A small work-in-progress detail from one of the scenes in the book – fitting subject matter for this time of year.

I’m going to take a couple of days off working on the illustrations to enjoy a very rainy West Coast Christmas with my family. The view from my window today is very, very green. There are even a few blooms on the miniature rose bushes. It’s very unlike the view from the same window in 2008:

Another small part of a page spread, this time with a Malachite kingfisher. And I’ve just noticed couple of tangents that need fixing.

Another little detail from a spread I’m working on. The thin red line is my gutter marker.

Still chugging along on the final illustrations with lots of eye-straining late nights & working-weekends. Here’s a little piece of one of the spreads I’m working on right now.

My boyfriend and I took off on a spontaneous road trip to Portland, OR for a couple of days to celebrate his birthday and while down there we went to see the exhibit The Artist’s Touch, The Craftsman’s Hand: Three Centuries of Japanese Prints from the Portland Art Museum. I have a particular fondness for Japanese woodcut prints, born out of the many hours spent as a kid poring over my grandmother’s collection of books on the subject, so I was thrilled that we managed to squeeze in a visit – it provided a perfect little artistic recharge and the trip gave my eyes a much needed break. 

If you are anywhere near Portland, I highly recommend taking the opportunity to see the exhibit. It’s one thing to see reproductions of the prints in books, and a completely different experience to see them up close. I spent quite a bit of time with my nose about 5″ off the glass. Reproductions, as good as many of them are now, just don’t give a complete sense of the translucency or subtle texture of the paper.

I took a lot of iphone photos of details I found particularly wonderful and wanted to remember for future reference, and also bought the catalogue so I can turn to it when I need a bit of an artistic pick-me-up.

(l-r top)   Katsukawa Shunkō | Ichikawa Danjūrō V as a yamabushi, 1779-81; Keisai Eisen | The Courtesan Uryūno, c. 1830

(centre) Katsukawa SHUN’EI (1762-1819), Hachidanme (Act VII: The bride’s journey) From the series Chūshingura (The Treasurey of Loyal Retainers), early 1790′s

(l-r bottom) Totoya Hokkei | Usokai (Bullfinch Exchange), probably 1831; Ogata Gekkō, Oishi Kuranosuke Yoshio, 1897

The exhibit runs until January 22, 2012.

I’ve inherited my boyfriend’s old iphone 3G after he upgraded to the shiny, fast, new model. It takes crummy photos and it’s really slow and it has always hated me – sometimes it just refuses to acknowledge my touch commands. But I still really like the (somewhat) immediacy of the photo function, and that I don’t have to fuss with big 7D files for silly little work-in-progress snaps. Now I can take really bad photos and add heavy-handed instagram filters to them, further satisfying my love for ambiguous images.
Bonus, I’m also not so worried about getting inky fingers on the thing.

The illustrations for this book are equal parts traditional and equal parts digital assembly. I’m in the thick of the digital stuff but stop every so often when I need to create more traditional elements. That requires cleaning my desk, just to make it really messy again.

It’s freeing just messing around with ink and a roll of rice paper. After trying to plan and figure out details so much on this project, it’s nice to find opportunities to work without a plan, just let interesting things happen, and let the medium lead the way.

There are minor frustrations here and there – like running out a rice paper and finding the new package I bought from Opus isn’t the same stuff as I bought before, and I like the texture much less.

Raven, Orca & Salmon (detail)