A few years back I said the phrase A string of stars and I thought- that would make a nice dagger design focus. I made a little sketch in my notebook and I started pushing some visual ideas around. But I wasn't sure of what I was looking for with this one. 

I had a habit of starting with a real world dagger silhouette and building my ideas from there, But I wasn't happy with the direction and I moved on. Fast forward I took it up again- this time I did some silhouette ideations:

I'm writing a graphic novel now that has daggers as a story function, so this might also be helpful for me to find or recognize meaning in my work as now I relate it back to that story, rather than some pure visual exploration. The story motive makes it feel like problem solving more than swinging for the fences and hoping it all works out (lol- so obvious but still). 

I wanted to stage it a little to present it with story. I didn't want to do a full on painting, but I wanted to do more than a texture with lighting effects, so I started pushing some pixels around. In my gut I will probably come back around and develop this a little further in the future. But I want to sit with it now. 

A little tribute to my favorite silly Vampyre <3 A BAT! Dagger that is visually far afield from it's inspiration, but I do like to cram ideas together. 

I was intending to do a straight up nice paint of the throwing dagger used on screen and in my fan art piece from the Jackie Daytona episode of The Shadows tv. But I wanted to add leaves like this little throwing dagger (bottom left) and a nod to Hammer with my favorite candelabra from their studio sets. I started looking for a silhouette and just found myself pushing a bit more to the decrepit, overgrown castle with my Vampyre Bat design. 

The leaves were a bit distracting from the handle, I started to balance my design to be able to get away with the bat elements, the thorns, and this idea of berries standing in for drops of blood, crystalized maybe? I needed that glowing saturated red. I felt like this tonal design saved the organization on this one- push everything together and let the darks of the thorns hold the center. 

I tried to bring the leaves in, but the attention is everywhere. So I brought the berries to the center with the thorns and the light. Just designing, deciding the whole time and trying to convince myself it is working. So in the end I really like what's come of this dagger- it IS more Hammer style than Shadows- is there something left there to paint? I will think about that. 

I love old horror films so this is my comfy zone, it calls to me. If a horror film has a "gowns" credit, then I'll watch it ;) If it's too scary my god, I can't really deal. Maybe I should also rewatch Son Of Frankenstein from Universal- beautiful sets, visual look to that as well. XO

Another scene that started as a study. I am painting a Vampyre's Dagger, so I looked to these dreary standing stones and imagined a scene unfolding. Could this be within the shadow of a castle ruin and a forgotten patch of earth? 

I was playing with shapes to make patches of color more so than using brushes in this landscape. I enjoyed those graphic stripes of color and was happy to leave them be and just focus on using brushes to create some effects of grasses in the foreground. Maybe because it started as a study I feel psychologically less worried if it feels a bit more unresolved, or graphic in places. 

Painting is weirdly emotional sometimes- it's a balance, it's a question, it's a dare that almost nobody cares about nearly, by far, as much as the artist who creates it. It's making means something different than it's reading by the viewer. 

I made a screenshot gif animation of the piece coming together. I don't always know where it will finish, I'm deciding the whole time and balancing and evaluating what I need to do next. I switch back and forth between painting and evaluating what I've done. I can't imagine having a screen recording going while doing this. I take moments to research reference, or even sketch some element I need to add. I like to add stuff really easy, sloppily, not worry about how it looks, but how it's working in the overall piece. Then if I want to keep it I move on to make it look right. 

Screen recording is asking too much, I can't feel right about that- but the step by step screenshot gif? I like this- not only to share, but to archive my thinking. 

This new design started from a concept from last January after an ice storm frosted over the shrubbery and berries in my front yard. I had envisioned the frosted over, paper thin leaves as a charmingly unlikely material for a weapon. It's beautiful, but brittle, but so unusual that it caught my attention. 

My initial concept started like this, above. I still like it, but the actual ice pieces seemed to break up the solidity of the leaf silhouette and I felt a little torn about it. I tried to make it work. 

I actually really like the way the ice looks, the way it's painted. But in my hesitation I started a new idea. I am trying to stick to this idea of a frosted-over leaf on a morning after a coldsnap. So I tried to stay more tightly inline with my reference image. I am wondering if I might take what I am hanging onto from this abandoned concept and recycle it into something else- most likely I'll try.

When challenged to design a book cover with a focus on hand lettering I jumped a the opportunity to take colors and imagery that is very familiar to me  and mix in something I haven't done in years: hand lettering. Over the last few years I have become more involved in writing and editing creative writing, so I tried to use that to find a way in to make this project something that I could care about. 

My digital painting set up is great, but anytime I try to write something with the stylus it does not look inspirational or communicating anything really other than just shaky and awkward.  So I went a different route and got out my inkstone and small calligraphy brushes. You grind ink from a solid block and once it is at a thick enough consistency it is ready. You can see it wasn't ready at all times :) 

I had more comps with imagery to speak my concept instead of text, aka my comfort zone. But once I realized I hadn't left enough space in the design for the author's name I had to change it up and I tried one with just text and my little star doodles. I thought it held the page quite well. Glowing things always make me think of PS, so I enjoyed the doodle and handwriting combined with that little digital touch.

I smoothed the text's edges for the title quite a bit in PS with a mask, and in my name I tried to do less smoothing and let the edges just be as they were. I am not convinced it all matches up because of this, but it is a great reminder of the traditional media and the paper quality, ink quality brush quality all needing to play nicely together. I always tend to not worry about it because I'll fix it in PS, but when the human touch of the handwriting is the point of the piece, then all is in play and important. 

I frequently feel like my mind is a tangle of ideas and ambition and good intensions, but without writing anything down it all just jumbles together. I need to write things down and use a sketchbook/journal to develop my ideas and how they could connect to or evolve forward things I've already done. Writing helps me to focus. 

I represent this as a beautiful knot made from the potential and decay on the floor of a remarkable woodland. I tried to balance the quick and slow read of different levels of details, along with the realism of 2D pictorial space and the more abstracted design of details and pattern right up against the picture plane.  

Some photobashed concepts for chapter openers for an upcoming horror novel 🕸🧛‍♀️🕷  I've never worked on interior black and white spot illustrations before, so I was excited to take on some concepts for a pitch for chapter opener illustrations. I started throwing some ideas together with just image search results, filters, and a little paint. I guess this is sort of how I sketch? I make elaborate photo collage references.

I want to follow this little spider around and create a symbolist language to set the mood for the chapter. While working on these I found this painting below: 'Death Looking into the Window of One Dying' by Jaroslav Panuška

I loved these elongated, unnatural proportions- they feel so much more interesting and special than the photo based silhouettes I was using, and it made me think of Louise Bourgeois' Spiders:

A great reminder to me about the flow of the process of art making: you've got to start with an idea and for me it is so helpful to just start pushing things together so I have something to push against as I go. But sooner of later, usually another angle clicks on and gets me to evolve my idea to something more suited and more expressive of what I'm really trying to say. But I still always need to start simple or I'll never get to that Aha moment when I begin to understand what I am after. I've heard the process described as a spiral with each pass around getting closer to what you are after. In this case I was happy I hadn't started on the final images just quite yet. 

This is an environment design for an entryway section of the Moon Garden just inside the Gate. I wanted to see the Glasswing Luna Moths in their place in the world. They are prevalent in this garden and specifically this region where the Moon Wytch has power.

The Garden Gate was designed as a bit of a thought experiment about crescent shapes, snakes, and either thorns or the horns of animals. How could I use those shapes to create an elegant, stone-carved entry gate that could signify an important place? 

This garden needs to feel like a contemplative destination, peaceful, soft and pretty, but still like a part of nature- not completely manicured. The sculpture niches with the candles add a presence of the characters who take care of this place, as well as a softly religious or meditative tone to the space.

I looked at Italian rococo architectural forms to create a basis for the design in our collective, known culture, but then explore and add some new shapes and forms. 

For the overall environment I created different elements and textures using the crescent and rounded shapes in a variety of ways.