Katura's Sketch-blog

I'm participating in the Open Studios Art Tour here in Eugene, an event where 30 artists open up their studios to the public on Oct 18, 19, 25, & 26. As a "teaser," all 30 artists have a piece in a group show--the official opening is tomorrow night (Friday) but we had a little VIP tonight as well. Was too busy chatting it up to take too many photos, but here is the incomparable Kartz Ucci applying one of my temporary tattoos with wine... So decadent!


For those of you who were voting on which insect should be turned into the tattoo, the pepsis wasp won by a landslide. I now have 2,000 of them to give away!

I have always thought that some day, some time in the distant future when I achieve a much higher pinnacle of artistic and illustrative perfection, I would eventually make it into the hallowed realm of Scientific American magazine. I love that magazine. I'm in awe of it. I used to read it out loud on radio stations for the blind. It's one of my Big Dreams, to be on its pages.

Well, as it turns out--I made it onto their website three years ago and never even knew it. The things you discover on Google!

Link to the full article here. And yes, that goofy little diagram is by me! Debra Mickelson, intrepid interpreter of fossil trackways--that's a woman who knows how to get her press releases seen, as it turns out.

I realized recently that I hadn't updated my website in a year. Aaa! But we've been busy, riding our bikes all along the west coast and then moving all our possessions back up the coast again in a truck.

Now that things have settled down some, the website has gotten some behind-the-scenes love today. New version is not up yet because I need to add in just one more page...But speaking of adding stuff, I want to wave some silly things at you all. As per request.

Yup! For better or for worse, http://www.cafepress.com/katura_art

Last month I went to see the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I'm finally getting around to posting the sketches I made. Leaving them large (behind the cut) in case anyone is interested in reading my scribbly notes about history, art technique, politics of representation, and curatorial decisions on the labels...

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The project I'm wrapping up tonight isn't really my artwork. But it's, in some ways, a childhood dream of mine come to life. I have always been attracted to the historic books and manuscripts in museums, and imagined how romantic it would have been to hand-color the old engravings in these ancient books, perhaps by the light of a candle in some chilly old European castle...

Well, let me introduce you to Harmonia macrocosmica by Andreas Cellarius, published in 1661. This historic book is an atlas of the universe, with beautiful engraved diagrams of the different theories about the structure of the cosmos.

The Huntington Library is putting together an exhibit on the history of science, and they have an original version of this book to put on display. However, their copy is just black and white, not hand-painted like some of the versions out there. And, for the big wall graphics, color would look so nice...Which is where I came in. Yes, using tools that would have baffled the original illuminators, I hand-colored the engraving in Photoshop, trying to replicate the nice old watercolor style.

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The bug sketches evolved into a final result along these lines.

The project was a fun one--a textbook company that makes interactive computer tutorials to teach geometry was looking for images that students could warp, twist, and otherwise alter with the power of math! The goal was to make these drawings fairly accurate and colorful but with very little actual shading. It's amazing how hard it is to *not* do shading sometimes.

The overall concept of the project put me in mind of the works of one of my historic illustration heros, Joris Hoefnagel. Only his bugs-on-flowers were accessories to calligraphy lessons, not geometry...

Here are some early sketches for a project I'm working on...A sampler of flowers and insects, as very quick pencil sketches with a wash of photoshop color over the top. The clients used this to pic which critters they wanted for the final art, which should be done tonight. Kind of fun how these early quickies turned out, though!.

An old friend of mine decided recently to name her new company "Man Sewing Dinosaur," after the title of a linocut I did back in the day.

We came up with a new image to go with this concept, something with a little more of a steampunk edge to it, in a style hearkening back to an old engraving...( Read more... )

So this is fun--it's one of these stories that requires a lot of links, but it's worth it.

A few months back, I set up an image gallery at www.science-art.com, an online database of science illustrators. One of the images featured on the art I uploaded there is a watercolor reconstruction of an extinct saber-toothed carnivore named Barbourofelis.


Early last week, I got an email from one Professor Jon Baskin. He has stumbled across my science-art account, and was writing to introduce himself because he is actually the fellow who discovered this fossil in the first place! Chit-chat reveals that he knows some of the paleontologists I worked with back in my undergrad days of drawing fossil rodent teeth.

Anyway, the result of this contact is:
1) Professor Baskin now has a copy of my reconstruction on his home page. (With my blessing--it's *always* good to ask before you use someone's art, kids.)

2) I now have a few images available for sale as on-demand art prints! The Barbourofelis was the first one out the door, of course. Behold my little shop at imagekind.com. They do prints on paper or on canvas and can frame things for you as well. (If anyone has been tying to get a reproduction of a particular piece of mine, let me know and I'll see if I can upload it to the gallery.)

(Speaking of on-demand printing, I thought I'd take an unscientific survey here--has anyone been just itching to see any of my illustrations on baby bibs or coffee mugs? I'm wondering if it would be worth the time to set up a Cafe Press account.)

I posted earlier about trying to do a digital "replica" of a watercolor painting of a hotel lobby, so that the painting could be animated as if it were being drawn right on the computer screen as you watched. We started off with this original sketch, the watercolor painting:


And then I fired up Adobe Illustrator:

(The jumble you see there are all the individual elements of the drawing, which are highlighted to show the math-based grid that is the foundation of each object. It's kind of complex, but this screen-shot makes it look even more so!)

And, happily, the end result is a reasonable facimile of the original painting! Here's the final digital version.


What's going to be really fun is to see it all animated. That step is being headed up by technical genius Jamie Cavanaugh, and should be visible at the Creative Resource Associates website in the near future.

Well I've been rolling madly along on lots of projects and not yet taking the time to blog about them yet--there's a backlog ranging from architecture to dinosaurs to lectures to wildflowers to sketches of the Frida Kahlo art exhibit I just visited in San Francisco. Expect some action here shortly!

In the meantime, here's my fabulous friend Pedro, another illustrator from the UC Santa Cruz science illustration program, talking about his process for illustrating birds. *Warning*--there are drawers full of bird mummies in this video!

I'm currently working on an odd little project. The goal is to take someone else's existing drawings--a very precise line drawing, and that same line drawing with delicate watercolor washes done over the top--and to precisely replicate the work in Adobe Illustrator. This digital replica, which is all set up in carefully labeled layers, will then be passed to a fancy smart programmer that will animate each layer so the picture looks like it's drawing itself on the screen of the computer.

It's fascinating. And tough. I have the line work mostly done, and have started on the watercolor layers. Real watercolor is transparent and subtle, and has a weird organic feel to it created by the sometimes unpredictable movements of tiny particles of ground up rocks in water. Whereas Illustrator drawings are very good at being mathematical and somewhat rigid, at least initially. I just now hit the very first moment of "Hey, that looks almost right!" with the watercolor stuff. So here's a screenshot of my rather complex workspace, to celebrate.

I haven't made it into my local bookstore to check the shelves yet, but the new issue of Bitch Magazine is up on their website, and my contributor's copy is speeding through the postal system even now.

Which means y'all get to see the final version of my "xenogenesis" illustration, with the space alien+human family portrait. It's got a different mood than the early sketches (below), a little more tense and uncomfortable...also a lot more fine detail in the rendering. Tentacle city!

I'll be participating in a local art studio tour this fall, and I'm considering printing up a batch of temporary tattoos as promotional give-aways. I kind of want them to be bug-focused, just because that's playful.

Which of these critters would *you* want as a temporary tattoo?

So this is what I was up to last night: transforming these...


Into these...


I think that ends up being a reasonable approximation of shiny metal. It's not flashy chrome, but I think it'll do the trick.

For the past two weeks I've been working on a project for the art education department of the Huntington Library. It's a companion to the porcelain vase project I was working on this winter. This one focuses on the step-by-step process of making silver cups back in the 1700s.


My first step was to make sure I had all the right shapes for each style of cup (Baroque, Neoclassical, and Rococo). The rough sketches have been tweaked all around in the pursuit of accuracy.


Then I started focusing really closely on all the ornamentation that was characteristic of each style. The original file is all done on different layers in Photoshop, so the programmers will be able to turn each element of the vase on and off in sequence, creating the step-by-step effect.


Today I'm cleaning up all the edges and trying to smooth things out. I'm also taking a step backwards, spending time studying photos of silver cups to make sure the overall shading of the form is pretty accurate underneath all the designs and decoration. It's interesting how wildly the shading can vary, depending on how you photograph it, or how shiny the silver is. I'm glad to see that the hammered texture of the metal does lend itself to a sort of "painterly" effect in many cases, light hitting the metal in vague strokes of color. But shiny silver can really act like a mirror, which makes things a little visually confusing.


I went out and got a cute little stainless steel espresso cup from the REI camping store to serve as a model. I'm amused to see that this image on their website is totally retouched: the actual critter is so darned shiny that I can can watch the cars go by on the street behind me, from where the cup sits over the computer monitor. The store's photographer must not have been able to keep the shot from becoming a self-portrait!

Back when I was working at the botanical garden in southern California, one of my fellow staffers and I bonded over the exciting event of seeing the cacao tree in the greenhouse produce genuine chocolate pods. It was like a strange tropical miracle in our arid climate. Turns out my friend was really affected by this, since now he is on the way to starting his own hand-made chocolate company! He's asked me to do some sketches for his logo, featuring the fruiting tree we knew so well. Here are some very rough concept sketches in Photoshop...


Followed by more developed examples, first in Photoshop then in good old fashioned pen & ink.


I've been doing a lot of computer work lately (which I'll post samples of down the road), and stepping back into pen & ink feels amazingly satisfying. The joy of crisp, clear cross-hatching!

So I went back to the arboretum after the wildflower festival was over, and just wandered around without the benefits of bands or booths...It's gorgeous. I am so impressed by how green things are in the Oregon springtime. Emerald City, indeed!

Yesterday I rode my bike to the Wildflower Festival at the Mt Pisgah Arboretum here in Eugene. It was a great time--native plants for sale, good food and music, and a huge room full of cuttings of local plants that were all labeled so that folks could learn the names of what they'd been seeing around town, as well as whether they are native or exotic, invasive, poisonous, edible, etc.

I did some quick sketches of the ones that most caught my eye. Click the "read more" to see 'em...

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Chipping away at a few random art projects, and working on better organizing my archived images on the computer.

For the Job-Job, I was charged to do a promotional postcard for an upcoming fundraiser with a Brazilian theme. Loathe to stoop to the stereotype of dancing ladies with fruit-covered hats, I decided that orchids are pretty darned Brazilian, and came up with this:



It's funny, I'm noticing in my digital drawings that I have a strange urge to cross-hatch, or even to scribble, nowadays. Strange how the brain/hands choose these little patterns.

Other art news--Audrey and I have put in an exhibit proposal to show our Project Pod artwork at a gallery here in Eugene. Should here the verdict next month. And I've joined the merry team of local artists who will be participating in an Open Studios event in October--perfect excuse to unpack all the remaining boxes and get the house in order.

And yesterday I got a dead horse in the mail! Well, in truth it's a plaster cast of the teeth of an Archeohippus fossil. Which means no bad smells, yay, and fun things to draw.