Katherine & Eric's Chicago Firehouse Guestbook

Hello again blog! The other downside to a lack of blogging and no access to my computer this summer is that I'm terribly behind on sharing my recent projects! Albeit, a few of my most recent project couldn't be shared until after my departure day. There were a couple that I finished right before I left that I absolutely love the results of! 

This wedding guestbook was such a fun challenge. Katherine contacted me about making a custom guestbook featuring the refurbished firehouse in Chicago that they'd be getting married at! It's such a gorgeous building, I couldn't resist.

I love painting buildings, particularly older buildings covered in brick. We decided to do a purple skyline of Chicago across the inside spread as well to go with their wedding colors. I really loved how this building turned out. I always love to get a project where I can just channel all my focus into the cover and a few small personal details.

A custom proposal book for Samantha & Sian

I get a lot of very sweet commission requests. Every now and then, there's one that comes along that scares the hell out of me. A commission so big and so sweet that I'm terrified of screwing it up, and ultimately screwing up the big day or surprise for someone else. 

This book was one of those "holy hell sweet and daunting" books. 

Sian contacted me a while ago about putting together a "children's book" about how she and her then girlfriend Sam met. The book would go through how they met, their travels together, meeting family, and ultimately end with a surprise trip where Sian would propose on the last night, on the very last page. Ring illustration included. 

Like I said, holy hell sweet and daunting. 

Luckily, Sian already had the story framed out so all I needed to do was illustrate and bind it! It was so fun to watercolor these two and their incredible story of dating across two continents. 

Sian was so sweet and so much fun to collaborate with that it made the entire daunting process so much easier to tackle. I also got a sweet review from Sian so I can guess the proposal went over well!

There's some more photos up on my website if you're curious to see...

Dhvani & Vineet's Travel Wedding Guestbook

Guys...I'm in love. I love my job. Absolutely, head over heels, in love with what I do. The sweetest people across the world ask me to create something one-of-a-kind that they'll cherish for years to come. My customers are the most thoughtful people. They're so patient with my terrible emailing/updating skills. They're some of my favorite people, that I've often never met in person. It's a pretty incredible thing.

A lot of the time, I have to keep my projects secret so as not so spoil the pretty details until after the surprise, wedding, shower, engagement or birthday is done. And more often than not, in the process of keeping it a secret, I forget to share what I made entirely! This album is one of those cases...

Dhvani and I met in Italy years ago when she was a student at Santa Chiara, the study abroad center I worked at. We first collaborated last year when I watercolored some illustrations for their wedding invitations. She then commissioned me to create a guestbook for their special day this past May! 

Oh man, I loved this album! This was a hard one to mail off. An entire book filled with passport stamps, how could I not love it?! We also alternated the stamps with flowers they used on their invitations. 

I'll eventually share some more photos on my website but that's under serious renovation and remodeling now. The blog will be too! Everything in fact... profile photos, shop platforms, prices, bios, overall brand aesthetics. EVERY-DAMN-THING! 

The Etsy shop already had a BIG name change this week! I'm hoping to have it all done and launched by mid September. Want to stay on top of the changes? Sign up for the Sketchy Notions Newsletter or follow along on Instagram! And if you've had your eye on anything in either the Etsy shop or the Sketchy Notions Shop, buy it now before prices go up! 

So....summer?

Um...where did summer go? It seems just like yesterday and I was cleaning up my classroom and saying farewell to all my students for the summer. And now we are just weeks away from textbooks, notes and new classes! CRAZY!

I still feel like I'm in catch-up mode after such a crazy and busy summer. I'll have to do another post about teaching this summer with Arts Outreach, we did a lot of fun projects that I can't wait to share! 

Here's some of my favorite photos from our family trip to Utah this past week. Still forever one of my favorite places on this continent...

1. The roads out in Utah are pretty incredible. Miles of desert and hills and rock formations and fields with NO ONE around. 

2. I brought all my travel gear with me to watercolor and get some work done while we were there (no such thing as a real vacation anymore I guess...)

3. There were SO MANY wildflowers this summer! This was just a small sample of all of them. 

4. Our grandpa has a few horses on this ranch and they're very friendly and photogenic. 

5. My sister snapped this photo of me while I was sketching on the edge of Horseshoe Bend in Arizona. SO happy to be able to cross that spot off the sketching bucket list, it's an amazing view. 

6. This is my little watercolor of Horseshoe Bend. I was pretty terrified the wind was going to pick it up and carry it all the way to the bottom of the canyon! 

7. Before we hiked out to Horseshoe Bend, we visited Lower Antelope Canyon. INCREDIBLE! I've been wanting to go back here ever since I first visited the upper canyon a few years ago. Lower Antelope Canyon was SO MUCH BETTER! Much longer and fewer tourists. 

8. This was my backpack I snagged during a road trip to Texas a few years ago with all my travel gear. 

In other news, I'm working on a brand new newsletter with some special downloads! Sign up here and get in on it!  

Weekly Postcard Project update I

I can't believe I'm already 16 weeks into my Weekly Postcard Project! It really puts how fast this year is going by into perspective...

The project is going along great! I'll admit, some weeks have been easier than others to sit down and make a postcard in advance. Some weeks I'm up early on Saturday morning to get it watercolored in time to post. And I'm not always the fastest to get them to the Post Office. But I really, really love this project! 

So far the farthest away I've mailed a postcard is to Germany! Another friend in Canada got one too. But most of the recipients have been domestic addresses. I also had my first repeat winner the other week too! I like that people are still entering even after they've won! It's nice to see people Posting It Forward in a way to send their postcard to a friend or a sister. 

I think the must fun aspect of this project is making the photo each week. It has been SO FUN figuring out new ways to display and collage an image together for each week. I get kinda giddy looking at the #weeklypostcardlove hashtag and seeing all the images together. So far, I think the bicycle color wheel up above and the butterfly chalkboards have been my favorite. 

I've gotten better about taking the photos but also editing them as well. All I use is a few giant sheets of watercolor paper and a sunny hallway! At first I used my phone to take the photos but I've shifted more into using my camera every time so I can edit them up with Gimp before posting. And I always do a high quality scan of the postcard before I mail it off to its new owner! 

I decided that at the end of the year since I will no longer have any of the postcards, I'm going to have a book made through Artifact Uprising. It will be fun to flip through all the pages and see how each week progressed from one postcard to the next. 

There's still plenty of weeks left for you to enter to have one mailed to you too! Just follow along on Instagram and keep an eye out every Saturday morning! 

Did you really have your eye on one of the postcards? You can find prints and notebooks with illustrations from the postcards in the Sketchy Notions shop! I'll be adding more throughout the year too...

16 weeks down, 36 to go! 

Do you have any ideas of images you'd like to see on a postcard this year? 

Farm Yard Family

I'm still slowly catching up on sharing all my most recent commissions. I feel like as soon as I finish one, three more come busting in! Which is great! I just end up falling behind on sharing them that much faster...

This sweet little book was another Christmas commission from last year. I made this one for Amanda, the founder of Old Yeller Ranch Rescue. The story follows her sweet little son and his adventures on his Grandmother's ranch with all her animals. You can see more photos of this sweet book on my website.

Little Texan, Big City

It's been almost a month since Christmas so it should be safe to share all my commissions that I had during the holiday season. This sweet little book that I made for little Amaya was one of the most challenging ones I've made. The story is also one of my favorites now too! The book follows Amaya and her pet javalina, Java, on their first adventure out of Texas to New York City. 

I don't say this lightly, I LOVE this book! I added a couple fold-outs to the book as well. One of them hides the carousel in Central Park and the other shows just how tall the Empire State Building looks when you're a tiny girl and javalina. Such a challenge but so worth it!

Before you scroll down to the photos, I have a really quick in shop news! 
Next week is my birthday! So to celebrate a little, if you use the code BDAYLOVE you can get 15% off in the Notional Notions Etsy shop AND the Sketchy Notions shop until February 1st! It won't work on custom commissions but you can use it on all the new Valentine's Day cards! 

Also, if you buy two prints of any size from the Sketchy shop, you'll get one free! Just leave a note when checking out to let me know which print you'd like free!

Here are a couple pictures from Amaya's sweet book and there are more on my website. 

Quarto the traveling sketchbook

It may have taken just over a month but I finally have Quarto photographed, scanned, uploaded, and in the process of printing! I actually photographed Quarto on one of my first mornings back in California and just got around to editing them tonight...oops. 

I'm currently printing designs so a shop update is in the very near future (finally)! I also have a couple designs already uploaded to the Society6 shop. In the meantime, take a peek at the final sketches! These are some of my favorites and the whole sketchbook is on my website. 

hello again hustle & bustle

Hello again. I've been back for two weeks three weeks almost a month (I've been trying and failing to write this post for that long...whoops). Honestly, it doesn't even feel like this summer ever happened. It's like this chunk in my recent memory is just misplaced...something has been forgotten. I've been carrying Quarto around with me to show family and friends what I did this summer and this sadly seems the only way to remind myself it actually happened. Everything has returned to the normal groove so quickly, it's like I never left. Oofah. 

I started my lessons with Arts Outreach my second week back and everything else has just been a blur of adjusting, car shopping, catching up, cleaning up and working. I may have been silent here on the blog but it has been a flurry of activity in the Art Bubble ever since I landed! Here's a little peek at what I have been creating these past few weeks. Surprisingly it has been a lot of illustrations for wedding invitations! SO fun! I still have a few more projects to share as well. And the new Fall line (and Holiday line!) will be making an appearance soon! 

My friend Dhvani commissioned me to make some watercolors and a map for her wedding invitations. This was the first time I watercolored a map...I may be a little addicted. It was pretty fun. Any other takers for watercolor maps?

This series of three watercolors was for a sweet lady named Karens. She had such a pretty vision for her invitations! The large watercolor of the country garden will be the background behind a laser cut gate sleeve. I can't wait to see the final invitations for both of these sweet ladies! 

Quarto the traveling sketchbook: update IV

How did two months just pass by so quickly?! In just over a week, I'll be making the reverse hellish trip back to California. Which is daunting. I'm excited to see everyone back home but this place is always so hard to leave. The food, the people, the sites...things you just can't get back home. 

One thing that I started doing this summer was taking photos of Quarto with the actual location I just sketched. I LOVE this series of photos! It's one thing to have a sketch to remember the place, but the combination of the sketch and the exact spot at that exact moment I sketched it is something really unique for me. Sometimes I can get the whole scene, other times it's just a little bit of the place. Either way I really love the double documentation of a place. 

1. My friend Susie and I climbed up the Campanile in Florence. Originally she wanted to do the Duomo but the line wrapping halfway around the back of the dome changed our minds. In the end, the bell tower had better views of the Duomo and some shady spots to sketch and read! 
2. The most perfect little mint Vespa! I sketched it first and then watercolored a postcard of it. Once I get home, these little postcards are going straight to the Notional Notions Etsy shop! I haven't been this excited for a shop update in a long time! 
3. The Anfiteatro here in Lucca. I've been working on this sketch for most of the summer. Which meant getting a gelato every time to claim my same vantage point...what a shame.
4. Piazza San Frediano was never really on my list of places to sketch but I'm so glad that I got pushed to (via some suggestions on Instagram). Such a pretty space.

5. One day I want to own a vintage Fiat 500. It's the cutest car (sorry VW Bug...)
6. I took a day trip to Siena last week, just in time to see it set up for the Palio race this weekend. I love this space, and it was fun to see it set up for the traditional horse race. Seeing the actual track set up makes imagining the horse race seem all the more dangerous. 
7. A visit to Siena isn't complete without visiting my favorite restaurant, Osteria Nonna Gina. Stuffed gnocchi in a secret sauce, fried zucchini blossoms, fresh focaccia, Chianti and a bit of Amaretto for a digestivo...love! 
8. I first sketched the Siena Duomo as a student but I never finished that sketch. It was nice to finally sit down and document the whole crazy beast. The next hard bit was finding my favorite part of the inlaid sidewalks around it to photograph Quarto with. 

Hopefully I'll be able to do another Quarto update before I leave. If not, the next time you see Quarto (if not on Instagram) will be once she's all scanned up and printed for the next Sketchy Notions shop update! 

Did you miss the other updates? Update I  | Update II | Update III