at the thought of using real fish to make prints on paper, but once I got there and started working with the kids, I realized that using the rubber fish we had was a good thing. Here I am below with my two prints which I brought home, scanned and played with in Photoshop. They made interesting images for Father's Day art.

Little Girl Fishing on Etsy

More fish came to play in my studio mid-May. I have been getting newsletters from Spoonflower, a fabric company in North Carolina, for some time and have been wanting to participate in their weekly pattern design contests. They sell quilt fabric and have prompts for designs every week and the designers can have their own shop and sell their designs as fabric, wrapping paper and wall paper. I started playing around last year with teaching myself via YouTube and Google how to make patterns in Photoshop and I really like it... so in mid-May Spoonflower had a mermaid design contest which was sponsored by a manufacturer looking for a mermaid design for little girls' pajamas. I didn't win but I had a lot of fun making this - my first fabric pattern. I got my fat quarter sample in the mail today and it's gorgeous. I have a little shop on Spoonflower now where it is for sale.

So now I've officially got the pattern making bug! I submitted another design yesterday and started working on a third.

My June so far is looking like it will be filled with a variety of summery things - more mermaids, children, dogs, hedgehogs and sandcastles. ;)

You can see my more art on my Facebook page.

And purchase art on my website or in my Etsy store.

Just start. Ideas WILL happen.

Something I have learned during the past year designing scrapbook papers is that I just need to get started. I never know how my collections are going to look. What I have discovered is that as I get started, I get more ideas. It's like going for a walk and deciding which street to go down next.

Delicate Splendor Collection

These scrapbook papers are image dominant so there's got to be some art on each page vs. just a pattern and all six papers need to read as a cohesive group. My client is terrific to work for. My specs are to use 3-4 main colors (backgrounds) based on the given theme. The rest is up to me. A little daunting the first time, but I decided to just dive in.

My process is more relaxed now than when I did the first set. I don't do as many thumbnail sketches or try to plan out everything before I start because my designs end up evolving as I go - so I brainstorm different objects, colors, and textures that go with my theme and then I look for reference material (my own photos or online). I start drawing in my sketchbook. Then I paint all the pieces of "clip art" on watercolor paper.

Autumn Splendor Collection

Usually I want to start designing before I have all of my objects painted so I scan what I have and get started. As I start on a page, I get ideas for other pages. I use the images I've created to inspire background color choices and I make several layers and try out different colors and textures and fiddle with the blend modes until I get something that I like.

So the lesson I have learned is to just start and trust that I will discover other solutions as I continue. I also have learned to give myself permission to redo. If I approach my art knowing that if I don't like the way it looks, I can start it over, then I am more relaxed. You can have a many tries as you want. I learned how to paint portraits this way. And it doesn't have to be a huge labor intensive encounter. I usually get my answers sooner than I think I will.

Dealing With Overwhelm as a Creative Person

I'm a highly sensitive person, HSP for short. It's estimated that 15-20% of the world population are HSPs. I would guess most are creative and introverted. It's a curse and a blessing. I remember being told by well meaning people to not be so sensitive. Ugh! The plus side is we're intuitive and compassionate. The down side is that sometimes life can be very overwhelming. But you don't have to be highly sensitive to experience overwhelm especially if you're an artist. I have a friend who refers to this as Artist's ADD. Yup.

I've been learning to deal with overwhelm through journaling, spending time in my garden, breathing exercises to focus before I start working, working in half hour increments with a timer and planning time to work on projects on my calendar rather than just entering the due date. These things are starting to help. I'm not doing them perfectly but what I am doing is reaping benefits. Eat the elephant one bite at a time. (I'm writing this to remind myself.)

When I start thinking about my art when I'm relaxed and not creating, I start having a million ideas, but then I don't know which one to start on first. Hello procrastination. The positive outcome of the practices I'm trying to do to manage myself is that they're starting to silence the annoying voices inside my head that say "you're not working hard enough" which I'm all for.

Another very important part of my dealing with overwhelm as a creative person is to be nice to oneself. I'm learning to ignore those annoying voices in my head and speak to myself in an encouraging voice as I would to a teenager. I have lots of practice at this with two in my house... And there's a better chance I'll listen.

Painting Watercolor Portraits Online Workshop

Hey All,

I'm giving an online watercolor portrait workshop today through Mark Mitchell's How To Be A Children's Book Illustrator Course. The presentation will be recorded and PDF will be included for both live participants and those who cannot make it at 2:00 pm CST today.

More details here.

Hope you can join in!!

Kathy

How to prepare your line drawings to color in Photoshop?

This seems simple but if you don't know exactly what you're doing and learning as you go (like me) it's easy to mess up. I have been working on my first digital children's book and fortunately the company has been working with new illustrators and has been very understanding.

What I had been doing 

Scanning and then desaturating and adjusting levels, making the blend Multiply, but when I needed to edit my line drawing, I both drew with my tablet and scanned additional lines. Well, what I learned was that this makes a huge mess! Each time you adjust the levels it affects the pixels and the more you do it, the more pixelated your lines can get. So that's my problem?!  Though the "multiply" layer method is the standard, I like this one better because you just get your outlines rather than a white background with it and the author talks about being able to work with transparent pixels which is a future lesson for me but sounds handy.

So now, rather than beating myself up for making so many mistakes, I'm realizing how much I have learned and feel confident that my second book which I am just starting is going to go even more smoothly!

What I have learned

I am so relieved to have found this information that I wanted to give them a shout and share with people like me. This link is to a blog called Chopping Block. It explains everything and then includes a free downloadable Photoshop Action. I first went through the instructions manually so I understood how to do it and then I tried the Action that I downloaded. It is slick! And I anticipate it will make my future line work much better.

I am in their debt.

What About Black Watercolor?

Over the weekend, I painted one of my cats who unfortunately is black. I love her coat and she's the loviest cat I've ever owned but when it comes to painting her, it's tricky. When I first started using watercolors, I was a purist. I heard so much about watercolorists not using black that I just accepted that as truth. Of course, there are ways you can mix black rather than using black straight from a tube. A nice rich black can be achieved using alizarin crimson, pthalo green and ultramarine (or whatever dk red, green & blue you have). Recently, I decided to scrap the notion that watercolorists have to avoid black. I also decided to do  my own little test and see what all the talk is about black watercolor. Below is my experiment. I painted lamp black in a square as my "control" and then I mixed up different blacks. See what you think.

I realize all monitors are slightly different but honestly I cannot distinguish a major difference between these in person or on my monitor. Comments?

So I painted Juliet using various mixtures of lamp black with ultramarine, perm aliz crimson and pthalo green just for the heck of it. I do like it when the wash is lighter and you can see hints of another color, but overall the black looks black to me. ;)