rose red + snow white

I'm working on a bunch of paintings at once these days.  This is the first one that got finished!  It's for a show in July, and it will have a sister piece to go with it... a diptych, if you're fancy.  

Click to see it bigger!

The show is fairy tale themed.  You know I love a good, obscure fairy tale.  You know what else I love?  Flowers, and vintage clothes, and patterns.  So all those things got wrapped up into this painting.  

It's acrylic on board, by the way, and 16"x16" square.  Haven't had it framed yet but I'm thinking something wood and vintage looking.  Usually framing is my least favorite part (who knows who will end up buying it, and what they'll like), but I can't wait to see this one all ready-to-hang.

As usual, I did a butt load of sketching before leaping into the painting.  Can you believe I really haven't done much bear drawing?  I just wanted him to be really BIG with a cute face.  And a crown.  Because if you know this fairy tale, then you know he is a prince, after all.  

I like post-its for compositions.  If you hate your drawing then you can just peel them off and throw them away.  

Yeah, flowers.  I had a moment where I thought I might do teenage versions of the sisters, and make them more contemporary, but the littler versions won.  As soon as I had the idea to put them in little mod dresses it was over with.  I might, however, still put those heart-shaped sunglasses on Snow White...

More comin'!

dresses which are not dresses + website

I forgot to mention this before, but I finally have a place you can find me in the internets with a name which is very easy to remember!  

It's brigetteb.com!

That's where my tumblr-based portfolio lives.  If you have a tumblr you can follow me and tumbl away! It feels very official and neat.  The only bummer is that you still have to remember to spell my name right (no D, two E's, two T's, yes I know it's a funny spelling, but I didn't choose it).

And here are some discarded ideas from a thing I'm working on, er, trying to be working on.  

I'm not going to explain too much because there isn't much to say.

Here's a birdcage dress lady!  Her hat is also a birdcage.  

I imagine that the weather girl is prone to mood swings.  

Pomegranates.

Yes I know they're very silly.  

stereo girl

I did this for my friend's zine!  I remember wanting to make zines when I was in high school and college, and then never doing it.   Sometimes I would even do a bunch of drawings and be like, "This is for the the ZINE!" And then the drawings would sit there forever and ever the end.

I'm not sure where this girl came from.  I did a super rough sketch of her a few years ago and I just liked the idea that her clothes (and maybe also her body?) are like a stereo, but a cool analog stereo, that plays how she feels.

In these drawings she's in a joyful dance-y kind of mood!

What's she dancing to?  Maybe THIS?  That song always makes me feel joyfully dance-y, even though it's not necessarily super dance-able.

Or THIS?  I mean, you can't really argue with that.

In other news, I've been around old CalArts a lot this week looking at student portfolios!  I have a workshop-stype situation going on.  SO MANY PORTFOLIOS!  It's great though.  I get to meet the students and hang around in the faculty lounge.  I'll be there next week too!   Busy busy!

the kitty: mostly photos, a painting and some drawings

Did you know I recently acquired a cute baby cat?  I did.  Her name is Pyewacket, but we pretty much only ever call her 'kitty'.  And even then it's usually 'kitty stop that!! no biting! KITTY!'

 Look at those claws!  Fierce!  Ferocious!

Here she is in action, trying to eat the buttons off my shirt.

Button consumption causes sleepiness.

So this weekend, when I was asked last minute to do a painting demonstration at Nucleus during the It's a Small World show opening, the little squirt became my muse.  What's a painting demonstration, you ask?  It's when you paint with a bunch of people watching you.  It was actually pretty stressful.  I was sweating like crazy, but you can't tell, thank goooooodness!

There were two other artists doing demos: to my left was Israel Sanchez, who whipped up a flawless gouache sailboat, and to my right is Patrick Awa, who made this totally lovely piece appear out of nowhere.  We had about 45 minutes, I think.  

Here's what I ended up with:

Except kitty never really brings me pretty flowers.  In fact I think she hates plants (she destroyed the potted plant in our living room by shredding it, the booger).   When I finished it was raffled away to a lucky winner.  I hope they like cats!

I didn't have a sketch or anything for this, I just did it on the fly!  It was very small, only 5"x5", and you can tell from my giant paint tubes that I used acrylic.  I did, however, have a little practice drawing the kitty:

She is hard to capture.  Like most cats, she has a very serious, and often psychotic expression, yet she is also stupidly cute.  

A got a couple good Lila drawings in there, too!

In case you were wondering if my household was turned upside down by the arrival of kitty, let the following photos assure you that she is fitting in quite nicely with Lila the dog.  

She's much bigger in this second photo...Lila likes to look out the window into the courtyard and then bark like a crazed banshee when anyone gets close.  

Yay for pets!  Furry little muses.  

CHEER!

I told you I had a lot of stuff to share, and I wasn't kidding!

About a year ago I was asked if I'd be interested in illustrating a series of books about a teenage girl.  That sounds kinda cool, right?  BUT, her primary interest in life, besides boys, and clothes, was cheerleading.  I know most of you don't know me personally, but perhaps you can tell by the overall impression of moi that you get from this blog,  that I could give a care about cheerleading, or school spirit, or anything remotely involved with liking high school at all.  I didn't enjoy high school one bit, myself, and I was about as far from a cheerleader as you could get.

It sounded like such an un-ME project that I almost said no.  But then I said yes.

And now those books exist, in the world, and my name is on them!

The first two books (in a series of five) are out now, and although they're chapter books they are riddled with illustrations.  I plucked a few of my favorites out to share with yous!

The illustrations are meant to be doodles and sketches by the narrator/star of the book series, a teenage girl named Maddy.  She wants to be a cheerleader SO BAD which I SO CAN'T relate to, but she is also an artist, and I CAN relate to doing silly drawings of things!

            Like wishing your nerdy best friend would dress cuter...

...or your best friend making faces at you...

...and getting dagger eyeballs from mean girls!

  It's a trip to see my own handwriting in a book.

 Ultimately, I'm really happy that I decided to jump into this book series.  The sketches are fun I make a point of forcing them to be interesting by inking them with a brush pen.  That way I can't noodle them forever (like in photoshop) and you get little spontaneous surprises sometimes.

  Plus they are supposed to be kind of wiggly and sketchy.  It's hard for me to avoid making them all clean and nice sometimes, tho...

So that's what I've been up to.  I wish I knew more tween-age girls, cuz I love to know what the intended audience thinks of the books.  

Now, back to work!

doodle explosion

I've been doodling a lot lately.  I'm in this Norman Rockwell tribute show in July, and I'm doing a couple paintings for it.  I'm using one of my favorite (and one of Rockwell's, too) subject matters:  teenagers.  They are pretty wonderful.  This is my very sloppy color sketch for one of said paintings.  

Here are some sketches that I coughed up in preparation for this piece.  I decided not to edit them or make them pretty, so, what you see is how they were drawn on the page. 

Doodles!

Some of these were done from photos.  It is hard to find good photos of teenagers.  The best way to observe them is in their natural habitat: walking home from school.  In photos they either look like children dressed as adults or they are trying very hard to appear attractive.  In person they can't hide all their appealing imperfections though.  

Most of these are not even whole ideas.  I just needed to warm up.  I tend to give up on a drawing half way through if I think it's not going where I want it to.  That's probably not a good habit.  But I keep doing it anyway.  

Even though this was drawn on a huge slice of 16 field animation paper, somehow my favorite drawings are squashed up against, and cut off by, the bottom of the page.  Mer.

This girl is a prototype of the one from the color sketch.  I think I  did a bazillion drawings of her before I found one that I really liked.  My thought process was something like "This girl will have cute short hair.  What kind of shirt would a short-haired girl wear?  She will wear a skirt because she's afraid people might think she's a boy if she doesn't, because she doesn't know how cute and girly she is.  She wears a lot of necklaces for the same reason..." etc. etc.  Yes it's fun to invent people.  

That head right in the the middle is my favorite thing that I've drawn in a long time.  I like that shoe too.  I considered giving her motorcycle boots, but I like cowboy boots better.  Plus it fits the 'Americana' theme of the show.  

I like that girl on the left a lot.  I wish I hadn't drawn that creepy man head so close to her.  It looks like he's trying to smell her hair or something.  Gross!

I hope you still like me now that you know I do lots of ugly and awkward drawings before I get to a good one.  

(Whoooooaaa blogger is all different now!  I like it.) 

Till next time, when I will have a lovely finished painting to show off!

twelve dancing princesses

My book Twelve Dancing Princesses is out this week, officially, in the world, for you to buy, and love and cherish!

So I thought I'd go back in time to when the book wasn't finished, to when it was barely just started, because it didn't just materialize out of thin air and Photoshop. Like most big projects, it developed in phases and rather slowly. There was lots of sketching and doodling and revising and things that didn't really look like anything that I'm surprised my editor could even understand!

Let's start at the beginning, when I chose what era I ought to place this far away kingdom in. I did NOT want to just do whatever-fantasy-far-far-away-princess-royalty-mashup. I love fashion history, and costumes, so I had to be specific. I liked the idea of doing an 18th century Mary Antoinette fanciful French style, but that has been done, and very beautifully, and one of my own favorite illustrators Kay Nielson, and I can't front Kay. I chose the 1830's-40's, because the kings were dapper, the ladies had big fantastic hoop dresses, and the shoes were appropriately similar to ballet slippers!

See?

I love how GIANT the dresses in that era were! Can you imagine wearing something that big? Everyday? Fitting through doorways in it? Going to the bathroom in it??

I did a few very rough and tumble character designs, for proportion and stuff. All twelve princesses are basically the same princess with different hair and dresses. To design and re-draw and remember all the puny details of twelve separate princesses sounded very not fun to me. It was challenging enough just fitting all twelve into each composition!

Since the story was already written and given the a-okay by my editor, I moved along to thumbnail sketches. They are very rough, and very small: I drew them on 1"x1.5" post-it notes. I did that so that I could doodle a composition and then if I didn't care for it immediately peel it away and draw another one. I went through an enormous stack of tiny post-it's in such a way. The compositions changed very little from what you see here.

This is the whole book in post-its!

I did all the final illustrations in Photoshop. I had to BUY Photoshop, because I had previously had only bootlegged versions of it (from being a student and to be fair, no student can afford that schnazz), and it kept crashing and asking me for serial numbers, and finally just wouldn't open at all. SOOOO expensive, but worth it in the end for a version that actually WORKS. It was a serious crisis for me for about 3 days, back when I was just beginning to work on the final art.

Yes there's like 100 layers, and they are all labeled appropriately. Virgo style.

What I take away from making this book is basically this: I really love making books. I'm beginning work on a new one...but that's for later!

wednesday weirdos

Watching TV and doodling is a thing I like to do. It's nice to turn off your brain and draw stuff that pertains to nothing. I remember doing a great deal of that before I went to art school, and especially during school, but once I began to draw things for a living somehow drawing becomes a chore! Probably because it's very cerebral when you are doing it for a specific purpose, or person, or job. You have to think hard.

When you don't think hard, or barely at all, because you are watching Ghost Hunters (again?), so half your brian is distracted by ghost evidence, you end up with a lot of weird stuff. Here are my weirdoes!

Have a nice weekend you!