Cartoon Family

This family has 11 kids, 11 spouses, and the parents, for a total of 24 people! Just perfect for a game of Guess Who. Cartoon portraits are definitely not my best area, but I tried. Some turned out better than others, but at least they don't all look the same!

The Happy Couple

11x14 Prismacolor. The parents of the last two girls I worked on, and the first adults I've drawn in a while! This photo has a slightly greener cast than the original.

Neighbor Girl #2

Second in a set of two, 11 x 14 Prismacolor.

Photoshop Fluff

This drawing was completed in 2002, I colored it just recently. Obviously, I didn't spend too much time on it!

Neighbor Girl #1

An 11x14 portrait of my neighbor's daughter; I had a great photo to work with!

Portraits for coworkers

My cousin's buddy and his girlfriend:




A strange guy at work that got fired soon after I drew this:



A drawing of a missionary who liked farming:




A coworker's three children:



These were all completed when I lived in the Seattle area, between 2001-2004

Photoshop coloring #3

This is my most recent banner for my other blog. The original drawing was a small pen sketch finished around the summer of 2003. It is an area near the Montlake Bridge in Seattle, WA where I used to hang out a lot; my husband and I also went on a few dates there. The only difference is in real life you would be able to see a big bridge scanning the water in the distance, and downtown Seattle would be off to the left.
Oh, and sometimes there were giant rats swimming in the water in the evening.



This is the original drawing before any photoshop manipulation:

Two Siblings

This was a large format pencil drawing, 16x20'' in size. What cute kids!

Four siblings: #4

Four siblings: #3

The third portrait in a family series of four. Cute girl!

Oil Paintings

My senior show in college included these large oil paintings. They really are large too, the length is at least four feet on each one. These three are a series of symbolic self portraits, for which I used a photo of myself as a child, as a college age student, and a photo of my grandmother for the final piece. I'll let you decide what they mean.
One skill I never quite perfected was the art of taking slides of my work. These are all from photos converted from slides, and they don't show detail well. (Plus, some of them aren't very straight.)


This first one had some purple mist swirling around the girl's legs, which doesn't show up here.




This next piece was the first one completed, and definitely the best in the group...probably because I spent the most time on it. The black on the left side isn't part of the painting, I just didn't have the painting perfectly aligned with the camera so the shot included some of the frame behind it.



The photo of this painting is slightly blurry, unlike the painting itself.

Four siblings: #2

This is the oldest of the four siblings I am currently drawing. The freckles really made the portrait! The scan is a little light, but shows detail well enough.

coloring with photoshop

Both of these drawings were sketched with a ballpoint pen in my spare time. Later, I scanned them into my computer and colored them with photoshop. These have both been used as banners for my other blog, and I love how they turned out! I will definitely be using this technique again. Although in this first one, that camera flare does look suspiciously like a will-o-the-wisp.

Four siblings: #1

This is the youngest of a family of four kids that I am currently working on. Isn't she cute?

Watercolor

I have always wanted to take a class in watercolor, but unfortunately it always conflicted with other classes in college and high school. I've tried the odd painting, but want to learn more! A few years ago I made a postcard for a friend, and liked it so much that I painted another for myself:

Still Life

This is a still life of some chairs set up for a party by my room mates, before I was married. The camera didn't completely capture the color and texture of the chairs, but I love how they turned out. If I were to redo this drawing, I would change the background wall so that it wasn't so distracting from the nice chairs. I started this in 2003, then forgot about it and finished it later in 2005.

Self Portrait

Throughout high school and college art classes, the self portrait is the ubiquitous assignment, I must own at least a dozen. So far, this is by far my favorite. Unfortunately, I have yet to get a good copy of it. It is in prismacolor on 11x14 paper, completed in 2003. The original is much more subtle in color, and the paper texture isn't as obvious as in this copy, but you get the idea.

Just for fun

These are just some fun sketches; most were completed in high school (12-15 years ago), some in college, and a few just after. Most of these in this post have a fall theme: don't you love Autumn?
I don't do these very often anymore, but I love looking at them for ideas. I"ll try to put them in a general chronological order... if you're interested, you should be able to find a year on each of them when you view the bigger version. Sorry some of these aren't scanned that great.

(I love trees, especially those in the previous drawing!)