New dog illustration on Creative Market

After all of these years there's subject that is missing from my portfolio - dogs! One of my long time Christmas craft sale customers even pointed it out to me. "Still no dogs, eh?" she said. I'm happy to report that I have one dog available for personal or commercial use on Creative Market. Creative Market makes purchasing and licensing easy. The original drawing is still for sale if you are interested!

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Tis the Season for Calgary Christmas Craft Fairs

Whew, it's after Halloween! I can officially share my craft sale schedule this year ;-D The TGCA Annual Craft Fair 5600 Centre Street North, Calgary, Alberta November 15 5-9pm November 16 10-3pm Calgary Expo Holiday Market BMO Centre, Stampede Park, Calgary, Alberta November 30 10-6pm Harvest Hills Alliance Church Christmas Craft Sale and Tea 10099 Harvest Hills Blvd NW, Calgary, Alberta December 6 4-8pm December 7 9-3pm Highwood Christmas Craft Fair 16 Harlow Ave. NW, Calgary, Alberta December 13 5-8:30pm December 14 9:30-3:30pm

Frank the Cat, Pet Portrait

I finished up Frank's portrait recently. He was the last commission from the comic show and I'm quite happy with how he turned out. Frank has a lion cut, so it made it difficult to feel comfortable with the body proportions. A little bit of white paint for eyes and whiskers and it felt good to be done :-)

4x6" ::: Pencil crayon and marker ::: 2019

Unicorn Sketch

LOL, at comic shows I don't mind drawing any animal that people want. I actually drew two unicorns at the Red & White Comic Card and Toy Show. My young customer was quite pleased with how her unicorn turned out. I enjoy talking to the young folk about drawing and always ask them to make sure that I'm getting their idea right. Remember when you see a child at a craft or comic show, they might be a customer too. Please don't push them aside, interrupt or talk over them :-)

Kitties Smalls and Wilson

I had a fun time at the Red & White Comic Card and Toy Show, but the lighting was quite dreadful. It was a pleasure to finish these pictures of Smalls and Wilson in the days following. Most people want to get their picture right away - but a little patience means a high quality scan and a coat of fixative spray.

The picture was challenging because I had them together at first, but the picture did not want to be made. After the second try, where I wasn't happy with the faces, I drew them separately and then made another sketch of them together. Funny how art is like that! It's always a conversation between the artist and the canvas.

Still pumped for September 8th!

Whew, if the weather co-operates, I'll be able to snap some pics of the drawings I will have for sale at Red and White Comic and Toy Show on September 8th. I must be getting bored with cats and dogs because a skunk came out of nowhere :-D

4x6" ::: Pencil crayon and marker ::: 4x6"

Pet Drawings Ahoy!

I have sequestered myself away to do a lot of drawing lately. I have a table booked at the Red & White Comic & Toy Show on September 8 and I needed to get real good, real fast! It's a one day show and I won't have the luxury of finishing work after the fact. One of the sketches turned into this dog. Dogs are a challenge for me as they often turn out to look like little horses :-)

4x6" ::: Pencil crayon and marker ::: 2019

New on Creative Market and Etsy - Pony Portraits!

It's always amazing how long it takes me to get something to market - mostly because I still have a full time job that needs attention. In 2016, I drew these cute little ponies for Christmas cards. I scanned them before cutting them up, knowing that I would fix them up at a later date. The hand drawn look is quite charming, after all! To save time, I whipped up the line art on my computer and printed them out on a sheet of cardstock. I coloured a wide variety of horse coat colours.

Recently, I had the time to sit down and clean up the pictures so I could offer them as clip art on Creative Market and Etsy. Usually clean up involves removing dust and scratch, little spots and fixing up stray lines or the eyes. As I zoomed in on the horses, I discovered yellow dots. All. Over. The. Place. Ugh!!! Suddenly having to do clean up was seriously time consuming! What had happened? Well, it turns out that some home printers have anti-counterfeiting and tracking capabilities called machine identification code. So yes, your printer could be spying on you. Sometimes failure presents an opportunity. It would be far easier to retrace the images in CorelDraw and make flat clip art than clean up all the dots. So the cute little hand drawn ponies morphed! In the end it was a better idea as I could offer more colours in the clip art package.

Many people think success is a straight line, but it's not. It's more of a curvy path where you wander in circles until you get to your destination :-D The pony clip art will be perfect for anything pony related - there's 72 images in CMYK and RGB JPG along with PNGs in the package. I'm going to make stickers out of them and maybe magnets too! Of course, you can buy the package for personal use on Etsy or licence the commercial rights through Creative Market.

Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo Pet Sketches - Part One

Oooof, I do confess that I am behind on blogging! I took an intense art history class at the Alberta College of Art + Design (now known as Alberta University of the Arts) which kept me busy from January 4th to April 12th. Then right after that it was full speed ahead to the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo. For four days and a few days afterwards, I drew 21 pet sketches. Thanks to everyone who visited me again, said hello and ordered a drawing of their pet. I was really happy with them all. Here are three below that were done after the show and I had a little big more time to work on them. Stay tuned for another post with the rest of them. Click on the picture to see the larger version on Flickr.

New Biz Website - hooray!

This is actually kind of old news, but when you get behind as I do...it's right on time! I launched a new website last fall. Somehow I managed to break my old website and/or parts of the PHP code I used became deprecated. It became apparent that it would take more time to figure out a fix, so I went template shopping. In 2015 I bought a mobile template, but this time I wanted one that didn't need separate versions for desktop and mobile and would great on any platform. I like that the homepage shows my work off better and people can just easily go where they need to be. It's also simple to update and I am so in love with that. The one thing I still need to change is make the font a little darker and larger, but that could just be my middle-aged eyesight :-)