artalicious

I thought I would put up some images that we've been taking in the studio (and by "we" I mean "mostly Robert").

First, we had an open house of sorts with all of the other studios and the gallery. We took holiday portraits for anyone who was brave enough to step in front of the camera, and there were some fantastic results!

Here's a great one of our friends' kid hamming it up. When I asked her if he practiced this a lot at home, she looked at me and said she's never seen him dance like this before!



Then we got this cute image (which I took, not too bad I think!):



We also took a holiday portrait for our friends, Katie and Rhiannon with their dogs, O'Malley and Oliver. There was much waving of toys and shaking of treats and wearing of antlers (on the dogs). They went with this one for their holiday card.

We then thought it would be a great idea to traumatize our own dogs, so we brought them over to the studio and made them do embarrassing things with holiday decorations. No animals were harmed during this photo shoot, but I can't say the same for the decorations.

Here's Keira, plotting our demise as soon as this is over.


Aggie gets pissed off. Keira hits the floor.


All is soon forgiven. Much kissy face is seen.


They make up over a meal of holiday garland. Lovely. I launch myself at them to make sure they don't swallow any. Damn dogs.


The rest of the images can be found by clicking here. We ended up picking 4 different photos and printed them out with funny captions and put those in our holiday cards.

Next up will be some of our model photos we've taken for stock.

~JML

Posted in: Animals, Dogs, Holidays, Katie, Kids, Portraits, Rhiannon, Robert Hill, Studio on January 12, 2009 at at 1:15 PM 3 comments    

Well, one thing I would like to do more is post more about art that I made this year. To start that off, here's an illustration of sorts that I've been working on.

I'd like to modify it enough to try and screen print it in one and two colors with my (new since Nov.) screen printing kit.

Right now it's got too many colors and screens to do that, but I think I can work with it. I'm also going to keep working on the letters and such a bit more. It's not quite done.

In other news, Robert and I did get the studio space. We've had it since late October and we really like it. It's allowed us to move a lot of the "art stuff" out of the house, plus it's let Robert set up a seamless white background for stock photography purposes.

We're now using SmugMug to host galleries of client photos and I'm really happy with it. Now I need to make sure we start to make money off of it to justify the yearly fee!

~JML

Posted in: Illustration, New Year, Robert Hill, Studio on January 9, 2009 at at 11:35 AM 2 comments    

I'm trying to figure out how to customize this blog. Seems like I should know how since I am a graphic designer.

So far, we have made a banner! woot. I think I'll need to get Robert to help me do the rest. To be fair, I'm not really much of a web designer/coder.

The current illustration in the banner is from a line drawing I did for a book called Jhane's Affliction. (yes, you may groan at the bad pun.) The other women are her glamorous super-model sisters. They don't have names. That's a slightly hacked up and rearanged version of the first page of the book (yay photoshop!).

Jhane is the short one up there. She's my alter ego of sorts. Short and with dark hair. I would say she *seems* like she has more issues than me, but that might just be an exaggeration.

~JML

Posted in: blog edits, Jhane, web design on September 5, 2008 at at 11:23 AM 1 comments    

Robert and I are scoping out studio space. There's a warehouse being divided up and rented out near our work and our house.

It would give us a place to move all of our art stuffs (which are currently packed up and jammed in odd spaces in the tiny house) plus give Robert a "home base" for a lot of his photography work. At least the stuff that needs to be studio based anyway (head shots, portraits, products, stock, etc.).

And it will (hopefully) get us back into a community of artists, something I'm missing.

We're trying to look at money and figure out how we can afford this and how it can help us bring in more income.

I'm hoping this will work out!


~JML

Posted in: Studio on August 27, 2008 at at 1:42 PM 2 comments    

Well Mike got his tattoo! He promises that he made it through with minimal flinching. The outline was done in one setting and he's going to get it colored (though I'll have to ask him about that as I didn't remember him wanting color, just shading). It's on his rib cage on the side. I think on left side of his body? I'll have to double check that.

So here's the new tattoo!


I think it looks great. I love what the artist did with the scales and the water. Now the waves don't look like mountains, but actually like waves.

And while he is pretty pale, he's not quite that ghostly shade of white. I lightened the photo a bit.

I'll have to find out where he got the tattoo done and who did it. You hear that Mike? Let me know!

This has been a good learning experience. I'm still looking for a sketch group so that I can work on my skills. And I think I've learned a bit about tattoos as well.

~Julia

Posted in: Mike, tattoo on July 8, 2008 at at 5:38 PM 0 comments    

Which means in my case, that I'm not doing so well!

My brother asked me to illustrate a tattoo for him. Awesome! I was really touched that he would ask me to do that. So I start working on it. And working. And working. And…I think you get the idea.

I realized that I haven't done any "real" drawing in probably 3-4 YEARS. I've done some small sketches for work as different logo projects came up and done some for stock work. But most of that ends up refined in Illustrator. And as long as I can get a decent sketch scanned into Illustrator, I can usually refine it from there.

But not this tattoo. It's just looking too "clip arty". I don't have the skills to add all the wonderful detail and shading and personality that a good tattoo artist can.

Fortunately, I remembered that my friend Jennifer "Jenny Bunns" Young is a tattoo artist! (check out her website: www.theapprenticediaries.com and her blog: theapprenticediaries.blogspot.com) She told me to stop tearing my hair out and that since the tattoo artist is going to have to redraw everything anyway, what I've got is good enough to take to them. So I think that's what's happening next. I think Mike is happy with the general details and he's scouting out a good artist.

Here's some iterations. He wanted the tattoo to have 2 elements. A compass and an Ouroboros, or a snake eating it's tail. The compass was representing the Navy (which he's leaving in a couple days) as well as direction or guidance. The Ouroboros (don't ask me how to pronounce it!) represents the idea of your actions coming back to you. Being mindful of your behaviour/actions.

I started with the compass (since it was the easiest!).



















We ditched the star and then came to this:














Which turned into this:














I then took a detour over here:


















Which I like as it integrates the elements more, but it gets waaay too "dragony" and not enough "snakey", so we nixed this.

I went back to "drawing" and came up with this to help me get the face and some detail.













Brought that BACK into Illustrator and got to here:


















You'll notice the compass changed (we could never figure out what to put in the circle after we took the star out) and we added a wave and star design in the center. The water symbolizes change, movement and the stars represent another form of guidance.

The current final version is this:


















I've taken out the minor shading I had. We got rid of the clouds; they were too busy. I made the waves less crappy (though now they look like snow covered mountains to me, hopefully the tattoo artist can fix that!) and I've got the compass pointing down into the middle of the waves. I like integrating the elements together like that. The stars suck, again, I'm relying on the tattoo artists to interpret those in a more interesting fashion.

Overall, I'm happy. I'm disappointed with how LONG this has taken me and I really wish I could have done a nice, detailed, illustration. I might still try to do a pencil sketch and see what I can come up with, but I think this is enough for Mike to take and get something nice done.

Now I'm trying to find a sketch group to attend since I've become aware of bad my skills have become!

I'll post a final image whenever Mike gets his tattoo done and I can get a good image of it.

~JML

Posted in: drawing, Jennifer Young, Mike, ouroboros, tattoo on June 25, 2008 at at 12:36 PM 0 comments    

I was very lucky a few weeks ago and was able to meet two artists. H.A. Sigg, who is from Switzerland and Ron Balser, from Atlanta.

Sigg was showing at Mason Murer for Modern Atlanta weekend. My partner designed his website so we were introduced to Sigg, his wife and his son. He was a charming little old man. I don't remember how it came up, but he said to us at one point "When I'm in my studio, I am a god, a king. But when I leave, I am nobody." (This is all quite paraphrased by the way.) I thought it was a good description of probably how many artists feel. Creating something that seems so important or amazing, but then (for most of us) no one knows (or cares!) what we've made. : ) It reminds me of Nell always telling us to "let go" of our art, to not keep it precious to us.

It was also interesting that I didn't have much to say. I mean, here I was, talking with an internationally know artist and all I could comment on was how brilliant blue some of his paintings were. I'm not great at small talk, but geez, seems like I could have said something more than "I love that blue."

I did love seeing the originals, especially after a year of seeing web printouts of his paintings all over the house!

Ron's work was up at the Fay Gold Gallery. Ron is a client of ours at work. We've done some of the design and the coding for his website. Some of the benches were pretty cool. I loved Dorothy's Tornado. I thought it was a nice variation on "bench."

Didn't have much to say to Ron either, but he's a client and that feels a little presumptuous to take up his time in that way. He was also swamped with guests. But maybe those are all excuses to not have to talk to him! : )

There was also photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen with work up at Fay Gold. His work was really clever. Landscapes and body shapes that would create these weird spaces and vistas. They try to trick your eye. Very cool.

So, I didn't make any art, but I did get to see some and meet some artists. And now I'm writing about it. Pretty much doing everything I can to avoid making anything!

~JML

Posted in: Arno Rafael Minkkinen, art show, artist, H.A. Sigg, Ron Balser on May 23, 2008 at at 4:01 PM 0 comments