Dragonfly

Here are two wallpapers I made of a dragonfly I found on the sidewalk:
Widescreen 1680x1080
Fullscreen 1280x960

I'm working on cleaning up the scan for a left-side of the dragonfly. That way if someone has two monitors side-by-side they get both halves of the dragonfly.

I'd like to do something artistic with this sometime - either in Photoshop or as a painting. The wings are so beautiful - they remind me of the Musée D'Orsay in Paris with its enormous glass and iron canopy - the beauty of humanity's industrial works reflected from nature.

WPA-Style Denali Poster

Each summer the MSCVB puts out a series of 4 black and white ads, each covering a different aspect of the Mat-Su Borough (glacier hikes, fishing, canoeing/boating, RVing, etc). This year we changed it up a bit by making the ads look like WPA posters from the 1930's, featuring illustrations by me. :D

We've since carried the WPA flavor over to the 2008 Mat-Su Visitor Guide. The guide breaks the Mat-Su Borough into 5 regions and each region gets its own WPA-style postage stamp. The above image is actually for the "Off the Beaten Path" region, which is everything in the borough that is not road-accessible, but I thought the sky was a good place for text and so dressed it up as a Denali poster just for fun.

The background is closely based on an actual WPA poster for Montana or something - the mountains came pre-resembling Denali so I borrowed their design, though drew it from scratch and did my own color theme. The Cessna 180 is from a photo I took - the colors are totally changed (the original plane was white with brown).

I'll have to upload those ads and the other stamps sometime.

Anteater Wallet

I simply adore Engrish.com! My sister and I were wondering to ourselves if it would be possible to create our own Engrish, seeing as how we have a firm grasp of the English language and really, it takes a feeble and carefree grasp of English in order to produce quality Engrish. So we did this MadLibs style: Kaisa randomly picked an animal while I picked a promotional paragraph on some product I had in my room. She picked an anteater and I had picked hand warmers. Next, I had Kais (who didn't know what my product was) give me a noun here or adjective there and took out most of the words in the sentences. And I made a wallpaper out of it.

So no, this is not authentic Engrish! but it is authentic Kara art. The anteater is mine, all mine! The kanji says "wallet" and "giant anteater", à la Wikipedia. Background texture in the wallpaper is mine as well.

Bumble Bee

Sometimes art kind of makes itself.
I found this bumble bee on the floor at work and had the thought of scanning her at the highest resolution possible with our Epson V700. The image is enormous and the detail fabulous. The sheet of paper I put over her kind of makes this nice fuzzy blue backdrop - kind of feels peaceful. I think with the way the bee's head is tucked makes her look sad or shy and tired. Or possibly just dead, but hey. ;) It might be kind of fun to do a quick painting of this sometime.

Knik Car: Battery/Fuel

This is a photograph of what I am currently painting. With work getting busy it's been awhile since I've worked on it but I thought I'd share the progress anyway - that's the point of this blog, right? :) Anyway, it's the driver side dash board of one of the cars the military put into the Knik River bank to help stop/slow bank erosion over by the hatchery. There's quite a lot of interesting stuff over there besides cars: stoves, refrigerators, barrels, old tin cans with still-readable labels... Some of the cars were in the bank and some weren't doing much as far as erosion prevention and were just sitting along the river, making for scenic abandoned photography. I plan to paint some of those, as they're probably more appealing to folks, but I liked the dash on this car and thought I could play up the contrast in the blue distant background/chrome and the orange rust.



Left: The canvas with the final sketch on it before I start blocking everything in.

Right: is the first phase of blocking. Currently it has more shadows and some of the birch trees semi-blocked into the blue distant background but this is pretty close. Color-wise, the painting won't really resemble the photograph, which is pretty common for me as I tend to paint pretty saturatedly, which I like. For instance, the Generator/Compressor original photograph was really washed out, the rust was more purple-looking, and the overal image was cold. I'm no photographer - when I take photos I'm more concerned about composition, subject, and angle of light, in that order. Everything else I can make up.

This piece will be a challenge. I had to teach myself how to do rust on the Generator/Compressor and hopefully I've retained something from that but I've not done moss before - and I don't want to do it in the 'easy' Bob Ross style. I will be playing down the moss and concentrating on bringing out the chrome in good contrast - it's all about the dashboard, "Battery/Fuel" (yay for slash names!) :)