its been a month!

Wow, I havent been able to get here for a month to blog. Ive been super busy and have bairly responded to emails etc. I finished the costume work for Beauty and the Beast and the show is in its second week. Everything is holding up, no major problems yet. I have 3 illustration jobs going at once... all holiday themed! I have been making beads like CRAZY to keep up with the holiday crunch and done NO shopping for my own list! I am on my way to Chicago this morning for a meeting...I hope I can get out and go shopping there. Im going to try to do some work for my portfolio at night... I packed my watercolors.
My next big project is getting my booth printed for my next trade show. I decided to print an image the size of the 8x10 wall. I will be tiling it with 12x18 pieces of paper. Here is a photo of the model I made. I hope to take this to two shows, CHA in February and Licensing in June. The banners on the right are 13" wide with my signature on the bottom and some images on the top. the back wall is my marketing post card image. Gotta go!

Back to the Drawing board!

Worked on Mrs Pots and the Sugar bowl today. What a mess. The last theater that had these costumes never really finished them. THe sleeves are attached with safty pins for gods sake! Also started imputting the images I did for my client into illustrator today. This is the fast part. I ran into a serious wall last week... 24 different xmas themes... enough to put anyone over the edge, but I got it done and now I have lots of ammo for my portfolio. I will take the images I sketched and actually draw them in Illustrator for the client and then paint them by hand in both watercolor and acrylics for my portfolio. One job sort of acts as inspiration for the next for me. Ill get some more sketches added in tomorrow.

Beads Beads and more beads

Welllll, I've almost recovered from that woman buying all of my beads, and have plenty for a good trunk show on Thursday. I've hit a wall on some of my Illustration work and taking it out on the torch is probably a good thing. I will be MORE than ready to get back to illustration on Friday! I've been at the torch for up to 4 hours a day and turning out some really cool stuff. Maybe Ill have some for eBay next week!

Costumes!

Well, what a day! Last evening was my open studio night. I hold my studio open on the first and third Thursday of every month and last night was fun. My sister is here to work on some costumes for the Nutcracker (she is the costumer for the Paso Robles Ballet) we painted circus animals and entertained my guests. As well as being an illustrator and designer I also make lampwork beads and design jewelry with them. Last night I put out a bunch of loose beads (about 150) that I had not made into jewelry yet. A woman came in and bought all but about 20 of them!!! I about died! I have a trunk show next week at a local bead store and now I have NO inventory! I have deadlines for Illustration work, costumes to work on and NOW I have to try to generate 200+ beads in 7 days. OK let me pull out the calculator here... I can make 10 - 12 beads in an hour so thats about 20 hours of bead making, thats 3 hours a day! Normally I only make beads for 1 to 2 hours a day....SOOOOOO I guess I will be working overtime this week!!!!

more winter

Here are some more sketches, this time its a snowman and trees. I think Ill do about 6 or 8 trees and then work them into a repeat pattern for wrapping paper and gift bags. As I work through these images, more come to mind. I will generate over 100 images to paint and then I will hit the proverbial wall and not be able to come up with any more. So, I have to draw while my ideas are comming fast and furious, and worry about color later. You will see lots of black and white here for a few weeks, then these images will come back in color!

I started working on Beauty and the Beast costumes last night. We have a ton of work to do and very few people to do it. Im so busy with my art work that Im not sure how much I will be able to do for the theater. Im really going to have to be organized and delegate as much as possible. Im still working on sketches for one client and hsould be finished with those today. I will start doing the illustrations in the computer next week.

Halloween!

We had a blast on Halloween. My Daughter would not settle for a store bought costume, mommy had to make it! THank god it wasnt some big fantasy creature! Ok I cant figure out how to turn the photos the right way so you'll have to turn your head! But we had the cutest costume on the block! I will be working on the enchanted character costumes for our upcomming beauty and the beast production, so you will probably see more costumes.
A link my webite: www.fcocdesign.com

Plowing through another day! got some more sketches done last night for winter. a few little mittens to color, some gifts and a few snowmen. I will have to complete my sketches for my client by tuesday and be ready to take images to final in illustrator,all due in two weeks. Its a killer but always leads to new images for the portfolio at the same time.
Im excited to say that I will be switching from SURTEX to The Licensing Show this year. after 4 years at Sutex, Im ready to try a different venue. The cool part is that my Husband and Daughter will be comming with me to New York and to the CHA show in Las Vegas as well! Back to the Drawing boards, Until tomorrow...

10/28/05

What a change! It went from a wonderful 75 degrees yesterday to cold and rainy today! It was actually necessary to get some heat going in the studio! Im starting a new collection of spot images and characters today. I have some sketches and linework done on a few of my new halloween images and want to introduce you to Bitty Witch her brother Bump and her cat Salem. They still need some work but theres a start! In the next few weeks I will be working through all the seasons developing as many images as I can. I take all of these spot images and combine them with backgrounds in photo shop to create endless combos for all kinds of licensing applications.

julann and me 

The First post

Hi, This is where you will get to see what Im working on in real time. I will be posting scans of sketches and current work in porgress along with my thoughts for the day. I think this will be a good thing for me to get things out of my head and into the world. Back again tomorrow!
K