Digital illustration leading to jewelry design...

In 2018, I purchased a new iPad to experiment with illustrating using an Apple Pencil. I'd tried sketching using a mouse and with other varieties of styluses in the past, and never been terribly happy with the results.

When you paint in watercolor, once you've mucked up a painting/illustration, you generally need to start again on a fresh sheet of paper if you want a crisp, fresh rendering. Getting depth of color is tricky unless you paint in gouache or acrylics. With digital painting, you can screw up and then simply "undo" the steps that are not loved, so I decided to give the Apple Pencil/iPad combo a whirl.

I started out doing sketches of jewelry. This led to the thought of doing an illustration of my cartoonishly cute Pomeranian and somehow crafting jewelry from it, which led to doing a slew of pet portraits and necklaces. It's always fun to play with the latest toys!

Here is a smattering of the digital illustration:

Jewelry:

Animal portraits:

Animal portrait necklaces that ensued...

Filling in some of the blanks from 2018- The Coffee Sack Project

Having neglected this blog for quite some time, thought I'd fill in a few of the blanks from 2018...

The Coffee Sack project:

Between costume gigs, 2018 was a year where I pursued other interests that were not costume related but great fun-

I'm one of those people who doesn't go a day without at least one cup of coffee in the morning. I love pretty much everything about it from the taste to the smell to the fact that if I don't have a cup, I might have to lie down and have a nap. If you've got to have a vice, you could do worse! I'm also a sucker for interesting graphics, texture and fabrics and this project tied all those things together:

One day, I happened upon a source for the large sacks that coffee beans are shipped in on their way to being roasted and turned into the fragrant beans we coffee aficionados know and love. The graphics were unique and the sacks were screen printed with the names of the varieties of bean, country of origin, sometimes the crop year. 

My studio turned into a coffee bean bag factory of sorts as these sacks were turned into tote bags of all sizes, floor mats and aprons. It was fun to mix and match fabrics for trimmings, webbing for straps, all the time working around the spots where the bags had been slashed to liberate the beans before roasting!  

Once washed, some of the printing faded to the degree that we try to reproduce in screen printing for costumes for that "authentic, weathered" look. 

 Here's a sampling of the merch-

Tote Bags:

Aprons:

Floor Mats: