Digging through old stuff

Found some old sculptures made from Sculpey from 2002 or 2003. They were in pretty bad shape and I had to throw them out but took some pictures beforehand. I can see in them my undying love for bored-looking ladies and cats :)

10 miles apart

Suburbia

And

Urban decay :)

I love cities - so many details, interesting things - big and little, people, smells, sounds, art, dirt, all of it, I love.

Look at the bundles of electric cables, oy.

And under the overpass - very beautiful.

Fantasy painting!

Alga and Saxe lampshades - 7th floor.

Cafe Lift - great brunch and beautiful light, what can be better.

Huevos Rancheros. 

Back to suburbia.

Tiny wooden tags 2013

Every year for the past 3 years I make small wooden tags for the under $100 show in Sweet Mabel. This year I did not have much time for this project as we are moving. So what you see is the result of a couple of sleepless nights.I was spraying them with polyurethane at 5 a.m. on the day I had to submit them, I woke up almost everyone in the house with chemical smell and noise. 

 Always some Little Red Riding Hood - like character finds her way into my artwork. And cats, I like cats, they seem very smart and aloof. 

 Couple of mature folks in jaunty hats (expression borrowed from Maira Kalman).

 A guy with a cool white beard and squirrel on his head. Because, why not? When I was little we went to the town of Druskininkai in Lithuania and there, in some park I fed squirrels nuts while a local photographer took my picture. I guess it was a type of a business that photographers ran there, I wonder who trained the squirrels. All the squirrels were named Tanya, at least they responded to that name. 

 Owl, this time in a black shawl

 Small child in a hat and sailor shirt. Cat looking at some flowers made from triangles.

 I like clever things, foxes are clever and they possibly drink cappuccinos when we are not looking.

 View from above - little girl, cat, dog in a scarf.

 Cat and some creature with antlers, I like how those antlers frame cat's face. 

 Fox again, now he is drinking coffee.

 Woman in a beautiful robe and her feet on the tiled floor (view from above)

 girl in a cool red hat

Cat+fish+flowers

all the cool little wood tags are from viking woodcrafts

Making the calendar

A little bit about the process of making my calendar this year. Every year I come up with some sort of theme for the calendar and after some thought this year I wanted to incorporate quotes about seasons and months of the year into it. I dug though various websites that have collections of quotes about seasons and small poems. My favorites are quotes from googlereads , also nature themed quotes from egreenway.com , and finally the best results for poetry I got from poetry.about.com . After I chose my quotes the idea of a group of friends doing various things throughout the year came to me. Of course all the characters are my favorite child-like creatures. For this adventure they are - a girl, orange cat, grey mysterious creature and two foxes.

Next, I drew the pictures on white think paper (actually it's paper designed for work with acrylic paints)

Then I felt that I wanted to have some additional layers to the pictures, not just colored illustration. So I cut the picture out with x-acto knife, leaving some white around the contours and layered the illustration onto craft-like paper. 

Then I colored the illustration with art markers (my beloved Faber-Castell)

and added details with colored pencils, and lastly added the quotes.

Here is another example:

Here I drew some "photographs" in sepia and added them to the illustration. 

More:

A couple of illustrations, including the cover I layered over black paper for more drama :)