Category: Art Gallery

Art Gallery – New Wave Portrait by Mousetivity

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About a month back, a friend posted an awesome portrait she’d had commissioned that brought to mind the iconic new wave pop art of Patrick Nagel. She linked me to the artist’s commission page and I bookmarked it for later perusal.

Fast-forward a few weeks and I’m still riding on the high of finding a kimono that fits me and happens to be in one of my favourite colours. I realised that the graphic design of the kimono, bold red lip, and funky glasses would be a perfect fit for the art style, so I contacted the artist and asked if it would be possible to replicate the pattern in his style.

He totally went above and put so much lovely detail into the kimono and my glasses, and even made the portrait larger than necessary to show it off to its best potential and included a background that helped balance the whole piece out. Be sure to view the full-sized version. He was an absolute pleasure to work with, and his prices start at a base five dollars, if you can believe that! If you’re interested in a funky and unique portrait like this, kimono or not, definitely check out Mousetivity on Fiverr.

Happy Hina-Matsuri!

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I hope everyone is having a great day! While it’s still March 2nd here in Canada, it’s been March 3rd, Hinamatsuri, in Japan for several hours already. Last year, I made a set of dolls with perler beads. The year before that, origami. This year I decided to go for a double-whammy. I drew a set which are also available as a print, and I made this adorable set from Nanoblock that was super fun to put together.

May this year be filled with luck and love to you and all the girls and women in your lives.

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Art Gallery – Sakura Valentine

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Sakura Valentine

Happy Valentine’s Day! I had grand plans to do a really sweet, romantic coordination on the mannequin but that went awry as plans are wont to do. I still wanted to share something though, since I love you all so much for continuing to support me. I’ve been working on this illustration for a while now. Initially I was going to share it during cherry blossom season, but the pink floral theme seemed perfect for a Valentine. It’s not much, but it sure is pretty, and I hope you like it!

I’ve also set up a shop on Society6 with some prints of the occasional artwork I do and share here, including this one. I get a few dollars from each one sold, all of which will go back into the fund to help support the blog.

Art Gallery – Washi Papercraft Maiko

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Washi Papercraft Maiko This week has been a long and frustrating one. Bad weather, work stress, and my grandmother is having some medical issues. So yesterday, when I found myself with some free time, I decided to self-soothe by working on a digital washi papercraft maiko collage. Typically, I make these based on characters from pop culture – movies, cartoons, etc – and prints of those are available here. However, I realised that the bold and graphic shape of them would be very well-suited to traditional woodblock printing as well. Armed with my large collection of washi and chiyogami paper stock textures and scans, I set out to work.

I stuck to a primarily dusty, desaturated palette to keep things feeling soft and vintage, and applied textures to her outfit to bring it all to life. I added the origami flowers as kanzashi and the bamboo pole on her parasol to bring a bit more depth to it and make it look even more like a “real” mixed-media piece instead of an entirely digital one.

Overall, I’m very happy with how she turned out. It always feels good to create something pretty and share it with the world. I suspect I’ll be making more of these sometime in the future.

 

Art Gallery – Inktober Compilation

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Inktober is an interesting initiative to try to encourage people to get out the old traditional media and be creative. For every day during the month of October, the goal is to produce one ink drawing. There are lists of prompts, but you can also choose to work off your own designs if you wish. It’s been quite a while since I did any real-media work so I thought this year I would participate, but rather than use the official prompts, I’d draw one kimono motif a day. I had a lot of fun doing this, and I think I might make it a yearly tradition. Maybe next year I’ll pick one common motif and draw a different variation of it each day. I’m certain I could find thirty-one ways to interpret sakura or ume, for example.

If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve probably seen these already, but I really wanted to put them all together for posterity and reference. I really love the variety in these. Some of them were clearly done on days when I had more free time than others but when you put them all together I feel like they flow very nicely. I think forcing myself to stick to two widths of black ink pen and only gold accents helped make sure that they really do feel like one cohesive project instead of just a pile of unrelated doodles. They’re also all in the same sketchbook on the same paper, the variations in colour are due to lighting differences and instagram filters.