All posts with the ‘watercolor’ Tag

Several of my friends have entered and won Fluevog’s ‘design our ad!’ contests, so I thought I’d go on and give it a try myself! Even though my piece didn’t make it as one of the finalists (you can see them here), but I am pleased with how this came out. I tried some new stuff and I’m pretty happy with the results!

The Swordfish Edwardian was their style this time around (which I actually do find pretty attractive, I would’t mind having a pair of those), which was billed as being “unisex”. Right off the bat I knew I wanted to do an ad that would play with androgyny/gender-fuckery.

After doing a couple sketches in my sketchbook with pencil and ink, I scanned them in and then built up the full design in Photoshop.

Then I printed out my digital lines, lightbox traced them onto a scrap of watercolor paper I had laying around and got out my paints.

Voila! Watercolored with some white gouache outlines.

On a separate piece of paper I went and painted this background.

While at a nice dessert place, they brought out our dishes on these adorable paper doilies. My husband laughs at me for being such a squirrel but you never know when you’ll be able to use miscellaneous scraps of pretty paper later! This project wound up being the perfect opportunity to scan it in and use. WHO’S LAUGHING NOW, MATTHEW?

Then I dicked around in Photoshop for a few hours until this emerged! Well, I mean, this is the full-bleed version without their slogan on it. You can see the cropped, slogan’d version at the top of this post. Click to see larger!

You can toooootally buy the original painting and a Giclée print of the final version on my Etsy! Or just straight up buy a Giclée print by itself!

My newest painting/collage, the mighty Moon Snail.

Working on the Snail Lady painting gave me the itch to do some more snail-centril paintings.

Several years ago I bought a sheet of this awesome shiny, silver sticker paper stuff, but never had a good project to use it on. UNTIL NOW. The nice thing about sticker-y paper is that I don’t have to use glue! I just cut out the shape I want and then peeeeeel off the backing. So nice.



Sometimes when I start a painting I have an idea for what I’d like to do in the background behind the figure– this was no such case. I knew I wanted to do the snail and I knew I wanted to use the black patterned paper, but all the background elements came together as a series of experiments of snipping out different shapes and shifting them around on the panel until I found something that worked. Very much like putting a puzzle together, except that you’re cutting out your pieces as you go and some are going to get chucked in the end.

My favorite thing about this piece is how incredibly shiny it is, way more than anything I’ve ever done before! Unfortunately, that makes it difficult to photograph– but I think you can get a pretty good idea from these pictures. What are those birds that love shiny things? Magpies? Man, I don’t know, but this is me collecting bits of reflective material and lining my nest with it.

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By the way, you’re coming to see me in Seattle at the Jet City Comic Con this Saturday, September 22nd, right?

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Another day, another artichoke! You know how I roll.

Originally I drew a more opened-up and blossoming design, but it just didn’t grab me– so I went with this closed up bud instead.

The gold design on that background paper is raised up like brail against the paper. What is that called? Is that embossing? Or is that when the paper has indents into it?

Don’t forget to come visit me on Saturday, September 8th, from 10-3pm at The Rose City Comic-Con!

Three paintings I finished back in June. Beets, carrots, and radishes.







Aaaaaand some gratuitous close up shots:

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Rich Stevens, one of my most favorite people on the earth, and Emily Nagoski, a lady whose sex education blog I very much enjoy but had not had the luck to meet yet, just got married on August 2nd!

The planets aligned magically and I was able to go spend four days with them in Massachusetts this past week. Of course I had to whip up a little gift to celebrate the good times.

(I accidentally reversed the sides they were supposed to be on, but it was so hard to get their portraits in the frame in the first place that I just left well enough alone. “It looks like we’ve got each others’ backs!” is how Rich justified it.)

It was SO GREAT to finally meet Emily after having enjoyed her wonderful blog, The Dirty Normal, for so long. She’s super smart and easy to talk with, especially about sex education stuff (which is very relevant to my life right now, as I’m toiling away on my enormous safer sex educational graphic novel for teens.)

And, of course, spending any time with Rich is always super inspiring and fun. He’s my brother from another mother, always making me so excited to try new ideas and think outside the box when it comes to this whole “comics” on the “internet” thing. It was on this trip that I realized we actually met exactly ten years ago! Holy moly. I feel so, so lucky to count him as one of my friends. Everybody should have a Rich in their life.

This trip was so invigorating; I got to catch up with old friends, meet new ones, get inspired, and best of all, see two amazing people in love joining together to make an unstoppable team of awesomeness.

Genuine congratulations to Rich and Emily, you guys are great together.

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Erika Moen’s Posters, books, prints and original artwork

Hey, hey, another new painting! The inspiration for this one came while I was doodling some dandelion weeds in my backyard.

The original doodle in my sketchbook, the under-drawing, and the lightly penciled drawing on 300lb hot press watercolor paper.

Watercolors and gold accents completed!

All the pieces together, waiting to be assembled.

Some more trimming along the bottom edge of the painting, to make it circular. Had to be careful not to accidentally slice off one of the little dandelion heads!

Dwam snapped this of me just as I finished gluing everything together (I’m rubbing the glue off my hands in the left picture). Yay! Done! …Well, I still had to go press it overnight while the glue dried. But still! As done as it could be!

Hopefully I can bust out a new series of paintings like this over the next couple months and find a place to exhibit them!

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Erika Moen’s Posters, books, prints and original artwork

A year ago, I had the opportunity to stay with the fabulously talented and hardworking artists Lucy Knisley and Nora Renick-Rinehart while they were still living together in The Burrow, their amazing Chicago apartment. (Here is my post about it!)

These two ladies are SO inspirational and creative, it’s impossible to be around them and not compulsively feel the need to just start MAKING ART ALL THE TIME EVERYWHERE.

Once I got back from my trip, I doodled up the rough sketches for these paintings, but it still took me about a year to actually put paint to paper and turn these into reality. But hey! Here they are at last!

There’s not really terribly deep symbologia behind these pieces: Lucy is holding a paintbrush to represent being an illustrator/cartoonist/painter and her ukelele to represent her musical side. Nora is holding a sewing needle as a representation of being a fiber artist and the squeegee to represent her screenprinting.

Also, Lucy and Nora LOVE their cats, so of course I had to include them.

I really lucked out when I found this GORGEOUS maroon paper with embossed(?) gold work on it. Oh my god, these photos don’t do it justice.

Saint Lucy: Saint of Illustrative Art and Music. And Cats.

Saint Nora: Saint of Fiber Arts and Print-Making. And Cats.

Aaaaand this is the part of the post where I post gratuitous detail shots. I’d put them behind a cut, but hey, it’s my blog and I will abuse it as I see fit.








And, of course, I will end this with a cat shot.

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Oh hey! And if you liked that Queer comic I posted the other day, I would be remiss if I did not mention that I am now offering two feet long prints of it for a limited time!

Erika Moen’s Posters, books, prints and original artwork

Oh man, I LOVE it when people send me photos of the places where they put my art! Julia Gay just bought my two original paintings, Palm East and Palm West, and then sent me this picture of their new home. How swanky is that??

And here’s a clearer shot of just the two paintings:

Palm West and Palm East
Both painted/collaged/assembled in November 2010 for my December solo art show at Orbital Comics in London, England.

Julia bought these paintings from my Esty shop, where I sell my original artwork.

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Erika Moen’s Posters, books, prints and original artwork

More than a year ago, back in October 2010, I completed a series of multimedia paintings that, to this day, I am still very proud of. Originally this post appeared on my Livejournal account, but I figured I may as well share it over here as well!

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Okay, so I really love the magazine Coilhouse and have been really inspired/impressed by the creative ladies who founded it, Nadya Lev, Zoetica Ebb and Meredith Yayanos.

So, naturally, I decided to personify the magazine’s slogan (Inform. Inspire. Infect.) with illustrations of the three founders.

Inform. The far left of the trio is Nadya being Inform, with her quill and carrier pigeon sending out information. I was kinda stuck on what sort of pattern to use on her outfit until Matt suggested I use the vane of the feather as a design element. Brilliant!

Inspire. Middle portrait is Zoetica, being Inspire, as shown with a sprouting seedling, since ideas start small and grow from there. They wound up looking more like cracks, but I was trying to emulate roots on Inspire’s dress, to go along with the sprouting seedling.

Infect. Meredith is Infect, with her legion of mosquitoes spreading the infection of ideas. It’s really, really hard to come up with a symbol for infect that isn’t totally gross. Sorry, Meredith, this is not a reflection on your character! But yeah, I decided to go with mosquitos since they were less of an abstract concept than molecules of a disease or something. Note how I also worked them into the design on her dress! Oh, and the wings of the mosquitos are leaf skeletons that I bought from a scrapbooking store.

I was afraid of bogging this entry down with the CASCADE of process and detail shots I took of these guys, so here they are as icons that you can click on to see bigger.

To cap it all off, here’s a time-lapse video I did during most of the production. I am not actually left-handed, it is just hilariously mirrored because that is what PhotoBooth does and I do not know how to fix that on their movies.

Inform. Inspire. Infect from Erika Moen on Vimeo.

I was so happy that all three of these portraits stayed together when they were bought by the same person –how sad would it have been if they’d been split up? Perish the thought!