Newest fantasy rubber stamps available

Sweet Pea Stamps has released quite a few new rubber stamp designs based on my work since I last wrote about it. It's been great seeing what customers create with them on stamping blogs. Everyone comes up with a unique color scheme. These two steampunk stamped cards from the blog In My Quiet Time are especially nice.

All the stamp designs available can be found here.

Announcing 3 new products

I'm excited to announce three new licensed products featuring my art!



• Using custom fabric, Haut Totes has designed make-up, cel phone and tote bags from 6 of my paintings. All of the bags available with my art can be seen here. Cel phone/gadget bags feature a clip to attach to a purse, strap or belt, and make up bags are backed with a strong mesh.

This week all of the cosmetics/coin purses are on sale for $9.99!



• Sweet Pea Stamps is now offering my first set of rubber stamps. A set of 4 fairies, or 4 individual stamps is available. All stamps come unmounted so they can be mounted on clear or wooden blocks temporarily (to save space) or permanently according to preference. More designs will be in the works soon!



• Masterpiece Memos has created a series of magnetic dry erase memo boards featuring my Birthstones collection. They are each 4x6, acrylic covered, magnetic on back, and come with a black dry-erase marker. Birthstone memos boards are also available in their etsy shop.

Looking for Art Books

I've been a little unhappy with some bad habits in my work and need to simply start sketching more for practice. I am jealous of people who went to animation school. So tonight I thought that I would try to find a nice animation book that would help me with movement. The only problem is that 90% of the animation/fantasy/comic drawing books at B&N are now Christopher Hart books. This is unfortunately since most of them are the same book with slightly different art (yes it irks me that they continue to publish them). I only found one actual animation book, which I think I will pick up later. I don't have any intention of animating but I think it would help with drawing.

There's really no reason I should be doing more illustration since I'm seeing children's books with the quality of art I am capable of. I just need get myself to believe I can.

So what I did find with what I was looking for was book 4 and 5 from the How to Draw Manga series Ultimate Manga Lessons. Most of the older books don't have a lot of useful information on how to apply techniques to your art rather than just copying poses in the books. There's some later books that go into detail about inking and specific techniques that are better though.



I also saw a new John Howe Book on dragons and and a Licensing book that I thought looked pretty helpful. Other than the author's idea that self publishing prints is more difficult than using a publisher (Fantasy and comic genre art is different than the market for, say Terry Redlin and Thomas Kinkaide), there's lot of information that no one tells new artists such as actual %s for different products (believe me, I was sure this was somehow secret information for a long time).



And some sketches:

These were preliminary sketches for my Christmas card design this year:


Sketches for a future painting and some critters:


Also,

- Saw Bolt (in 3d) this weekend. It was awesome. That got me interested in checking out future Disney movies The Princess and the Frog, Rupunzel (I love the concept art but how are they going to do this with the main character stuck in a tower the entire time?), and King of the Elves
- I discovered Emma - A Victorian Romance season 2 is out and Netflix has it. Yay! :)