Salaric

I was once upon a time a geologist and have mapping pens still kicking around, I also have lots of old maps of various sorts (some are the sort you frame most aren’t), and I was poodling around on Pinterest and saw some fun map projects and there some little creatures I had been meaning to draw for a while.

So I have started work on a series call The Maps of The Imagination which are going to be for sale at The True Believers Comic Festival. Pretty much there is only going to be the actual drawings rather than any books.

This is a photo – I need to get around to scanning at some point 🙂

This is also only the beginning of the map projects 🙂

One manga style colouring in sheet of Ada Lovelace as free download this coming week 🙂

Colouring Sheet

To celebrate Ada Lovelace Day 🙂 A celebration of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths.

So I woke up at like 5 in the morning with the idea of painting a flamingo in water colours which is the medium I currently experimenting with.

I found a photo, sketched the flamingo and then painted, I’m finding that it is easier to paint if I don’t think about the process as such.

A few days back on Google Plus I saw a post about a drawing challenge – now I was in the middle of not only trying to run a poetry writing drive but trying to do the drive myself as well as plan things for a science-art exhibition this month and start gearing up for festival season – so I thought I would join in 😀

Insane yes!

The challenge as set by Margareth Osju and is to draw 100 birds in 100 days – I am off course already lagging behind but hope to catch up!

There is a Google Plus circle and Margareth’s blog.

I shall be posting the pictures on my Picture Books and Illustrations blog Orange Monster.

This first one has been done as a request for my husband, most of the drawings will not be this style at all. The picture is called Gaia and is part of my visual poetry journal.

Because I am running the WoPoWriMo (World Poetry Writing Month) website this year and am going to be meeting up with writers I’ve had my Tea pictures turned into postcards and stickers. I’m really pleased with how they have turned out 🙂

Just before we moved to the new house about a year ago, I came up with the idea of Lojbani Chicken, a character who would help my little girls or anybody else understand and learn Lojban (a constructed language) but I wanted it to be more than that. I wanted some sort of all languages web-comic thing which is obviously very complex and so it never happened – there were some biro sketches in the back of a note book and that was that.

Then last week I saw it was Lojban’s 25th birthday and so I sat down and revisited the idea of my chicken. The result was more biro sketches and Mother Lang and her two daughters Coni and Nat, they live on a farm where Lojbani chicken is one of the animals.

A full first story will hopefully be appearing on my Wiggly Pets blog soon 🙂

Once the image above is digitally edited (this is just what I russeled up using my new birthday pens and colouring pencils.) there will be speech bubbles saying such things as fi’i – meaning welcome.

Other existing characters include Esperanto Cat and Toki Pona kitten. I haven’t decided yet what creatures should represent any of the natural languages – mainly due to worrying about offending people :/ I might do something like have made up creatures for natural languages and real animals for the constructed languages – suggestions welcome 🙂

Image is a link to a free PDF of the book!

A few years ago to entertain my then just turned 4 yr old I wrote a series of kids poems and we made a little book with me handwriting the poems and drawing some quick pictures in felt tip pen. My little girl liked it so much she took it to school with her where to my embarassement the head master saw it and thought it was great.

I typed up the poems and took photos of the book assembly – for this blog and thought that was the end off it all – especially when the book got a cup of water spilt on it (much to my annoyance and the tears of a little one). But I then ended up writing a Little Book of Poetry for all sorts of other events and festivals like christmas and the birth of my second child and to stop the heart ache of the first ones destruction I scanned the pictures I drew.

People kept telling me that I should release the books but I thought I should digitise the pictures so I spent ages trying to draw the pumpkins and things but I found that it just came out looking like a cheap hobbled together image and that was not what I wanted. Then I came to the realisation that this was not needed and that the felt pen look was a good for kids books. So I drew pictures and have run them through a few filters and things to clean them up etc… (I found that different sketch books have slightly different coloured paper in them which needed to be sorted etc…).

But the up shot of all this is that tomorrow I am having a virtual launch party of an e-book (PDF) of The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry. I will be giving things away and there will be author interactions etc… The PDF will be available for FREE until midnight on the 31st of October 🙂

Enjoy.

A few years ago I donated a piece of my art work – yesterday it was returned to me – as it had spent the last couple of years sitting in a store room. The piece is called The Cricket Gear and was the first piece I painted for my GCSE’s. I was 14 and it took me a terms worth of lessons plus a holiday of painting on the kitchen table to do. I had it in mind as a present for my Granddad but unfortunately he died before it was released from the school (they kept several of my pieces for a while and the teacher even offered to buy them off of me!)

It is framed behind glass so I can’t get a good photo of it and it is somewhat sun faded compared to how it was. It is a picture I would be annoyed to paint now – I look at it and see mistakes but at the same time I know it surpasses stuff I have seen for sale for alot of money.

I’m not sure how I feel about the return – I am hurt as I think any artist would be to be honest but at least it is no longer sitting in a store room. And I wonder about art and society – my husband points out that it is hard for people to tell the difference between a print and a painting and that even hand painted stuff is cheap as cheap from other countries and is bulk bought in. I put a lot of work into this piece and part of me was arrogant enough to feel that I was leaving a legacy by donating it.

Fortunately this as happened at a time when there are many brilliant things happening to me in the creative world so it is not as devastating as it could have been. Also I feel like I am being childish in being upset – I can’t expect people to want my stuff after all.

Of course my mother is over the moon as she had been annoyed I’d given it away in the first place and has a place set aside for it on her wall.

I am attempting to do some gothic arts and cute scary crafts for Halloween – this is my first sketch 🙂

This is my drawing for the March Time Capsule for Art Evolved on the heavy set large meat eating birds known as the Terror Birds. I chose Kelenken which is from about 15 million years ago and is one of the largest found so far. I got the general shape from looking at pictures of the skelentons – the feet I am not happy with but the over all bird I am 🙂