we've come a long way, baby

This is a meme that's been making the rounds on deviantART and I had to give it a try because I love seeing how my art has improved!

The concept is simple: pick four artworks from each of the past seven years to represent where your art was during that year, and write a little description about where you were in your life.

Here's my list:


If you can't read that, for which I don't blame you at all, just click on the image! It'll take you to the page on DA, then all you have to do is click on the small image there to see it full size!

best books ever: the book of flying

This, along with several other works-in-progress I'll hopefully be posting soon, was directly inspired by my rereading of one of my very, very favorite books of all time. And guess what! I'm going to tell you all about it, in this first installment of THE BEST BOOKS EVER!!!

Volume 1: The Book of Flying, by Keith Miller.

This book is possibly the closest thing to a perfect story I have ever read. This book helps you understand what real magic is. This book makes me have to draw, because this book is brimming with paintings turned into words.

The story is about a lonely librarian named Pico who lives in a city by the sea where nobody knows how to read. He falls in love with a winged girl who can never be with someone who can't fly, so his sets off on a quest to find the mythical "morning town" of Paunpuam and gain his own pair of wings. Pico's journey is episodic; he travels through deep forest, over mountains, and across a desert. As he meets each new character, they tell him their own story, and then move out of the tale as he journeys onward and eastward. One review called it "a book about books, a story about stories," which I think is charming and accurate.

The writing is like poetry, full of images and metaphors. It's flowery, but not in a pretentious way, just for the sheer love of words. For someone who loves books and adventures and magic as much as Pico does - namely, myself - it's everything I wish I could express in my art.

My very favorite part of the story, the part that has inspired all these doodles I'm working on, is the city in the mountains where Pico rests for a few months and nearly gives up his quest altogether. I don't blame him. In this nameless city that's kind of a rainy cobblestoned Bohemian Paris-London mashup (in my mind, at least):
1. It rains all the time, and
2. Everybody reads all the time.
So of course... I would be very happy living there.

"A city of squalls, foggy mornings, intervals of blue and white so immaculate the eyes ached. A city of readers, coffee drinkers, kissers on sidewalks, sad faces at wet windows. A city of umbrellas, woolen scarves, raincoats, cigarettes, wineglasses, cognac."

swoon.

READ THIS BOOK!!!!!

*My most recent Etsy treasury matches this theme and artwork very well, although the correlation wasn't intentional.

haiti earthquake relief

Hey everyone,

I'm going to keep this short, because I don't want it to get sappy, but I just wanted to let you know I decided to donate all the profits I make from both my Etsy shops for the rest of the month of January to UNICEF to help their relief effort in Haiti.

Basically, I don't have any money to donate myself at the moment, so the way I'm thinking of it is if I can get some other people to help out, I can at least send those people some pretty jewelry or prints as a thank you.

If you want to help out on your own, here's a good list of organizations that you can donate to.

Thank you, and I hope you find your own way to give!!!

My shops:
Prints
Jewelry

new semester, new shop, new shoes

Back to school! Today was my second day of classes. Most of my classes are the same, but I did have one new one today - History of Typography! Yeah, it fills an art history requirement, but I would have wanted to take this class anyway. I looove type and fonts and all that - it's sort of an interesting connection between my artistic side and my passion for linguistics. (Not being sarcastic. Fun fact: I almost went to school for linguistics instead of art!)

Along with getting back to studying, I'm spending a lot of time creating jewelry for my new Etsy shop! I just started listing stuff on Sunday and already sold something, which sure beats the weeks I waited in agony for my first Etsy sale the first time around! Boy, have I learned a lot since then... mostly how to make things that people will want to buy, and just as importantly, how to take decent pictures of them.

As a grand opening celebration, I'm offering FREE SHIPPING on everything from now through January 20. Dude. Did you get that? FREE SHIPPING. That is pretty awesome.

One more link to my shop: The Spaces in Between

Keep an eye on it, cause the best stuff is still being listed!!!

Oh yeah... mostly I wanted a nicely rounded title, but I did get some pretty sweet new shoes over break. I treated myself with my Christmas money from Grandma to a pair of gray Blowfish hobbit boots.



I didn't own a single pair of boots except for rain ones, and I've learned that in NYC in the winter, bootless is a very silly state to be in. The situation is now remedied.