The New Website

It’s up and finally functional (mostly)!  Visit www.emilylopuch.com to see my new and very improved illustration portfolio, and definitely feel free to leave me comments – thanks!

The Carousel

I am particularly fond of how this piece turned out.  It is a combination of watercolor and acrylic.  Though I haven’t begun another, I consider it the first of a series.  The colors and the subject matter are just too fun to paint once!

An under the sea adventure. Complete with flippers.

As I slowly prepare to launch my own website, I am also scanning and retouching illustrations.  Here’s one of the later ones: another experiment with mixed media (acrylic, watercolor, ink).

Picnic, shmicknick.

Okay, so here’s the next one.  I had fun playing with the perspective of this piece – I wanted to do something a bit different with the typical picnic scene, so I went for a literal bird’s eye view.  This illustration is a combination of watercolor, ink, and acrylic on board.  Oh, and also some pencil.  I couldn’t resist.

The mysterious summer months of 2010

So it’s been forever.  By forever I mean two months, which in internet-speak is pretty accurate.  A lot has happened since my last post.  My job ended, which was sad and selfishly nice at the same time.  My husband got a fabulous new job four hours from our present residence.  We got a new apartment, and I am currently going through my artistic and life-related stuff accumulation from the past three years in NJ.  There is a lot of stuff.  But I guess there will always be a lot of stuff.  Though I haven’t been blogging, because blogging is a concept that hasn’t quite sunk in, I have been painting, writing, and doing things “under the radar”.  Today I actually used my scanner to piece together a newish painting so that I can put it online.  There will be three more following shortly, hopefully all done by tomorrow night.  This marathon scanning/piecing back together has needed to happen for, well, two months.  So, forever : )

Here is a new-ish painting I did for my new-er portfolio.  I have named it “The Tea Party” because it is a painting of…a tea party.  I have been doing my best to focus on painting children.  I am much more enthusiastic about animals in general, so it was definitely a challenge to begin sketching lots of human arms and legs and faces.  This painting combines watercolor, ink, acrylic, and collage on illustration board.  Anyway, more to come soon!

Super Awesome Postcard Sale…

So Overnight Prints is having an amazing Memorial Day postcard sale, which I just couldn’t pass up!  I decided to try something new, and used my most recent painting, the one Jeremy describes as “weird”.  I suppose he’s right.  It was lots of fun painting the girl: I wanted her and the birds to look very similar, and tried to utilize more white space.  I think I was mostly successful.

Magazine Schmagazine

So my boss was throwing out a pile of very old Japanese magazines, and I just had to keep this one; an old ad for G&G Whiskey, featuring Orson Welles.  I just had to give him a speech bubble, because Orson “is really a man.”

Pigeons love reading, too.

So a while back I entered a contest for The Strand.  It was an open entry contest for tote bag designs.  Clearly, I was not chosen (there are no tote bags circulating NYC with cute ink washed pigeons on them), but I have to say I’m very pleased with how the design turned out.  I think I will remove the Strand text in the center, and replace it with NYC.

Seed Art Submission

Last week I submitted to a very cool company called Hudson Valley Seed Library.  They were accepting illustration submissions for their “seed packs”.  The seed packs are lovely, artistic seed packages, containing all sorts of different vegetables and flowers.  I chose to submit an art pack for Crook Neck Squash, which remind me of long, yellow necked birds.  They were so much fun to draw!  You can check out the Hudson Valley Seed Library here:  http://www.seedlibrary.org/index.php

Submitting to the Seed Library created a dilemma: I’ve been putting off photographing my latest illustrations because I don’t have the appropriate equipment to photograph them, and they are painted on board, which makes it nearly impossible to scan them in pieces and reassemble them in photoshop (as I usually do).  Unfortuantly, I was pressed for time, and sent a photo of my Tea Party illustration, which really does not do it justice.  This is one of three illustrations in this new style (watercolor, ink, and acrylic on board).  Because I am currently dissatisfied with how the images reproduced digitally, I will be researching copy places with the capability of scanning large works.  Oh joy! 

Puppy Love

It has been forever since I’ve posted.  I’ve been working full time and attempting to juggle my many projects – a few of which I’ll be posting here soon!  This is the logo I put together for a friend of mine who is living in Laconia, NH.  She has boldly begun planning  her own dog walking service (and walking is just the beginning!).  It’s actually more of a dog running/walking/play time/tooth brushing/grooming kind of business.  And she travels to you, which is great because that’s less stress on your dog.

Tonight I’ll hopefully have time to finish putting this image on business cards and can format this for printing on a flier, so Jen (my friend) can post this around town.  And after that?  Maybe a blog header!

Good luck, Jen!