a penguin, a yeti and an eskimo...

Okay, so here's the deal.  I'm opening an Etsy shop!  My launch date is set for March 8th and my life has been basically "eat, sleep, work" trying to get things up and running.  I plan on selling prints of my illustrations and fine art as well as notecards, handmade journals/sketchbooks (with my artwork on the cover or as endpapers), and needle felted characters from my illustrations.  I purchased a high quality epson printer to make my prints and have been feverishly whipping up several new sets of illustrations.  I'm working on an "animal alphabet" meant for children's rooms (a is for armadillo, b is for beluga whale, c is for cuckoo bird, d is for dormouse, e is for echidna, etc.).  I'm also working on a series of four illustrations centering around the adventures of Polo the penguin and Teddy the yeti who's 3-D needle felted wool counterparts are pictured below.  Polo wears blue and green striped socks and Teddy wears a red hat.  

Teddy the yeti has toes!

I've also been working on new pieces for my illustration portfolio.  I've decided to focus my attention on book covers and children's books and am updating my portfolio with that in mind.  I've also updated my my process.  I'm still going for the same style/"look", but am doing more digitally, which speeds things up and makes my work cleaner and easier to manipulate.  I do all my ink work by hand, then scan it in and color the image by digitally collaging watercolor fields and patterns that I have painted and scanned separately.  Below is a piece that I completed recently (though I still have to go in and tweak a few things) that I like to call "Tangled Eskimo".  

I am super excited about all these new plans and projects!  I feel more motivated than I have since we graduated and the feeling hasn't gone away yet, even after about a month of non-stop work.  Hopefully it keeps up!

As always, I appreciate your thoughts and opinions.  I also want to apologize for being out of touch and not checking Facebook or this blog regularly... I'm afraid I've been a little single-minded of late, focusing on the things mentioned above to the exclusion of most everything else.  I was completely unaware of the newer blog posts until Chad informed me that I was missing things and should get my butt in gear!