ABOUT ME

I have been drawing as long as I can remember. When I was little, little...like 4...I would trace animals from early 1970's, junior encyclopedias. Fun! I don't trace any more unless I have drawn it first or for an odd exception like limited time.

I was voted Class Artist in high school. These are some of the pieces I made in high school.

Pointillism or Stippling (all dots):

Ink, but not dots:

   

Colored Pencil:

     

I went on to college to study business...but my heart was in art. I took two Graphic Design classes (and 2 Life Drawing & Modeling classes...great for improving my drawing skills!) as electives. Loved them all!!

All of the items in the picture below are meant to look like a Bodoni Ultra Lowercase A. Bodoni Ultra is a font/lettering/typeface. It's lowercase as opposed to uppercase and it's the letter a. Since we were like advertising graphic designers, it was our "product" that year. 

I designed and drew this, all dots, India Ink, shortly after college. I felt lost after college like people can...I didn't know what I wanted to do...and this made me feel better:

An idea of size from the bird picture above:

Another detail picture:

I had drawn a few large, stippled (all dots) designs in my 20s and had them printed onto shirts. They were white shirts with black ink only. Mark and I went to the Boston Gift Show and I wore a shirt that had a "hidden" large cat face made out of many cats (pictured below).  It caught the eye of an apparel printer from San Diego. 

He wanted me to design for him. His other licensed artists created designs with hidden items in them and I was doing that too...thanks to influence of artists like Bev Doolittle. Problem was...I didn't REALLY know how to paint.

I decided to figure out how to add color in dots to my black ink. Then, I learned about the right kinds of colors for the print business. I made 13 designs for that company. They printed ONE...only one.

These are detail pictures of that one design they printed.

I quit trying to make designs for that company and started drawing birds...cockatiels, African Greys, etc. We had gotten a Cockatoo and I loved to draw and paint birds! I learned how to make my own website and mail order catalog. I sold at craft shows and bird shows and collected names and addresses of interested people. I was selling greeting cards again, prints and address labels....soon I would be printing my own shirts to sell...again.

This is a "How I do it" small poster that I made back then to take to craft shows to show people how I made my art:

A friend, Beth, recently sent this photo of a catalog of mine. She had saved it for many, many years! That made me smile!

One of my favorite designs. I draw all of the birds separately. They are combined on the computer:

Cards and Notepads from various holidays:

I drew Horace and created Beaker Seals to raise money to donate to a bird sanctuary:

I started around 1995 and built that business until 2007 when we had a beautiful, baby boy! I kept trying to go back to work, but he was so small. I became a full-time mom.

Thanks to PTA and school crafts, I painted more...and got better at it, I painted on rocks too as that became a great thing to do! 

So now I am working on some painted Holiday designs, but am also bringing back all of my animal designs. It should be fun!