Design & Execution

  The reference for this piece is a known work of fine art: a photograph by Peter Mitchell, a lorry driver who traversed West Yorkshire and occasionally snapped photos. The piece is titled Eric Massheder, Leeds, (1975) . Eric is the man in the doorway, a drippings refinery worker who posed in his home, adjacent (really, attached) to the refinery where he worked for 12 years. Eric woke up in his home in the morning, walked one room (or so) over, and began his shift. I have changed and omitted a few details for the sake of composition as usual. I've now been working from home for about four years, and I make a similar commute without stepping outdoors. My house even resembles Eric's a bit, though there's no factory nearby. I enter my workplace by transferring a USB cable, which joins all of my input and output devices from my personal computer to my work laptop. I stoop under my desk to make the transfer, so possibly a similar amount of exercise is involved—the digital equiva...

Another rooftop scene washed with black tea, though coffee might been more apt for Paris. I want to celebrate Paris's commitment to corrugated, slate-blue metal roofs, as explored by the titular cat in A Cat in Paris .  I enjoyed painting in darker and lighter tones over the middle tea tint. In past projects I have used Micron fineliners under my wash work because their ink doesn't blur, but I often find their lines too even, which makes the drawing feel contrived, mindlessly consistent in the weight of the line rather than heedful of the weight of the objects. For this project I returned to a college technique of drawing with a sharpened dowel and black ink to create some of the beefier, sketchy lines around the outside of the buildings because I can vary the weight more with pressure. Some details aren't explored with ink to give greater emphasis to others: a tree in the courtyard, smaller buildings in the background.  As I drew, I kept recalling advice about how to defin...

In Damascus, Virginia, near access to the Virginia Creeper trail, is a bed and breakfast known as the Millsap-Baker Estate. The house is more of a museum than a place of lodging. Each room brims with old pipes and depression glass. The breakfast area resembles something from Harry Potter, and the host and hostess tell stories every morning over home-cooked breakfast with 4 kinds of jam. Outside of the Victorian ediface of the Millsap-Baker Estate is a large Ginko tree surrounded in a halo of yellow confetti leaves, perfectly shaped like wings. I printed my Ginko leaf in red because yellow does not contrast enough with paper, though it is a mixed red. In this color, it more resembles a Japanese fan of some kind. The shape took me so thoroughly that I carved it into a woodblock and attempted to make cards from it. I'm still learning to manage this level of detail.

I began experimenting with woodblock printing this year. I'm not very good at starting with simple subjects, as one should in a medium that requires carving of every detail into a block of wood with mostly unfamiliar tools. Not bad for a first attempt, though.

I don't know where these rooftops are located, but they look like they could appear in a bustling village in an episode of The Witcher . OK, the bricks (and is that a skylight?) are a bit off theme, but imagination does the needful. I've been following the TV show, but had not delved into the books of Andrzej Sapkowski until recently. I've been reading (well, listening) to  The Sword of Destiny , purportedly a solid introduction to the world. The impetus: a few friends of mine have invited me to join in a Witcher-themed campaign of Dungeons and Dragons, which I know even less about and had not played before.  Now, every other Sunday, I find myself gathered around a table with a handful of D20s and D8s (many-sided die). As a Bard-class character, I cast "spells" and roll for ability checks, wisdom checks, and probably other checks yet unknown. And if I'm going to role-play in the world of Geralt and Ciri, I'll need grounding in the setting. And the setting ...

This stairway in San Juan was one of my favorite views, maybe because it was cool and shady and I wanted to get out of the sun. But the path upward drew my eye into a charming vortex.  I shall try archisketching in physical media this time. My workspace is heavily supervised by Eli, which did little to increase my efficiency. Eli disapproves of wet media, and harbors a grave mistrust of my eyedropper. Update: I sketched with a Micron archival ink fineliner, then shaded with watercolors. Micron fineliners create lines that don't smudge when exposed to water, which makes them perfect for this kind of layering. The washes of color went on step by step. Ha. This is a significantly looser style than I typically use. Let me know which style you prefer in the comments if you have an opinion.

My husband and I visited Old San Jan (Puerto Rico) at the end of October this year in an act of denial of the end of summer. We criscrossed the blue brick roads on foot in a color-induced daze, for San Juan is an archi-sketcher's dream city. I get a sense that the building owners of San Juan have collectively agreed that no two buildings in the town can be painted quite the same color, but all of the colors should be plausible options for fruit-flavored cereal pieces. The overall effect is simultaneously ancient, yet tropical. In the sketch, these buildings could belong to a street in a small town in Spain or Italy, but the colored version places them in Puerto Rico, at least for me. Buildings reveal so much about a community. Given the history of hurricanes, the choice of bright colors for nearly everything in Puerto Rico, so vulnerable to wear and weather, strikes me as optimistic.  Old San Juan has preserved its historic layout well. Given the narrowness and brick-ness of the st...

I've tracked over 14 years my visual obsession with radially-oriented life forms. So when I sought new painting subjects, the cactus astrophytum, which resembles a green, bedazzled, peeled-but-still-contiguous orange, of course caught my eye. It looks as though an overdressed canteloupe attempted to transform into a star, but quit halfway. When it grows a flower, it appears to be wearing a fancy hat. Down the side of each of its orange slices is a neat row of buttons, which if unbuttoned, would draw back the curtain into another universe. I drew on three different photos for this acrylic wash, which you should have guessed. The astrophytum is charismatic enough that it does not want to sit in close proximity to others of its kind outside of my paintings.

There are really two reasons as to why the rainbow eucalyptus could look the way it does: The bark simply can't decide what color to be. The fruit of the tree is Skittles, which inevitably melt in the sun and rain. Whichever it is, I felt like attempting to pay homage to Jacob Magraw-Mickelson .  Media: acrylic wash on watercolor paper

A little over a year ago, two friends of mine purchased a house encircled by sumptuous Japanese landscaping. Cloud-pruned evergreens and spiritually-positioned rocks abounded. So when my friends decided they wanted a paved courtyard and a privacy fence in one portion of the yard, an exquisite specimen of a Japanese maple had to move. We're talking a lacy, 9-foot-wide cascading affair with, as it turned out, a surprisingly robust root system. I was recruited to assist with the transplant on the understanding that I would receive the tree after it had been removed. The reader is spared the expense of watching the moved tree through winter, March, and (painfully) April with no sign of leafing. I eventually admitted failure, though the maple retained an air of majesty with its tangled grey arms, refusing as they did to issue buds. By late April, I had despaired of running outside after work to stare at the branches and will them to bud, so I decided to represent them in paintings inste...

 A sketch of Victoria Street, an adorably elbow-shaped thoroughfare in Edinburgh. I enjoy when streets make me feel like I'm indoors. I feel like this one could swallow me permanently. There's always a bit of falsehood in sketching architecture in a locale one hasn't actually visited, so I'll have to remedy that someday and walk it.

Scientific name:  Clavicorona pyxidata , or the Coral Fungus, known for its boxy shape and crown-tipped branches. Drawn digitally in Photoshop with a Wacom Intuos tablet.

While sheltering at home, I've become fascinated with shade gardening. This lovely has not graced my backyard as yet, but there's time. Technically they're called "oyster mushrooms," and I don't think I need to explain why. Creature combo! Sketched in Photoshop with my Wacom and Kyle's Fountainia Soft brush.

One afternoon, Tucker and I were drinking percolator coffee and avoiding errands, when he suggested that we take a look at  his collection of photos from his academically-guided trip to Israel and other areas near the Red Sea. What followed was a Spielberg-like  tour through Petra  (a.k.a.  the end of  Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ) in Jordan , and a kibbutz* in Israel on Tucker’s monitor. Amid the comedy, danger, and sand, this shot of the city of Jerusalem struck me.  It shows the eastern, or Arab side of Jerusalem, an area of relatively new development.   The buildings and their glinting windows and green mosque lights coat the side of the hill like bright scales. Urban landscapes appeal to me, especially ones where space seems so precious that every inch could be the subject of a possible dispute. This interest may be tied to my upbringing in Alaska, where the land is so plentiful, people get tired just looking at it, let alone deciding what...

I recently picked up some stellar drawing advice from the Shouting from the Basement , blog of Green Arrow comics artist and writer, Ande Parks.  Inking Made Easy Here, in my semi-humble opinion, is what makes good comic book inking, in five not-so-easy steps: Draw, don't trace. You don't have to be Frazetta , but you have to know what the forms are and how to contribute to them. Always. Make confident lines. We don't want to see you tentatively feeling your way around. Make every line like you know it's the right line. Vary line weights. If all your line weights are the same the work will be flat. Fat, bold lines next to razor thin lines makes stuff POP. Texture. Develop & consistently apply visual shorthand for textures. Complex or simple, they must be convincing. Wood, steel, cloth, etc. Saved the most important for last. Help tell the story! Spot blacks. Separate visual planes. Keep things clear. Story > pretty lines. There. Now you can all g...

My recent drawings  have been part of a three-part installation for Buffalo Exchange Colorado. The other two pieces are open-ended, topic-wise. The second piece grew from my mental image of the Buffalo Exchange store in its new location on Broadway in central Denver, which I have never had the pleasure of seeing in person, so it remains an object of surrealism for me. If any work of art inspired the subject matter, it is probably the giant tiger roaming New York in Jonathan Lethem's novel Chronic City . Not to worry; the tiger doesn't really affect the story in any substantial way. Whatever anybody says, comparisons to Catbus from Hayao Miyazaki's animated film  My Neighbor Totoro happened only after I had finished the drawing and began showing it to savvier anime consumers. I can't help but wonder whether Catbus, in Japanese, is also a bad pun that gets funnier beside the word for Pop Tarts.  I wish that Miyazaki could design my breakfast...

I began a draft of this project years ago when I was living in central Denver, a region that naturally keeps its finger on the pulse of Buffalo hipsterdom. This was really more of an emo buffalo. My grasp of hipsterdom during the making of this sketch was as tenuous as it is now. Where was I going with that spiked wrist cuff? This never quite blossomed into a finished piece, but Buffalo Exchange fished it from the archives a few months ago and suggested I put a bow on it. I was overjoyed, but my zeal was soon tempered by the realization that hipsterdom of all kinds might have been redefined during the period between drafts. I decided to crowd-source my research on Facebook.  Some comments have been censored due to requests for buffalo nudity. From this thread, I gleaned that a fixed-gear bike would be an unavoidable accessory. Try though I might, I knew I wasn't going to find a photo of a buffalo riding a fixed-gear bike on any Flickr album to serve as a model...