7 Days of Color - The Project

As you all may have noticed I have joined in on the fun of the 7 Days of Color project started by Victoria Ying. The idea of the project is to create an illustration for every day of the week that corresponds to a color of the rainbow. Monday is Red, Tuesday is Orange, etc. I love to draw, but I love the idea of a challenge/project even more, so I decided to join in! For the past week or so I have been posting colorful illustrations to my Instagram and Tumblr.

I have been completely overwhelmed by the amazing response I have gotten on social media to the illustrations I have been creating. The kind comments I have received, the amount of followers that have taken an interest in my artwork, it is simply unbelievable. Illustration has always been a passion that gave me joy, but being able to share the art that I love to create with others and to have them react positively to it is the best feeling in the entire world.

Thank you all from the bottom of my heart for taking an interest in my passion. You don't know how much it truly means to me.

Lainey

7 Days of Color - Red

7 Days of Color - Violet

7 Days of Color - Indigo

7 Days of Color - Blue

Rose

Hello everyone! Yesterday I went old school and spent the day painting with acrylics. I ended up with this lovely lady that I affectionately named "Rose". She is a character I sketched the other day while I was decompressing at Le Parker Meridien and I really wanted to take her to the next level. Below you can see my process pieces that led me to the final artwork...

I also wanted to announce that I now have a tumblr! I will still be posting to this blog with finished Etsy artwork and other pieces that I create, but I will be posting sketch work and doodles to my tumblr more often.


Have a great week everyone!

Pin Up Girls

 

Hello again everybody! I have been working on the idea of these three lovely ladies for a while now but I finally managed to put on all of the finishing touches today after getting some inspiration in Paris. The beautiful artwork that I saw there has really inspired me, and I am already planning a long list of pieces that I want to create in the near future.

 

I hope you enjoy these girlies! Au revoir!

Adventures with Oil Paint

When someone stumbles upon my little blog I'm not sure what they think of my jumping from medium to medium and style to style. They probably think "wow, this girl is all over the place with her art/design/packaging"...and they would be completely right. I am an extremely compulsive personality and my art and design work is not exempt from this side of me. In fact, if I didn't have my artwork as an outlet for all the crazy, bipolar creative energy that I have I would probably drive myself and everyone around me completely insane.

My latest obsession has been learning how to oil paint. I had used oil paint a few times when I was younger and HATED it. Up until then I had been very happy painting with acrylic which was easy to clean (which is great for someone as messy as I am when painting) and dried quickly to help with coating and layering. Oil paint was insanely hard to clean off, the smell of turpentine made me gag and to top it off everything blended together! So that perfect color that I mixed suddenly got completely destroyed by the other colors around it. Can we all say "UGH!"

Once the idea recently came into my head that I wanted to give oil paints another try I could not be happy until I had gone to Michaels and purchased new brushes, ODORLESS turpentine (whew) and a set of oil paints.

And you know what? Oil painting is fun!

It is still ridiculously messy (I will be scraping paint from my fingernails for weeks to come), but the finished product is totally worth it. On the right subject the color blending becomes something truly beautiful, and the paint always seems to glisten like I just finished painting it a minute ago.

So above you see my first successful oil paint still life. I hope you enjoy it and I hope this post makes you go out and try something new!

It's a Celebration!

Happy Saturday everyone! For the past few weeks I have been working on wedding invitations for my amazingly beautiful and wonderful friend Megan. Her and her fiancé Josh are the two sweetest people in the world and I wanted to make sure that their invitations were really special. 

I came up with a few options, some typographic and some relating more to elements of their wedding, but in the end the invitation design of choice included my illustrations of the happy couple. Thanks to my handy dandy Epson Stylus Pro 3880 and a bunch of exacto blades I was able to do all of the printing and craft work myself from the comfort of my design studio.

I'm extremely pleased with how they turned out and I'm even more pleased that Megan and Josh got exactly what they wanted for their very special day!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Mother Nature

Let me start off with the fact that I am not one of those people that can't stand the winter. I love winter! One of my favorite activities, snowboarding, is a winter sport. I also thoroughly enjoy getting off the mountain after snowboarding and drinking a nice spiked hot chocolate. Winter is AWESOME!

But... as of today... I am over it.

It is time for sun, for flowers, for chirping birds and sunglasses. Although technically Spring has already sprung I am declaring it officially Spring on my blog as of this evening. Today (after it was done raining) was a gorgeous NYC day, and to celebrate the occasion I have decided to unveil my latest illustration.

I hope you enjoy her, and I hope there is a long, beautiful Spring ahead of us!