Illustration Friday: Intention

I think my art might be suffering a bit from me being sick for like a week, but I had this in mind for the prompt and wanted to make it happen anyway. FUN FACT: I drew this while lying in bed ;)

The line is from "Wrecking Ball," a song by Mother Mother, and the medium is sepia Micron pen with a touch of Photoshop.

March updates!

First and foremost, I redesigned my website and vastly improved my bio page. There's even a slightly blurry photo of me now. Hoo-ray!

Secondly—now that the month is over—I've compiled all my February Project pieces onto one page. I was overall pretty pleased with how that turned out. All fifteen pieces were hand-drawn with the same Pilot Fineliner pen, which I consider a victory. Click the image below to view the whole series:


One of the things I was interested in exploring with this project was how to marry my interests in art and writing outside the route I've always gone before—comics. A few of the quotes are pulled directly from stories I've written and others were made up on the spot. Though these pieces were inspired by my own characters, I tried to choose themes that were universal or at least relatable. It was interesting to see what resonated with people. There were several fans of the tacos!

Thirdly, the all-women-contributors issue of The Medulla Review just came out and I've got a piece of flash fiction in it. Check it out!

Illustration Friday: Fluid

Not sure where this one came from! Ink and watercolor.

I finished my "February Project" yesterday, so I'm planning a round-up post of those 15 pieces here with some commentary. Until then, you can see them all on my tumblr, of course!

Illustration Friday: Suspense

Part of a series of text-based illustrations I've been doing on Tumblr inspired by one of my stories. Tis the season for conversation hearts, after all!

My new favorite Photoshop trick

I'm more or less self-taught in Photoshop, which has meant I've had to figure out a lot the short cuts for myself. Up until recently, I've done all my coloring with the brush tool (coloring book style!) but it's always kinda time consuming and since I discovered this easy method for laying down my flat colors, I'm not going back.

I can't remember reading about this particular trick in any of the tutorials I've consulted over the years—so even though I'm sure other people are familiar with it, I decided to put together this mini-tutorial. The line work does have to be on a separate layer from the coloring for this to work—I colored underneath the lines here as the white space was all transparency, but you can also just set your lines layer to 'multiply'.

I split the tutorial into two images, so click on through:



And just for fun, here's how the finished picture turned out :)

Illustration Friday: Twirl

Watercolor, ball point, colored pencil and a little bit of gouache.

I'm aiming to hit at least two Illo Friday prompts each month this year. We'll see how it goes! The daily tumblr's been keeping me motivated.

Illustration Friday: Grounded

So this is where this week's word took me!


Illustration for a doofy sci-fi story I was writing a while back. It's okay—the stranded pilots will soon be accosted rescued by space pirates. Photoshop.