Month of Love 2015

Well another February has ended which means I have a bunch of new art from the 3rd annual Month of Love challenge!

A few things changed this year. I made a new website and switched platforms to Tumblr, which I think looks much nicer for our purposes. It was a really great year with some of the best overall quality of art yet! You can check out all the beautiful work, the challenges and the stories at http://monthofloveart.com/. 

I am also pleased that we were able to partner with Every Day Original this year and offer many of our originals for sale in one place! You can check them out at http://www.everydayoriginal.com/month-of-love/. 

Without further ado: here are my favorite pieces from this year's challenge:

Lady Nautilus and Companion for the "Love is all Around" challenge 5 x 7 oil on panel available for purchase from Every Day Original

"Lilith" For the "Forbidden Fruit" challenge 5 x 7 oil on panel available for purchase from Every Day Original

"Halloween Jack" For the "Diamonds" challenge Watercolor

"Calamity's Child" For the "Diamonds" challenge Watercolor

"The Wolf and the Lamb" For the "Love your Neighbor" challenge 16 x 20 charcoal

Some favorites by my friends. Clockwise from top left:   Goni Montes, Wylie Beckert, Winona Nelson, Angela Rizza, Carly Mazur

Spectrum and Leurzer's Archive

So I just got my Spectrum letter telling me which piece got in number 18! Strange portraits of Richard Saja seem to be my lucky charm it looks like, because it was another commission from Richard that earned me a place in the book this year:

This piece was a collaboration between Richard and I, stemming off the initial idea of a portrait with piebald skin and then incorporating a few symbols that have significance to Richard. As I've mentioned, I often look to Baudelaire for inspiration and his poem Elevation ended up being my personal mental narrative for the painting.

Whose thoughts, like larks, rise on the freshening breeze

Who fans the morning with his tameless wings,
Skims over life, and understands with ease
The speech of flowers and other voiceless things.

Speaking of Richard, the last portrait I did of him for his show at the Shelburne Museum continues to bring me luck as it was chosen for this year's Leurzer's Archive of the 200 best Illustrators World Wide.

I actually had two pieces accepted into Leurzer's. The other was my 'Echo' painting:

But I decided to only show one piece in the book this year.

ArtOrder article, some drawings and some news

Hello folks!

I am excited to share my first ever foray into semi-semi-pro writing. Jon Schindehette over at his ArtOrder blog recently put out a call for guest writers to help lighten his workload and I decided to respond. You can see the results Here:

http://artorder.blogspot.com/2010/04/guest-writer-kristina-carroll.html

Please go check it out and let me know what you think! I had a wonderful time writing it.

And now it's time to share a few new pieces I'm working on:

Eve


This piece is for a show going up in May: Replanting the Garden. All pieces are works that were inspired by Heironymous Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delight's. I wanted to try something different so I chose a very simple and quiet composition of Eve taming the snake. The curator is the same man who commissioned my Richard portrait for his show at the Shelburne Museum so I think this is going to be a good one. I also quite like the color studies I did for the piece:



You'll have to wait until the painting's finished to see which one I chose. Lastly is a drawing I am very excited to start painting:

Merlin


Very much inspired by the charcoal drawings of Charles Vess. I haven't done a nice, woodsy scene in a while and I am really looking forward to it.

Lastly I am very pleased to announce that the aforementioned Richard painting has been accepted into this year's Spectrum annual!



This is such a huge honor, and I still can't quite believe that I got in.

Read what Richard Saja, the curator, had to say about the piece in his show here:

http://mrpeacockstyle.blogspot.com/2009/10/chat-with-historically-inaccurate.html

Last, but not least, Marc Scheff posted a lovely review of my Zebrulu piece on his blog:

http://www.marcscheff.com/some-favorites

Go check them out!

Rust drawing

"A sword, a spade, and a thought should never be allowed to rust"
~ James Stephens
Irish poet and storyteller, 1882-1950



This is my Charcoal drawing for the latest ArtOrder challenge, which was to create an illustration from the above quote. I LOVE these sorts of challenges because they demand that you think outside the box. I knew immediately that the first rule for this piece was to avoid swords and spades as imagery. I thought about it for a while and then, randomly, picked up my favorite book The Neverending Story and opened up to the chapter I was currently re-reading. (I have plans for this book, but in the words of Ende "That's another story and shall be told another time.") Anyways one of the characters has an army of metal giants that she controls with her will. Towards the end, when her evil plans have been thwarted, she looses all control of these giants because her will no longer has a purpose and they kill her. I thought, 'well this is all just too serendipitous'.

"They were puzzled, because they knew it was Xayide's will alone that had moved the hollow giants. So, they thought, it must have been her will that they should trample her to death."

The giants are the personification of Xayide's twisted thoughts and desires. But because all her plans involve manipulation and power, her thoughts are hollow and they prove to be her undoing.

"For years the hollow, black-metal giants stood motionless on the heath not far from the City of the Old Emperors. Rain and snow fell on them, they rusted and little by little sank into the ground, some vertically, some at a slant. But to this day a few of them can be seen."

Now onto the paint!

Variations on a Theme

First of all- thank you to everyone who voted for me in the last Art Order challenge! With your support I won the game! So get ready for another round of pencil fencing, because here's my submission for this week:



Variations on a Theme asked us to take a race from the 4th edition D&D set, put it in a pose and do 3 variations of the armor. I chose the Deva mostly because of it's newness to the world, and the potential for some crazy design. It is described as having a persian/japanese influence so I went to town on reference and had a blast trying to find different ways to marry the two styles. I plan on working on some color this week, to really finish these up as I just enjoyed them so much.

So if you like my Devas, head over to ArtOrder after Tuesday's (tomorrow's) posting and leave a vote for me in the comments section. FYI, Jon is no longer accepting anonymous votes, so please remember to put your name in the appropriate box!

Concept Tuesday's Devolved Gnome

So I did this week's concept Tuesday challenge over at Artorder and wanted to share the results. The challenge was to devolve a Gnome from the 4th edition D&D manual and here are the results:

Here are a examples of the original concepts by Raven Mimura:

I thought that being a trickster fae, the Gnomes ought to be more primal and animalistic with their ancestry so, going off the original design, I based my devolution on the shape of the spider monkey. The Gnome, which now lives in the roots of trees, used live on top of them. Tails, long hands and flexible feet serve the early Gnomes in leaping through the branches and swinging from tree to tree gracefully. Tricksters from the start, their long tails and clever fingers and toes also aided in swooping down to steal shiny objects from surprised passerby and disappearing back into the leaves before anyone could register what happened.

So if you like my piece, please head over to ArtOrder.Blogspot.com and vote for me!

Maiden Voyage

Well I've gone and done it. Finally, after much kicking and screaming mind you, I've decided to do the blog thing just like everyone else. Really I just want an excuse to sketch and share more strange things that won't necessarily have a home on the website, so here we go. Let's see what happens...

News: One of my newest pieces, Legolas at Helm's Deep, has been accepted into the Society of Illustrators student competition show. A LOT of people enter this show, and only about 120 get in, so this is a huge honor and I am really excited.

Ok- a new drawing to start this off. Here's a girl who was reading a book.