monday's palette: barberries

Today's colors were inspired by the front garden. I have two types of barberry, one dark and one gold. This palette reflects their colors now, as their leaves come in fully saturated and luminous against these wet march days.

monday's palettes

I love color. And I specialize in color palettes. Color is emotional, and I personally am attracted to strong, vibrant colors that are fairly bright.

To try and build consistency and perhaps even inspiration into my blog, I will be featuring a new color palette every Monday. This one was developed for some wrapping paper (see below!).

This palette is called wedding paper one.

wedding wrapping paper

Today I made wrapping paper for a wedding where the bride and groom have shown a proclivity for french flair in their registry.

So I made wrapping paper with little dogs (tres parisien) and selections from traditional french wedding vows: pour avoir et pour juger (to have and to hold), and a' l'amour et pour aimer (to love and to cherish).

The palette is inspired by a selection of napkins the couple requested from Anthropologie. I love to work with color. I will offer a palette of the swatches I used in my next posting.

Wedding wrapping paper. FUN!

i promised

I promised myself I would post every day this week. So I am posting! I have the flu and feel ewww. Like my trachea is fighting an anti gravity battle with the contents of my stomach. Not very nice. I tried to do something creative today, but mostly laid my head on the nice soft paper I intended to draw on. Then I gave up, and took a nap.

Although I did'nt work on the Nik Notebooks today, I followed through on one thing I meant to do: blog. I promised. Even if all else failed, due to my trachea threatening to revolt, it feels good to have kept this promise.

the fate of one peach

My cousin Freddie told me a story of how, when he was a little boy in the Netherlands, his family had a picnic at a park. A fat man sat nearby, eating a juicy peach. When he was done, he tossed the peach pit over his shoulder and walked away. Freddie's father picked it up and wrapped it in his hankie.

Freddie's father took his treasure home, dug a hole in the yard and planted the pit. Slowly, the pit grew into a tree. Freddie said that the tree produced the juiciest peaches.

I love this story, and think it could be illustrated in a book without words. A peach, eaten, pit discarded, pit salvaged, planted and grown into a tree covered with fruit year after year. This drawing is from a little sketchbook I carry around with me everywhere. The fate of one peach.

meet mercedes

This is the first panel in which we meet Mercedes, the evil villain in The Nik Notebooks, Volume One, THE SILVER SERPENT, and the third panel in which we view Nik. Getting the collision to look sufficiently violent while maintaining the grace inherent in Mercedes (the collider) and Nik (the collidee) was challenging. Whew!

Dressing them was fun. Mercedes is all Kate Spade: skirt, blouse, handbag and shoes. Nik is a little Gossip Girl. Just because I'm creating a middle grade graphic novel doesn't mean I can't have style and sex appeal!

I still have to rough in the shirts, skirts and shoes details, but the body mass and movement is good enough to hang clothes on during finished pencils which is my next step!

page two partial roughs

Here it is. My messy process. This is a rough sketch of page two in the booklet that I am preparing to send to a publisher by the end of this month! It is amazing how easy the rough sketches arecompared to developing them to finished pencils. It seems like it takes so much longer than it SHOULD, like there are rules about how this process goes or something.

When I do roughs, I am loose and non-committal. Then, when I get down to preparing finished art, I tense up, strive for perfection, and guess what? Perfection never comes. Why do I keep forgetting finished art does not come easily? But come it will, with the application of some serious butt glue. But the roughs are fun, because they are so free.

forgive me blog

KAREN ANN:
Forgive me Blog, it has been fifteen days since my last posting.

BLOG:
You are forgiven my child, now go post daily for one week.

KAREN ANN:
Thank you Blog. I will!