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ophelia's nocturne
6x6 mixed media on canvas panel
©the enchanted easel 2016 |
this summer i wanted to try my hand at some small mixed media pieces. i decided to start with a theme of sorts as far as a color palette went....i chose just a few to start with...red, orange, teal and brown. from there two little creatures were born. ophelia here is the first.
mixed media was kind of new for me. i have so many art supplies laying around my home that instead of looking at all of them, well i wanted to try to actually USE them. my paintings/commissions are acrylic on stretched canvas so i never really get to play with my oil pastels or my inks (OMG-can we say "obsessed" now?!) or my tons of scrapbook papers and supplies, etc.
one day i sat down in between commissions and said "what the heck...let's give it a shot!" and so i did...and had a blast doing so. i used everything from paper to water soluble graphite pencils to palette knives to my fingers for this piece. even got some old sheet music from my keyboard ("ophelia" from tori amos to be exact-hence the name of this little owl) and went to town with that. a total blast this was-from start to finish.
PRINTS are available
here and the ORIGINAL painting is also AVAILABLE. contact me
here if interested. hope you love her as much as i do...owls just say "fall" and "halloween" to me. one of my favorite times of the year!
A new book just hit the shelves, last week. Buddy's Bedtime Battery by Chirstina Geist (published by Random House) is my latest book and I want to take you behind the pages to see how the project progressed.
It's always exciting to get the first printed books in the mail. After months of a studio full of art boards in progress, wet paint and gallons of coffee (not part of the painting process but very necessary), the final product is a welcome payoff. Buddy finally arrived!
Now, let's look at how Buddy arrived. After reading the story manuscript and creating sketches for the characters, a full length book dummy was created. When the book sketches were finalized, the painting process began.
I created a production line of boards with images of each page. I taped the edges with low-tac tape to keep that area clean and white. Then, an underpainting with brown acrylic paint was washed (thin layers) onto the boards. I usually do this when the final art is created with oil paint. The acrylic and polymer layers sealed the paper board from the oils and gave me a good (light and dark) value study to follow.
At this stage, the studio was full of artwork covering every flat space to be found. I have a drying rack for storing work in progress but I like to see everything laid, side by side.
Here is the title page. The towel area on the left was used for copyright and publishing information. The title was placed on the wall, above the bathtub. Notice the pajamas are visible, just below the towel. I often use elements and story props to hint at what's coming on the following page(s).
Here is one of the illustration spreads. One of my favorite images of the book.
This was my table, somewhere under the shingles of drying illustrations. The images were at various stages of completion so Buddy's hair looks really dark on the bottom image, etc. I worked on several paintings at a time and all art started to finalize toward the end of the process....which is also called..."the deadline" (If all goes as planned). It was a fairly long process and sometimes hard to see the end when spending days painting little parts, adjusting colors and adding detail. But eventually, it all came together and a package with the final art of Buddy's Bedtime Battery traveled to Random House.
Then, months later, I get to see the book on NBC, being read to millions of TV viewers. How COOL is that? So exciting! ...So surreal! ...Yay, Buddy!
...deep breath...now, back to the drawing board. :)
Over every
mountain there is a path, although it may
not be seen from the valley. - Theodore Roethke
Moonlight on the beach. From a story titled 'Banana Moon'. I won a Highlights silver tray award for the art to this story. It was altogether a complete delight.
"who knows if the moon’s a baloon" - E.E. Cummings
today's
FEATURED PRINT...a little piece of Halloween in December. the sweet and shy Sally from Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (my favorite).
{perhaps he's dreaming of SNOW. God knows i sure am....}
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moonlight mavens
11x14 acrylic on canvas
©the enchanted easel 2014 |
truly this week's
IF theme was created just for me....and little maggie. ;) two little insomniac BFFs painting themselves a
whimsical night sky. ' cause while the rest of the world sleeps, we paint. :)
{throwing back to last july 2014 for this one...my website's home page image and the *face* of
the enchanted easel. a bit more about this painting
here....}
News broke in July 2015 that the Rosetta mission’s Philae lander had discovered 16 ‘carbon and nitrogen-rich’ organic compounds on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The news sparked renewed debates about whether the ‘prebiotic’ chemicals required for producing amino acids and nucleotides – the essential building blocks of all life forms – may have been delivered to Earth by cometary impacts.
The post How did life on earth begin? appeared first on OUPblog.
The discovery of water on Mars has been claimed so often that I’d forgive anyone for being skeptical about the latest announcement. Frozen water, ice, has been proven on Mars in many places, there are lots of ancient canyons hundreds of kilometres long that must have been carved by rivers, and much smaller gullies that are evidently much younger.
The post NASA discovers water on Mars again: take it with a pinch of salt appeared first on OUPblog.
Throughout history, the influence of the full Moon on humans and animals has featured in folklore and myths. Yet it has become increasingly apparent that many organisms really are influenced indirectly, and in some cases directly, by the lunar cycle. Here are ten things you may not know concerning the way the Moon affects life on Earth.
The post 10 things you may not know about our Moon appeared first on OUPblog.
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"moonlight mavens"
11x14 acrylic on canvas |
to one year ago yesterday...and this painting, "
moonlight mavens".
hard to believe this piece (and the newly designed
website, by me) are exactly one year old! how do i know this? it was website renewal fee day yesterday (
squarespace is awesome, by the way)....and, i have a memory like an elephant. ;)
here's the
story behind this painting as well as a bit more about
me (in case you didn't already know)...
{and, just because it's throwback thursday, well i thought i'd share a picture of a very small Nicole with lots of dreams behind those big brown eyes of being the bestest children's artist she could be! :)}
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| a little Nicole...circa. 1975/76 |
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| Click on image for larger view |
This landscape scene is from
Sunny Bunnies which was originally published a few years ago but it is a 'landscape' image I am still fond of. I particularly like the night-time blues, and the friendly lights of the car making its way home through Carrot Cake Park.
Materials: Dip-pen ink outlines on watercolour paper, coloured with watercolour paints and coloured pencils.
June Goulding
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"moonstruck"
©the enchanted easel 2014 |
love, sally...and her beloved kitty companion
xxx
{PRINTS AND SUCH FOUND HERE:
never used these guys before, but surely will be using them again!!!
thanks so much to
easy canvas prints for doing such a FANTASTIC job on some canvas prints of my painting entitled, Moonstruck (PRINTS FOUND THROUGH THE SHOP LINKS HERE-
www.theenchantedeasel.com). the colors looks amazing and the quality of the canvas is superb!
will definitely be using them again in the future. highly recommend.
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a crop of my painting "moonlight mavens"
©the enchanted easel 2014 |
love,
me and maggie
xxx
{almost forgot. good thing i didn't. not quite sure maggie would have ever forgiven me. :(
whew!}
PRINTS AVAILABLE THROUGH THE SHOP LINKS FOUND HERE:
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a peek at "moonlight mavens"
©the enchanted easel 2014 |
just a glimpse at the new *face* of the enchanted easel. this business is my proverbial *baby*. I've built it all by myself and have done most of the legwork after not one, not two, but THREE cervical spine surgeries in the last four years. 'cause that's just how i roll. ;)
I've had the painting done for over a week but i'm doing my best to re-build a new website hosted by squarespace...which, by the way, i HIGHLY recommend. i didn't think such wonderful and cooperative corporations existed anymore. they are fantastic. it's just a matter of getting acquainted with the new site and how it works as well as adding watermarks and shrinking images for the web....mundane stuff like that. let's just say, i would rather be painting. but then again, what else is new?!
hoping to be done by the end of this coming week. if not sooner....*fingers crossed on that one* ;)
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Hello my dear Linda,
I’ve just spent an hour looking at the fabulous drawings on your website – thank you for the musing and dreaming! So unique and original, – there must be an equally unique and originally personality be speaking behind it. So much so I’m sometimes worried that you still like normal people, Felix people and such. On the other hand – I wish I could have a conversation with you about all these beings that populate your cloudy worlds.
Many of your ideas are hard to relate to each other. They seem only connected somewhere in the interior of the café where you draw or somewhere in you. Sometimes I wish there would be more pavements, cityscape (you have great talent in drawing these too), something I can hold on to, stories. But I understand the fragmentary is part of the philosophy and approach. In addition to that there are so many intricate allusions that require good knowledge of English, of history – it’s difficult! Why is there no educated English speaker around that could help me to grasp all the meaning! Expressions like “tether’s end” aren’t known to me, I have to stumble over them using a search engine. Another coincidence made me stumble over the real story of Tesla, the pigeons and the doctors. Phew!
Linda, sending hugs, please be kind to yourself! Felix
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