Ursa

This completely slipped my mind until now. Our Micro Gallery at work had a show right before the holidays! The theme was 'winter'. Here's the piece i did for it:

The rough edges of the painting are cropped by the matting in the frame, but i like the look of them.

Here's some of the concept sketches i did. normally my concept stuff isn't much to look at, but i liked these early things (not included: a bajillion practice drawings of bears):

Afghan! The musical?

Not really art, but in the absence of anything else i thought i'd share. My roomie got me a big fat crochet hook for Hanukkah, which inspired me to take all the leftover yarn that i've been accumulating and make a big afghan! i made it circular, just because i can.



Weird picture of me, but i'm there for scale. That's the thing behind me, folded in half over the couch.


It's a good size, but it's an odd shape. The nice thing about making a blanket in cold weather is that it keeps you warm while you're making it :)

Just a jewish girl on xmas

I didn't get around to doing a Hanukkah comic this year, so i did a Christmas comic, why not? This is what good little Jewish kids get xmas morning.

I tried making sugar cookies last night, and they turned into Tasty Butter Lumps. each one is a heart attack waiting to happen, but i just keep eating them.
Sorry for the bad scan, that one spot on my scanner seemed determined to be blurry and who was i to tell it to conform?
I also... don't know any korean and just kind of had to... wing it for that word balloon, so... apologies there as well.

As the fine folks at Penny Arcade put it, "I hope that whatever phenomenon best epitomizes your native winterfest is in plentiful supply."
Couldn't have said it better myself :)
Peace.

Baby, It's Cold Outside...

This saturday, Eliza Frye is hosting a Girls Drawin' Girls show at her gallery "Miss Scarlet in the Parlor".

(postcard art by me!)
All art will be $50 and under. If you're in the area and need a last minute holiday gift, swing on by!
Here's the piece that i'm selling:

It's been a while since i've sat down and done just straight-up wildlife art, so this was fun.

Come check us out!

totally thankful!

Super thanks goes out to an anonymous commenter on my last post! My scanner totally works now!
So this year i'm thankful for working technology, family, friends, my pukey cat and house-hold cleaners.

Hope everyone in the US had a good Thanksgiving weekend! To everyone else, i hope the tail end of your November has been rockin'.

Na naaa nanananana na na na naaana nanana

A little while back, Jason sent me a link to this pattern for a crocheted magnetic katamari ball. I learned to crochet (thanks nicole!) just so i could make this ball.

For a first attempt it came together remarkably well! It was fun to make.




Ride the royal rainbow, little ball!


Yeah! Roll up all that business.


I have some actual art to upload, but trying to get CS4 to run my scan software has been a tiny nightmare.
Has anyone ever installed drivers for a CanoScan LiDE 600F scanner onto a mac and managed to get Photoshop CS4 to recognize the scanner and NOT crash every time you try to scan? i was able to install it no problem for CS2, but the issue for CS4 is it's no longer made with TWAIN plug-ins that are needed to recognize the cannon drivers. i managed to install them, and i can open the scan software in photoshop, but trying to preview the image crashes the whole program. maybe i installed something wrong, or maybe everything's just messed up in general.

blah blah blah. TECHNOLOGY, am i right?

Carry on

I realized the other day that if you sing it soft and slow, "Carry On My Wayward Son" would be a nice lullaby.


It was really weird drawing myself holding a baby.
I was drawing this while sitting in the theater waiting for 'Where the Wild Things Are' to start. I really enjoyed the movie, and wound up doodling this little wild thing on the same page in my sketchbook:


Hope everyone had a radtastic Halloween!

Mummy spies the candy!

Halloween is almost upon us! I'm all about the mummies this year.


I did this for round two of the Micro Gallery we've set up at work. "Micro" because all the artwork is approximately 6"x6" or less and... our space is really small. Photos from the opening of the first micro gallery (courtesty of Brian Kesinger):




All proceeds from the first gallery went to buy us a lovely bar (it's name is "Barsheba", or at least that's what i'm going to keep calling it until it sticks)! Proceeds from our Halloween show are going to charity.

ikea

I recently set up a small studio space for myself in a corner of the spare bedroom in my apartment (a space now also shared with my cat Quincy) and figured this new reclamation of space would be a good opportunity to set up some bookshelves as a solution to my ungodly book overflow problem.
Not wanting to spend too much, i set out for Ikea!

Ikea is a terrible place, especially when it's busy. Full of fast-moving little kids, slow-moving adults, and tons and tons of things that i have no use for but want anyway.
I didn't actually wind up getting anything, not even the shelves i'd come for. i found one set that i liked, but it was $60, and i figured if i was going to pay that much i might as well pay a little more and get something nice that's not made of particle board. I'm an adult now (so they tell me), and as such i think i deserve to surround myself with furniture that's not totally crappy.

So i won this round, Ikea! Perhaps someday we'll meet again on the field of battle, but it's not likely.

Ballooning

A fine and fancy female ballooning in her bloomers!
Kind of a concept drawing for a better-planned painting i'd like to do eventually :)

Also posted over at the Girls Drawin' Girls blog as part of our "weekly" theme.

Purrcasso!

I did a piece for the Purrcasso Art & Craft Gala which benefits the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society. It's a good cause, and a good excuse to draw a cat. I recently adopted a cat myself from The Catharine Fund here in L.A.! His name is Quincey, and he looks a bit like this guy here.


The deadline to get art to them is this saturday (Oct. 31st!) so there's technically still time! I've been slacking big time and need to get to the post office early tomorrow morning so i can have this overnighted up north. Here's hoping it helps!

Autumn!

Two posts in the space of an hour! RIDICULOUS!
I did this last week and it's been sitting around so i thought i'd throw it up here (hehe, "throw up"). Autumn is my absolute favorite season-that-doesn't-really-exist-in-LA. This was meant to commemorate the start of our delightful cold weather, and came out a little more sinister than i was intending.
I still like it though, so here it is.

Mummy Girl

This is my piece for the Girls Drawin' Girls show that opens at the Hyaena gallery this weekend! She's just preppin' for Halloween like the rest of us. Mummies are going to be the new vampires (nice try Penny Arcade but i thought of it first, just ask anyone.)
Ain't nothing sexier than mummies.

I won't be around for the opening, but if you are then you should definitely check it out. Located in scenic Burbank, CA, next door to House of Secrets. Sure to be spooky good!

green sweatew

I have a green sweatshirt that i love (the actual sweatshirt has the WWF panda on it!) but until recently it's been too hot to wear it. SoCal's "other season" has officially begun, and i'm super-psyched. I love this weather. It makes it possible for me to deal with just about anything.
Anyway, i dug the sweatshirt out and was wearing it around the house the other day, but it was all dusty from hanging on a hook all year. It was kind of a cozy smell.

for the bar

This fox had a wee nip o' the barrel.
I'm not sure if that's a thing people actually say (now, or... ever) but... i guess i just said it, so...

Changed up the blog template again. just trying to find what feels like home ;)

saturday morning

When i read The Internet in bed there's this kind of continental drift that happens.

Polyphylla Decemlineata

It's been warm out so we have a TON of these guys hangin' around the studio.

(thank you The Internet for the photo)
They're a little bigger than a quarter and they're harmless unless they hit you at high speeds. Fortunately i've never actually had a collision with a ten-lined june beetle (at least, not at work) but with the sheer numbers of them it's not an unlikely scenario.

When i was a kid i used to go camping with my parents near Lake Arrowhead and these guys would turn up around dusk every summer. My dad named the first one Elmo, and it stuck. We found Elmos camping at Lake Tahoe too, and the ones there would dive-bomb us in the showers. They're solid little dudes.

Rebuttles

This comic is based on a totally real fake argument that Jason and i frequently have about a real friend of ours. This was Jason's actual counter-argument.

Maybe now he'll get off my ass about posting this.

Guitarcher

This is a half-post/half-promotion for the upcoming Girls Drawing Girls show at Meltdown Comics here in L.A.! It's a pretty awesome venue, and it's the first gallery show i'll be participating in so i'm pretty excited. Come check us out if you're in the area!


Here's one of the three pieces i'll have up. They're all original watercolor and they're all for sale (shameless promotion!).


And here's a sneak peak at the other two (preserving the air of mystery!):

Koalas

This post is made of koalas.
The typical cartoon koala's pretty cute. But have you ever looked at a koala? i mean really LOOKED at one? Their eyes are bizarre. They have cat eyes! Most of the eye is a warm, reddish brown, and in the middle is a black slit of a pupil.
Which is not to say koala's aren't awesome. Or even that they're not cute. They're both those things.
They're just also freakin' weird.

These koalas are angry.




These are pretty normal.


More posts coming in the near future! They may come later this week. They may come this very night! WHO KNOWS?

Cah McCahn

Heading out for San Diego Comic Con thursday evening! I'll be there Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and i'm pretty excited. My brain's already there!


Don't forget to check out Torch Tiger at booth #2302!

Another summery doodle! It's heating up in LA, gotta take this all in before it gets too hot to breathe ;)


Unrelated, but if you're in the LA area you should swing by Gallery Nucleus in ... scenic Alhambra and check out the Yuki 7 show that opened last night, which features the work of the very talented Kevin Dart and an array of his very talented friends and acquaintances. Really fun stuff!

Blorp Sac

I guess this means it's summer now.


Photo extracted from cuteoverload.com via a very, very risky procedure.

I figured i should get back in the habit of updating this blog. Ideally i'd like to post things that are, if not informative, tell some kind of a story or illustrate some sort of observational skills.
I don't have any of that :)
But i DID draw this:


Flipping through my sketchbook i saw that i had doodled this at the bottom of a page. I did it last week, but somehow i'd forgotten that i'd drawn it until the moment i re-discovered it. Apparently i enjoyed making it though, so there it is. Enough words have been wasted on it already.


'Till next time...

What is...?

Torch Tiger is coming! The follow-up to last years "Who is Rocket Johnson?", "What is Torch Tiger?" is a collection of short comics and stories from Disney's story artists and directors. I'm very honored to count my name among the lot, and even more honored to know that my story (and everyone else's) will be swaddled in the stunning cover made for us by Disney artist Paul Felix (seen above).

Yay Torch Tiger! San Diego ComiCon 2009! be there or be square.