Birthday Birds

Not only was Sunday Father's Day, a week ago was my father's birthday so there was quite a bit of dad celebrating to do. For those of you who don't know my father, he is an excellent musician, fantastic furniture maker and quite the technical illustrator. And none of those are even his day job. But his job does intersect with one of his oldest hobbies - birdwatching. So it was a natural choice to make they contents of his birthday card avian.

Here's a lovely sketch.

And the final painting.

Make It Yourself: Clean or Dirty Indicator

If you live with three other roommates like I do and sometimes you find it's hard to keep up on running that dishwasher, have I got something for you:

 This lovely dirty or clean indicator!

We use ours to remind each other, 'Hey, there are some dirty dishes in here, load it up and run it.' or 'Look these dishes are clean, maybe I should put them back in their cabinets.' It's at eye level on our cabinets above the dishwasher.

I bet you are wondering, 'How can I have one of those for myself?' Well, let me tell you: by using this template and following these wonderfully easy steps put together by yours truly. Read after the jump for my full tutorial and printable template.

Another Illuminated Letter

Seeing as you all come around this blog for my illuminated letters, I have another one for you. This project moves painfully slowly and hopefully one day we will see it done, but for now here's my snails pace progress:

J is for Jentacular - of or pertaining to a breakfast taken early in the morning, or immediately on getting up.

Adventures in Typography

While being an Administrative Assistant is not my dream job, working for the school does provide some excellent perks, one of which is free classes. So this summer I signed up for a Typography course so I could learn a bit more about design and hopefully apply it to my other illustration work. While there have only been about two classes here's something made from the first assignment. We had to create a collage with blocks of text in varying weights and spacing etc. The first one I made wasn't my favorite, but the second was a little more fun, once I had a little more command and knew what to expect. Of course, with my illustration background, it was still an illustration, I couldn't just go full blown abstract. Here it is:

 

I call it: Typecat