Cell Phone Photography

I take a lot of pictures. It's my nature to - I'm an observer, I notice things and I want to preserve the magic I see. Most of the time I don't have my DSLR camera on me though, so my phone has hundreds of photos on it. I photograph everything from events to interesting bugs I see on a walk.

Some of the great photos I take on my phone I simply share (through Instagram or Facebook), but a lot of my photos I either forget about or don't take the time to give it the slight editing tweak to bring out my idea for the image.

Today was a quiet day, so I went through my photos and pulled out a few strong pictures I haven't shared before. I gave them some love and am sharing them now here:

~ m.d.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

I struggled for quite a while trying to figure out what to give my mom for her birthday. Birthday gifts are hard, especially for someone I've been giving gifts to my whole life - that exhausts a few options as repeats ;-) And I love and appreciate my mom, so I always want to do something special for her. But she refuses to give lists or ask for presents, which makes it all the more challenging to come up with the perfect gift idea (silly mom, of course I'm going to give you a gift!).

Today is her birthday. This time yesterday, I still was struggling to figure out ideas as to what to give her. But as I was sitting at my desk at work yesterday, I realized I should do something with chipmunks. She LOVES chipmunks, and that just seemed like a good idea to go with.

At first I started browsing Etsy and picking prints of photos of chipmunks that I thought she'd like. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized our walls are already full of prints and photos and too much stuff for me to be picking something to take up more space. I needed something small. In fact, why don't I just make something small. . . and that's how I got the idea to create a painting for her.

I worked a 10 hour day yesterday so I came home really tired - but I was determined to get a painting done by the end of the night. I pulled out one of my watercolor postcards and my art supplies and pulled up a reference photo on my tablet. And got started. I didn't take progress shots because I was worried how it was going to turn out - I'm not very confident in watercolor so I was pretty nervous.

After about two hours (and pulling out my gouache to do some highlights), this was my result:

my little chipmunk - actual size is 4x6in.

I'm really happy - and frankly, surprised - at how well this turned out.

The green leaf  and twig were not in the original reference image but I felt like the composition needed that element to balance the piece. I like the touch of golden green too, especially as green is my mom's favorite color.

The piece took a little over 2 hours to complete from start to finish. I then went out at around 1am to buy a frame and a birthday card. This morning I sprayed the piece (to set it) and then put it in the frame. Ta-dah!

all framed and ready to gift!

I'm so happy. I went from no idea for a birthday gift to a beautiful, thoughtful one. I'm so grateful that I've been blessed with the talents that I have, and that they enable me to offer something beautiful of myself to those that I love. ♥ ♥ ♥

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!!

~m.d.

i love strawberries

My very talented friend Naisi loves working with ink and watercolor, and as I haven't really played in that world I was inspired by her work to take the leap and do some experimenting. My friend works mostly on watercolor postcards, so I bought a pack myself as well as some permanent ink pens in a variety of tip sizes. I already had the watercolors.

The first thing I did was some free play with the pens to get an idea of what effect I could achieve with the different tip sizes. Then I looked around my desk to figure out if there was something worth painting. If you remember, I created a little strawberry pot arrangement out of clay (I have a blog post and pictures here) and I've been keeping it on my desk - so I decided I would paint a picture of it!

I started out, as I always do, with a pencil sketch of the planter. Then, I felt confident enough with my pens to select a tip size to trace over my pencil work to create the ink outline for my painting.

inking over my pencil lines - usually when I do watercolors I will just do pencil and paint directly over the pencil lines

finished ink outline after pencil lines have been erased

I completed the ink work but it was several weeks before I found myself with time again for art (which was last night, I'd had a bit of a difficult weekend so I needed an escape).

My original intention was to play with salting the wet paint to create texture to represent the dimples on the strawberries. Unfortunately, the scale of my painting was too small for this technique to be effective. Instead, I pulled out one of my smaller tipped pens and drew in the dimples.

after painting in the ink outline

I decided after painting my original ink outline that the piece needed some kind of border to look complete. I sat and thought about it for several minutes, then just started with a simple line border and built on it from there.

the finished piece with border

me holding the finished piece for scale - this is under my desk lamp

the painting next to the model - it's about actual size!

I think I'm going to do a few more little paintings like this - I'm glad I tried the technique, it was a lot of fun!

~ m.d.

"Withheld Memory"

I've worked on this particular piece of art over and over and over again. I initially drew, painted, and colored it for my first year at Sakura Con (you can revisit how it originally looked here - note that I have two edits of the same piece in that post) as a piece of original artwork to bring along mixed in with my collection of fan art. I was inspired by sakura blossoms (cherry blossoms), which the Con is named after, and wanted to create some original artwork that would reflect me as an artist as well as show the Japanese influence of my work. I wanted something that felt a little more serious than I was able to achieve with anime, so I ended up doing a piece that wasn't anime. That felt very brave.

But when I was putting the piece together visually, I ended up treating it like it was an anime piece. I was focusing too much on keeping it looking like the presentation of an original character rather than letting the visuals tell their own story.

In my original work (that has nothing to do with anime or fan art) I enjoy playing with shapes and lines and usually incorporate them with illustrative elements to tell an abstracted visual story. Much of my original work is digital and I haven't really done much to build the body of it in a few years - not for any particular reason, more I think because I've been invested in improving my other artistic skills than just free forming with what I enjoy. For some reason tonight I thought of this piece and opened it for the first time in a long time. And I just did some free forming. I let the visuals figure themselves out.

And I renamed it and think I can finally leave it alone. Because I think it's finally a piece of original art, which is what I had intended all along.

This piece is now titled "Withheld Memory." The kanji/hiragana written on it - 言わぬが花 (iwanu ga hana) - literally translates to: "Not speaking is a flower." It's a Japanese proverb about both the beauty of silence and the wisdom of withholding.

This is finally art. I think you can only understand the achievement that something like this is when you're an artist struggling to find your voice, reworking a piece repeatedly without success. When that success finally and unexpectedly comes, it's a landmark all its own.

~m.d.

A Glimpse of Boston (and Maine!)

I spent the last week on the east coast in Boston (taking a day trip together up to southern Maine), visiting a friend from my college days. I have to say that I fell in love with Boston - it's beautiful and feels sophisticated (but also welcoming and friendly). There is so much character in all the buildings there, if you're not paying attention you're probably missing some interesting architecture or unique wrought iron gate design.

Here are some of the more artsy shots I got on my trip - enjoy!

walking down Newbury Street, which is actually where my friend was living

typical ivy creeping up a beautiful brick building

 

flowers blooming on a fence along Marlborough Street

a corner in the Boston Public Library - this building was so full of beautiful!

sitting on a stretch of low wall on the Harvard campus near the Natural History Museum, I accumulated a few feathery friends

swan boats in the Boston Public Gardens

Boston Harbor

Boston Harbor

Long Sands Beach in southern Maine (York)

looking down the stretch of beach

other end of the beach

watching the ocean beat against the rocks

beautiful waves rolling in

looking out at a sailboat on the water

looking out at the Nubble Lighthouse from the beach

we drove up to get closer to the lighthouse, when the seagull flew by I couldn't have asked for a more perfect shot!

I had a wonderful trip - had beautiful weather the whole time and it was wonderful to see my friend. Couldn't have asked for a better experience.

~m.d.

Attack on Titan (with progression shots)

I took a nice, LONG break from drawing. . . with Sakura-Con and the wedding, I was going crazy creating art stuff and got a bit burned out. I needed a rest.

But I've recovered now and have picked up my pencil to start drawing again ;-)

When I started drawing this piece, I decided I wanted to document its progression. I don't know about anyone else, but as an artist I am fascinated by the process of art. Even when I'm the one making it!

So here we go:

First layout out the shapes and lines. Everything is pretty rough at this point, but it's a matter of figuring out what I like and what I don't like to evolve proportions as the piece progresses. 

I've cleaned up some lines and fixed some things I felt were weak or incorrect in the initial sketch. My lines are starting to get stronger.

There's some odd shading I'm going to attempt, so here I'm penciling in some of the areas I'm not sure about to see how the ideas I have will look. I'm also starting to bold some of the important outlines.

Focused on bolding lines and building more shading shapes. I'm also starting to test some different shapes for the background elements.

More bolding, more shading.

The shading part takes a lot of time. . .

Building up some darker values.

Finished pencil piece. This piece isn't intended to be a finished piece in and of itself - there are things purposely left imperfect or unfinished because I know they'll be resolved when I digitally color the image.

This piece is based on a scene in the anime "Attack on Titan" - one of the grittiest, creepiest animes I've ever watched. It also has some of the most intense moments I've enjoyed in an anime series, including the one I drew here. This is the main character, Eren, sacrificing himself to save the life of his childhood friend. He's actually in the mouth of a giant monster, about to be swallowed. In the anime this moment is always shown from a side angle - never straight on like this. Yet, when I picture the scene in my head, this is what I see.

Hope you enjoyed looking at the steps that brought this piece to life!

~m.d.

Strawberries in clay

Something you may not know about me - I have a weakness for miniatures. If it's a tiny well done re-creation of a larger thing, I may just stare at it for hours, transfixed, or pay stupid amounts of money to own it and stare at it for hours. There's just something incredibly fascinating about miniatures.

My favorite kind of minatures (the kind I find myself willing to pay stupid amounts of money for) are plant minatures (made of clay) and food minatures (the best are also usually made of clay). I have a collection of beautiful minature clay flowers I keep on my desk and my Etsy favorites are full of tiny clay foods with glazes and delicate coloring to imitate the golden brown of baked goods or the shine of syrup or milk.

I recently purchased on clearance a tiny bell jar on a pedestal, and being a fan of minatures as I am I thought long and hard about what kind of minature I wanted to fill it with. A tiny cake seemed like a good idea, but the dome was tall and a cake just didn't seem the right shape to properly fill the space. The same weekend I purchased the dome I went to Pike Place Market with a friend and stopped by my favorite clay flower artist's booth there. And saw she had added tiny strawberry plants to her collection of creations.

That's when I got the idea of putting a minature clay strawberry plant inside my dome.

The strawberries the seller had were too tiny for what I had in mind, so I went home and I did some looking around online. I refined my idea and then contacted a seller on Etsy who creates beautiful clay flowers and takes custom orders. She created the plant for me based on pictures I sent her and a description of my idea, but unfortunatley she didn't follow the dimensions strictly and the plant was too squat and full to fit under the dome (plus, she put it in a paper basket which wasn't what I had in mind). This artist works out of Thailand so English isn't her first language, plus she doesn't charge much at all for the quality of her work - so honestly I can't really complain. Especially being a capable artist myself and having an exact idea in my head to execute. So I took apart the plant she sent me, pulled out my paper clay and fashioned a new pot in the shape and size I wanted. After days of drying, sanding, shaping, and finally glazing, I filled it with floral clay and took the elements of the strawberry plant I'd dissassembled (it came apart into individual leaves and strawberries and flowers, nothing was attatched in groupings) and made a new arrangement in my pot.

a few of the leftover pieces of the strawberry plant after I deconstructed and rearranged it.

You could say it kinda became a collaborative piece - one that came together between Bath & Body Works (where I bought the small glass dome, of all places!), the Etsy artist, and myself.

Here's the final result - a realization of what I imagined.

a quarter for an idea of scale.

I'm really happy with the end result - it's like keeping a fresh piece of Spring with me always.

~m.d.