A while back I spent some time with my friend’s daughter and shot some photos of her. Lucky me!

Originally Posted on May 3, 2010

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending my friends Patrick and Shannon’s beautiful wedding in Calistoga. The ceremony was lovely, the weather was perfect and the reception was good fun. I took my bff Andi as my date and we made some lovely new friends.

As a wedding gift, I painted one of their engagement photos. I found one photo in particular to be such a sweet and tender moment between them that I just had to paint it. I was initially just going for a simple high contrast image with a solid brown background, but once I finished it I wasn’t happy with how stagnant it seemed. I had a tight solid painting all planned out, but the background seemed to call for movement so I did something totally out of character and just went crazy with some red paints. I was really happy with the end result :0)

Originally Posted August 5, 2011

I finally set up an Etsy store for myself. I only have 4 items in the shop at the moment but there will be more to come soon. What do you think of my store banner? I put up the first one but wasn’t happy with it so I reworked it, much better don’t you think?

Originally Posted on February 28, 2010

Oh liquid latex, you are soooo fun! Stinky, but fun! For my 30th birthday, my friends and I went to the 1st Annual Zombie Crawl here in Alameda, California. We gathered at my place before hand to get zombiefied and had so much fun just playing with the make up that we all wondered why we don’t do that kind of thing more often. I had a particularly good time making the flesh wounds. I had seen a few “How To” videos on line so I had a good idea of what to do, but it was exciting to see how well they came out. Liquid latex and toilet paper, ftw! I did a wound on my chest that looked like someone had been clawing at me and I had an open gash on my left hand too. I did one on my bff Andi’s cheek and one on Erin’s forehead too. Andi made the fake blood, can’t go wrong with food coloring and corn syrup. Angel put herself in a body bag and was a little bit too convincing as a corpse. Some CSI peeps even came to investigate! Here are some pics for your enjoyment :0)

Originally Posted on February 28, 2010

I’ve always been really drawn to high contrast images. In my first photography class, I took some photographs of my friends gathered around a campfire in Big Basin and some of those images are still favorites of mine to this day. A couple of years ago some friends helped me recreate the firelight scene in their backyard. I’ll have to scan the negatives to get most of the images up, but I actually used a couple of the images for one of my drawing classes. I wanted to see how well I could replicate the images by hand. Here are the results.

The first one is Dar, this image was from the original Big Basin campfire shoot. After some advice from my drawing teacher at the time, I attempted to get the high contrast effect using only graphite. Unfortunately, no matter how hard I pressed, I couldn’t get the graphite in past the teeth of the paper. Also the graphite is super shiny, which can be cool too, but it’s very hard to photograph. In certain light it looks metallic, but I’d really prefer the darks to be dark with these high contrast images so on my next attempt I used charcoal.

The second one is Nick, he was one of the lovely people kind enough to help me recreate the light situation and pose for me as I stuck my camera in their faces. I really like this image since he looks so relaxed and has his eyes closed. Charcoal was definitely the way to go, don’t you think?

Originally posted August, 1 2011
These images are from a series of photo shoots in 2004. This was a fun project and I’m pretty happy with the results.

Originally Posted on February 28, 2010

These were all done in December. Two of them are of my character, Yoshiko, and the other is a penguin, with a lollipop or a “sucker.” I was actually reading the Twilight books at the time and felt like a total sucker for getting so into them! What can I say, I like vampire stories :0)

I like photographing flowers, mostly I shoot them close up. Sometimes they come out looking almost like abstract paintings.

Originally Posted on January 18, 2010

Linoleum cutting is fun! I started this one of a 3″ block then tried a 5″ and ended up doing it on a 7″ but I’m pretty happy with the result.

This drawing is inspired by the work of Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh and her husband Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Originally Posted on January 18, 2010

Sometimes when I’m laying in bed I’ll look for shapes in the texture of the ceiling. One day I saw a girl’s face so I jumped up and started to sketch her. That’s when Yoshiko was born. I called her “The Girl in the Ceiling” for a long time until I finally settled on the name Yoshiko. I think it suits her. I did this painting in December, followed by the smaller painting of her and a couple of linoleum cuts. She’s been hanging out in my head, getting up to all kinds of things that I have yet to put on canvas (or linoleum) and her personality is becoming more interesting by the day. You’ll be seeing more of Yoshiko soon. She’s quite ambitious :0)