How 'bout that

Here, have a happy heifer sketch.  She likes to dance so hard her earrings jingle and the wine flies out of her glass.

Candy Frames

I may be in a summer outdoor market this July and I'm customizing some frames for my Farm People series.  A pessimist would say, "You work at a frame shop all week and then you go home and your days off you still frame? What's wrong with you?" but an optimist would observe, "Look at all the pretty color!  What fun you get to have!!!"  

I haven't painted in a while and it was really fun to break out with these juicy colors and just have fun mixing and dabbing.  I just love this color pallet.  If you find it on a macaroon or jordan almond, I will want to paint with it.  I hope to post what they look like all finished soon.  Have to wait for the paint to dry first, though! 

New Cards!

My long awaited printing of dragonfly cards is finally happening!  I've had about enough of the snow so these dragonflies are a welcome emblem of summer breezes.  I carved the block a while ago but haven't had the opportunity to print them up until now.

When I lay out all of my prints from an edition in the drying rack, I get this satisfying sensation of achievement.  Look at them all!  The process of printing can be and usually is a complicated one.  By using the term "make ready" printers sum up the laborious process of mixing ink, preparing paper, locking up a block or type, aligning gauge pins or guides, packing or unpacking a tympan, calibrating rollers or bed heights, etc.  The list has the potential to go on and on.  Even after "make ready" you can still (and usually do) run into printing issues that need troubleshooting throughout the run.  But when all of the prints are gathered there to dry, you can bask in the light of satisfaction at a job well done!

Here is a dragonfly freshly printed on the VABC's old C&P.  It's letting its wings dry before it takes flight to the drying rack to join its kin.

I'm also working on a line of cards involving a favorite quote from Charles Lamb.  Here's a worst case scenario for "make ready".  I thought my block image and text would play well together but the first proof proved me wrong.  The text lay in an awkward place on the image where horizontal lines obscured the text and made it difficult to read.  After all the other set up, I didn't have time to rearrange the type so I had to pull some proofs on tracing paper, go home, revise my design, and come back another day.  I did not leave the shop feeling particularly good that day.  

But, my hard work paid off because the new design worked well.  I was lucky enough that no one else needed the press and my registration wasn't disturbed.  I had saved my ink from that day so all I had to do was walk in, correct my type placement, lock up, and print!  It's a great feeling when you finally get it right and let the flywheel just go!

It will really be fun to see them all packaged and tidy.  Stay tuned!

Shop Local

If you love my work and also want to support local businesses in my community, please consider visiting any of these fine locations!  Not only can you support my art but you also support our local business community and potentially get exposure to other treasures!

You can currently find my work at:

Creative Framing and the Art Box

The Barn Swallow

The Crozet Artisan Depot

Scottsville Supply Company

VABC Art on Ivy

Press Work Wine

I've always thought that the best jobs in the world would be to design wine and beer labels.  I can't think of any other product that takes such creative liberty in their branding.  Even the movie industry, in my opinion, holds back on certain angles of marketing.  Beer and wine seem to thrive on coming up with the most off the wall styles for their labels.  Sometimes you get lucky and there is a tasting where you get to base your purchase on the quality of the product but more often than not, beer and wine gets sold based on the appeal of the label unless you know a thing or two about regions, years, vines, etc.  So, on the note of novelties . . .

Amanda Johnson Smith of the Art Box saw this and had to pick it up for me! What a treat!  I got a bottle of wine AND a keepsake!  They even used some printing terms in their description.  After a lovely afternoon relaxing and sipping I couldn't just toss the experience.  This little gem had to make it into my collection!  Since I work at Creative Framing, I knew which moulding would be perfect with this.  Now, to find a space on my wall and refill my wine glass . . .

Carrots from the snow

The snow, she is a fall'n outside but I have dreams of gardening in my head. I'm developing some ideas for a new card line focusing on garden vegetables in the arts and crafts movement style.  Heirloom vegetables offer up so much beauty to work with!  Parisienne carrots, French breakfast radishes, and Forellenschluss lettuce are my favorites.

a Poison Sisters process

The time has come to talk about Poison Sisters.  I had wanted to work with Frank Riccio on a collaboration for a very long time and in 2013 I finally got my chance.  The Virginia Arts of the Book Center was getting into their annual group project and the fervor was for all things miniature book.  Frank and I love botany so we created the concept of Poison Sisters.  

The concept grew from our curiosity with European poison gardens and the observation that Atropa belladonna (Deadly Nightshade) and Datura stramonium (Hells Bells or Thorn Apple) were sisters in the Solonaceae family.  Our fascination and inspiration culminated in:

". . . an illustrated meditation on the science and folklore of two botanicals, datura and belladonna.  Evoking their hallucinogenic potential with pictures, pop-ups, and text, this accordion-fold book is a syllogism in miniature on the lethal and medicinal characteristics of this pair of plant siblings. Letter-pressed on Lettra ecru white paper with tinted end sheets, and hand-bound in Japanese silk and Italian marbled paper."

- VABC 2013 Miniature Books Annual Group Project

We worked really hard to bring this edition together.  It's one thing to make a pop-up book.  It's a whole other monster to produce an edition of them.

I don't normally go in for printing with a polymer plate but there were 2 key factors here.  Firstly, this miniature book had to conform to the dimensions of 2" x 3".  In order to achieve the crazy detail in draftsmanship we both love, I knew we would have to do a caste.  Secondly, even if I was nuts enough to attempt a block there wasn't enough time to get it done and print.

Frank came up with a beautiful technique to create our own "end sheet" paper.  He printed a weak layer of black onto our ecru paper and then printed layers upon layers of different purple grays.  The result is a lush painterly quality to the paper that creates this ethereal background for the illustrations.

You can see our edition number was 30 but we printed and had materials for more like 45 in case anything went wrong . . . and it always does.  We had a few artist proofs left over but not very many!

This spool of thread illustrates the diminutive size of our incredible book!

It really was serendipity that some italian marble paper I found matched our color scheme.  Veins of gold and burgundy course through washes of lavender, black, and deep purple.  It compliments the Japanese silk book cloth that encases the spine.  Frank did a custom title for us in his script.  I remember he cut each little title piece out and kept them stacked together in a tiny cardboard jewelry box.

The accordion had to be printed as one full sheet of paper that had to be folded over into two layers and then folded again into 11 pages that added up to ultimately 22 pages.  We barely squeaked under the size limitations of the VABC vandercook with this one.

Here's a close up of Frank's illustrations and the "painterly" quality of our custom made paper.

Here are some photos documenting the dreamlike "storyline" of our book.  We wanted to have a continual dreamscape for the top layer with facts and folklore showing through on the under layer.  The accordion-fold style translated this well.

The first page features our poison sisters carved into an old stone relief, sitting atop a skull, and drinking from their cups.  Their namesake plants are etched beneath them.

Frank drew Belladonna next in the style of Botticelli's "Birth of Venus".  She is edged on her left by heavy ripe belladonna berries as she rises within her flower. Twinkling cut-out stars dust the background that leads into a landscape of clouds.

I drew Frank's Belladonna soaring in the air with a toad, a goat, and a black cat.  Lore had it that witches used belladonna in their rituals as a "flying" potion.  I used my own goat, Odin, as a model.  His tail is crooked because it was broken before birth.

The next pages feature Datura as she tumbles through her spiky maze of thorn apples and into a bed of trumpeting datura flowers.

We end with our sisters united in the Caduceus, Hermes' staff.  Though it has been wrongly confused with the Rod of Asclepius, I wanted to use it because it fit my duality purposes and many people associate it with medical and pharmaceutical connotations.  Now as nagini, our sisters twine up the staff to sit upon a belladonna berry while holding a thorn apple high above their heads.

Lastly, we signed and numbered each book with our lovely signatures.

I am so grateful to have finally worked with my friend Frank Riccio and shared the efforts, burdens, and rewards of an edition of books with him.  It is a thing of magic when two kindred spirits come together and create something beautiful with their own hands.  It is the feeling that craftspeople live for.

Sadly, Frank succumbed to cancer this past summer.

I will never forget my friend nor the adventure we had putting together this book.  I will imagine his spirit sitting by, quietly sketching and observing, every time I work in the VABC.  I know he enjoyed documenting the dreamscape of poison sisters and we saw them at once as poison, hallucinogen, and medicine.  The memory of our work encourages me to keep creating and documenting the dreamscape.