New portfolio website!

You may have noticed that I no longer update this website. You would be correct! Instead, I would like to direct you to my current portfolio site, http://rhiannonrs.com, where I will be consolidating my web presence and hopefully install a blog and the like. Meanwhile, it is an image-based portfolio. Enjoy!

Reorganizing Portfolios

Just as a heads up, I’m separating my portfolios into illustration and design.

The illustration one can be found here: http://charibdys.cleanfolio.com/
And the design portfolio can be found here: http://charibdys.designbinder.com/

As all portfolios, both are works in progress.

I am still here!

Hello everyone! I’ve been too busy to update the blog (it’s my senior year at university), but I thought that I would update it to assure my audience that I have not entirely abandoned this blog. Keeping track of the websites that I have it tricky– I’ve only now managed to understand how Twitter is supposed to work– if you want updates, that and deviantart are probably the best bets. I want to change this blog’s layout to a less cramped, more readable one, so that’s my next plan. In the meantime, have some art!

In Progress

This is a watercolor painting that I started a few years ago and have not finished because I felt that I wasn’t “good enough yet” to finish it without ruining it. I have much more confidence that I can complete it now, although I have got some other comics, illustrations, and prints to finish first.

I also just really like how it looks sketched out!

Saint Mantis Sketch

Messing around in photoshop. The texture’s just for fun.

This is a draft sketch for a little woodblock print I want to do, which is in turn a study for a larger work (mostly in process and technique). Maybe a vulture next, if this works out? I feel like I’m treading awfully close to Ursula Vernon’s territory, though.

Shuggoth Paint Sketch

This is about a year old. Gouache study for a painted illustration for Kobold Quarterly magazine.

In other awesome news, I got a short story accepted into Arcane magazine! Strangely enough, it’s a horror story.

Nathaniel: character concept sketches

Whoops, I did not mean to take a month break from blogging. Here’s some character design sketches from a comic I’m working on. Click to enlarge.

Intro to Printmaking, I

Since I’m primarily a printmaker, I thought that I’d start off my Thursdays with a quick intro to printmaking. I primarily do relief printmaking in wood, with a few forays into linoleum and that wonderful white eraser rubber stuff. I’ve done etching, drypoint, monotype, screenprinting, and a couple other methods, not always successfully, but many of those methods require a much fancier setup than I have currently. Relief, on the other hand, does not require a huge amount of space, and can be printed by hand rather than needing a huge press setup or vats of acid or giant slabs of limestone. Screenprinting is also fairly easy to do in, say, a garage, but that’s a subject for another day.

I posted up a scan of one of the final the Winter Bird prints yesterday, so today I’ve got a picture of it about a third of the way carved. You can see I started with the outside; the order that pieces are carved in doesn’t really matter.

In this case I drew straight on the block, totally forgetting that the final would be reversed, and then swore a bit. After I’d decided that the image worked just as well reversed, I primed the surface with ordinary white Elmer’s glue. Priming with glue isn’t always necessary, but in this case the lines were so fine that I was afraid that the . The glue (a very light coat) helps hold the wood fibers together and also smooths the surface. That done, I inked the picture with a brush. Really only halfway- you can see that I didn’t use a terribly organized process with this one. When more colors are involved, it takes a lot more planning and precision. I inked the surface mostly so that I could tell what lines I would be carving on.

Usually I prime a woodblock with a light wash of watercolor so that the carved surface and the surface that will print are more clearly differentiated — this one I didn’t bother because it’s such a tiny quick piece. The feathers were tricky, though. I mostly used a knife.

Whew, that’s a lot of information in a short time. And carving is the easy part! Next Thursday: carving tools!

I know I have a tendency to dump a lot of information fast and/or without context, so if you have any questions, please ask.

Blue Winter Bird

Here’s a tiny woodblock I did last fall. The full size is 4×4″, so it’s actually bigger onscreen than it is in real life! I didn’t exactly consciously decide to work so detailed, but I like doodling on the pieces of wood I have lying around, and every once in a while I carve them. I was about halfway through it before I realized that I had to carve every single teeny feature out. Hah!

… I have a lot more of these carved doodles around that I haven’t printed yet. It’s too cold to work in the basement right now, which is where my studio is, so I’m hoping that spring will show her face any day now!

Sakuracon/Stumptown 2011

Whew! That was a busy two weeks. Busy and awesome! Stumptown and Sakuracon were both fantastic. I was there with Melanie, my partner in Crab Tank, and at Sakuracon splitting an artist’s alley table with Kayla, one of the contributors to Crab Tank’s Tankadere comics anthology. I also got to hang out with my relatives up in Seattle! It’d been way too long.

I’ve got a plan for this blog, but I’ve been to busy between convention prep and classes to implement it. So! Here’s the plan: art posts every Tuesday – finished pieces are ideal, but sketches and in-progress works too. Expect some crossposting from my dA account, which I know can be hard to navigate. Thursday will be the day I discuss my artistic process and art in general. Let me know if there’s any specific questions you’d like answered or themes to be discussed!

Now I’m going to go sleep off the con crud before I catch up on my homework.

New Business Cards!

Just in time for Stumptown! Woo!

I’m excited because they turned out so nicely. You can’t really see it on the scan, but the monster in my header is over the front of the card — in spot gloss! Very exciting.