OBLIGATORY VALENTINE'S DAY POST

The month of love hasn't been super romantic for Eric and I. First Eric was sick with a gross snotty coughy cold, and now I am! I've been doing weird things like sleeping from 11:30 - 4 am and then just getting up and staying up all day... which I'm sure isn't helping my body, but dammit I can't breathe!!!

Despite our gross sick month of loving only Nyquil, I have been doodling some romantic things. Unfortunately I have finished a few today, the day before Valentine's day, when most (organized) people have already purchased cards and gifts, but I figured I could always use them to send to greeting card companies asking for money.

I had originally done an illustration of some coffee, biscuits, and donuts, and then this morning I woke up and thought "YOU'RE THE DONUT TO MY COFFEE". Thanks brain. I added a soft amazing bluey purple drop shadow that I'm super happy with. Yay for non-cheesy drop shadows.

The other love themed illustration I worked on was inspired by my two cats, Harpo and Groucho, who are completely in love with one another. They are constantly cleaning one another, snuggling, and falling asleep together.

I wanted to turn it into a cute card, so I chose the tagline "this is perfect"... I thought it was simple and sweet, and I hope you are all grateful that I did not make a pun. My dad thinks the pun would make it better but NO. NO PUNS.

Two variations on the donut card, and the cat card are available on Society6! Maybe... for next Valentine's day?

*edit*

I made this too

CRYSTAL MOUNTAINS, CLOUDS + CASTLE.

Isn't that mesmerizing? I have always loved watching gifs of illustrations building from the sketch up. Above is a piece I have been working on for a few days, inspired partially by the beautiful Disney film FROZEN and the icy Toronto winter. It is also inspired by my large amethyst collection, which I gathered in a mine near Thunder Bay with my parents and Eric. It was more of a large dirt pile full of amethyst than a real mine, but it was still amazing and magical, and I came back to Toronto with a ton of crystals and a lot of cool information about how amethyst is formed.

The largest piece of amethyst we mined, found by my mom.

The finished illustration:

My cute mom, digging up rocks.

4 THINGS I HAVE LEARNED FROM THE FIRST 30 PAGES OF ART & FEAR

If you are an artist, and you haven't read Art & Fear, please make a point to do so. When I am feeling the paralyzing fear and self-doubt that so many artists know, a few pages of this book gives me the perspective and inspiration to continue working. It is a really powerful book, and this is coming from someone who scoffs at most self-help books, and hates inspirational quotes. As I read the first sentence, "Making art is difficult." and then the first page, "We do work that does not feel like our own" "Often the work we have not done seems more real in our minds than the pieces we have completed" I knew this book understood a whole lot about me, and about my art, and about my daily negative inner dialogue. I wanted to finish the book before I wrote a blog post about how wonderful and helpful it is, but I got 30 pages in and couldn't contain myself any longer. Here is a list of the many helpful things I have learned in that first chunk of Art & Fear.

1. The work you imagine is always more incredible than the work you actually make, and that is totally normal and doesn't really change.

I have always loved making thumbnails because of the potential they have. This could really turn into something incredible. Vision races ahead of execution. The very first brushstroke has the potential to turn into a masterpiece, and every brush stroke after brings it further and further away from the imagined masterpiece. There is an anecdote in Art & Fear where a piano student is learning from a master and says to the master "But I can hear the music so much better in my head than I can get out of my fingers." to which the master replies, "What makes you think that ever changes?". It's not you being a bad artist, it is just the reality of our imaginations. All you can do is try to improve with every piece.

2. Everyone else feels like they're only pretending to be an artist too!

Apparently a lot of artists feel this way, and I definitely do. I know exactly how I make things, and how much of it is unplanned, accidental, happy mistakes. We doubt our credentials. We compare ourself to people we admire, and we don't think we measure up. But really there is no such thing as "pretending to make art", if you're expressing yourself artistically, and making the best art you know how, you are making art, and you are an artist.

Seriously what the hell Jeannie. Stop all of this tremendous work. 

3. The artists you look up to are not actually magical creatures who easily make masterpieces.

I am definitely guilty of thinking that these people who make the art I have pinned to my illustration board, or my artist friends who I admire so much, are secretly magic. I mean I don't really think they're magic because I don't believe in magic, but I definitely don't picture them as mortal beings slaving away, making mistakes, deleting their mistakes, revising, hating their work, feeling exhausted. I picture them in beautiful studios with charmed lives where every brush stroke is an act of genius and they know all the answers before they even begin. I just picture their successes, not their struggles. But as described in Art & Fear, "Art is made by ordinary people", and in fact ordinary people are the ideal artist because great art needs to include warts and flaws and happy mistakes. If a perfect person made perfect art, why would I care about that? And guess what? I'm an ordinary person, and can therefore make art just like all of my wildly talented friends, like Jeannie Phan and Noreen Rana.

4. Striving for perfection is dumb and harmful to your work.

Making mistakes is really scary. But it is important for artistic growth. If you try to avoid making mistakes, you will either stop making art, because if you aren't making anything there is no way you can mess it up, or you will stick to things you know you can do really well, and never challenge yourself. This is bad. Your mistakes show you what you need to improve on in your next piece. They are helpful and awesome, and being perfect is probably overrated and boring anyway.

ANXIOUS #2 - IMPROVEMENTS

As some of you know I have been plugging away at a new black and white comic zine about Anxiety. I haven't been posting a lot of the illustrations I have been working on for this on facebook or twitter, so I figured it was time I update you.

After completing my very first zine (also about anxiety), ANXIOUS, I was ready to keep drawing and keep improving. I guess art is like that, as soon as you finish something you are overcome with hatred for it and just want to create something BETTER. I am extremely proud of ANXIOUS, but I see all of the things I would do differently every time I read it.

Here are some of the things I will be doing better for zine #2

TYPOGRAPHY:

For ANXIOUS I wanted to hand write all of the text, because I thought it was important to have my fingerprints on everything. I never get to see everyone's interesting writing anymore because we're all frantically typing away, and I thought it would be more personal if I wrote everything with my tablet pen. Unfortunately I was doing everything in photoshop, and the words came out a bit blurry and sad. AND wonky. Very wonky. I have a tendency to write on an extreme slant when using my tablet, and it took a lot of editing to make the text in ANXIOUS at all legible. It really limited how much text was in the zine, because I couldn't write huge paragraphs without it being unreadable.

SO for zine #2 I experimented with a number of handwriting fonts, but it all felt too impersonal and cold, and when I looked at it all I could see was the writing of someone else explaining my very personal experiences. Luckily my friend Cal swooped in and showed me how to convert my writing to a font that I could type out, which I knew was possible but never knew was SO EASY. I used Myscriptfont.com and it worked perfectly.

MORE COMICS:

Because of my new brianneburnell font, I am able to have a lot more text in the zine, and it doesn't take a zillion years to get it in there. This means MORE COMICS less full page illustrations. The Americano comic in ANXIOUS was my favourite page and I decided zine #2 should have a lot more content like that. The pizza comic below shows the new font, and one of the many comics.

LENGTH:

Zine #2 will be 32 pages, while ANXIOUS was only 20. Maybe I had just seen all of the images so often that flipping through ANXIOUS felt really short, or maybe it was really short. All I know is when I got to the end I felt like it was over too soon. There were also some things I couldn't explain fully in ANXIOUS because of the page limitations I had originally set, so that left it with a lot of one page comics/illustrations. Zine #2 will have more double page comics and at least one 3-page comic.

HUMOUR:

Everyone who knows me knows I have always, and will always, find the humour in having anxiety. You can't survive it if you don't laugh at yourself and your life. Plus laughing is good for you. ANXIOUS had some really sad pages that I found really hard to draw. And after I did draw them I wanted to curl up in bed forever. I know that people do really connect with the sad, personal stuff, and I do love connecting with people, but I don't like portraying my life that way because a lot of times it is really awesome and crazy and silly and not sad. Zine #2 will have more humour because I think my experience with anxiety is funnier than I portrayed in ANXIOUS. There will still be some sad stuff though.

STYLE:

I was still majorly experimenting when I worked on ANXIOUS, and although I am still experimenting now (and forever) I think I have found a style that I can use consistently throughout zine #2. It also helps that everything is black and white in zine #2 and I don't have to worry about making cohesive colour choices throughout.

ALSO, I would like to mention two artists who have really inspired me with this zine.

Firstly, Hyperbole and a Half, which I have always loved, published the best book ever. I begged Eric to buy it for me for Christmas, and then read the whole thing in one sitting. It is the funniest book ever, and Allie is really great at explaining things in comic form, the funny and the sad. She also colour coded the pages, which you can see on the side of the pages, so each story is a different colour which made it really easy to find each story.

Secondly, OYSTERFACE. I ordered this super intricate black and white zine on Etsy, and it came all the from Australia and went straight into my heart. The artist, Ben Constantine, is seriously talented. This zine definitely showed me that black and white doesn't have to be blocky and boring, it can be so intricate and beautiful! I turn to this zine when I miss working with colour and need to be inspired again. You can read the entire thing here. 

I am aiming to have this zine complete in the next 2 weeks. I have 15 of the 32 pages remaining. I am currently stuck on one specific illustration and it is driving me crazy! Anyway, thanks for reading my long-winded update and I hope now you want to go make cool things.

Collections of Beautiful Things

Inspired by the wonderfully talented Jeannie Phan's book of Nature's Collections I decided to put together a grouping of my favourite/cutest beauty products. I have been meaning to get around to drawing beauty products because there might be an opportunity for paid work there in fashion/beauty magazines. Plus I have pretty sparkly beauty products, and drawing sparkles is fun.

From the top going clockwise the products are:

e.l.f mineral infused face primer (which is SO sparkly)

LUSH popcorn lip scrub (smells sweet and salty)

REVLON colorburst matte balm in Sultry (stays on forever, is so amazing)


Deborah Lippmann nail polish in Happy Birthday (which I dreamt about for 3 years before my Aunt kindly bought it for me)

LUSH Dragon's Egg bath bomb (in the middle of this sudsy white bomb is a pocket of gold shimmers that go all over your skin in the best way)

Pumice Stone that I desperately needed and now have

Lime Crime opaque lipstick in Chinchilla

LUSH Volcano foot mask (smells really really good)

And finally in the middle is my adorable Tony Moly "Petite Bunny Gloss Bar" in Juicy Grape which is just a really subtle pink lip balm in the cutest container ever.

I'm now envisioning more collections all about myself. All of my shoes! The items in my purse! All my favourite foods!

Art on Society6

I have been meaning to get on Society6 since forever, but it took a recent nudge from Alyssa at Random Acts of Pastel  for me to get around to it. I am SO GLAD I DID. Not because I am making any money at all, because I'm not, but because I can see my art in pillow form. I love throw pillows, LOVE them, and I have been uploading images just to see what they would look in pillow form and dream about them in my future amazing house that I am really far away from owning.

Spoiler, they all look awesome and I want them all.

Woops

It has been approximately a million years since I have blogged. While I don't really do New Years resolutions, blogging more in 2014 is probably a good idea.

A lot happened in December 2013. I completed my first zine, a 20 page zine full of colour illustrations about anxiety and my life. I have sold about 20 of them so far, enough to help cover half of the next months rent. ANXIOUS is available here.

After a nice Christmas holiday in Thunder Bay with my parents, which included an amazing day of skiing and tons of food, I began working on a book cover for a friend of mine. She wrote an extremely compelling novella which I devoured in 2 days. The finished cover:

 

I received a ton of positive feedback on this cover, and I managed to complete it really quickly which I was thrilled about.

I am now working on a new black and white zine (two actually, but one is a little secret), which I will update you on in a new post.

Project in the works

I am very excited about a new personal project I will be working on, a zine about anxiety and depression, based on my personal experiences. The zine will include some of my comics, illustrations and a teeny bit of writing.

I will have the zine complete by DEC 15, at which point I will be printing and assembling it myself. I splurged on a 25 dollar long reach ruler and everything!

Below are some of the complete or partially complete pieces for the zine.

CATS, VALUE, AND COMPOSITION

I have been reading some great books on composition, and have been practising with paintings of my cat Harpo.

FRIENDLY PORTRAITS

A friend of a friend has is organizing an art show and told me I should submit my work. I was initially way too nervous, but eventually got around to working on it.

I wanted to make abstract portraits of a few of my friends, where their eyes and hair are really precise, and the rest is kind of a blob, because i figured you could still recognize the person from their eyes and hair.

What I ended up working on wasn't really what I had initially imagined, but I'm happy with how they turned out anyway.

I have one more I will be working on and then I will submit them!

I enjoyed making them a lot, and with the holidays coming up I was trying to add items to my Etsy shop that would make good gifts. I think "custom magical portraits" would make a nice gift!

DRAWING PRINCESSES

I think this piece is finally done, but I might go back to it eventually and add more detail. I am REALLY happy with the coral around the bottom edges of the illustration. Definitely my most detailed and complete piece to date.

Also, today I quickly drew this princess.

NON-BORING LANDSCAPES

Today I am VERY inspired, mostly because I purchased some incredible photoshop brushes that look like gouache and watercolour and oil paint and charcoal and pretty much everything you can imagine.

The brushes are from KYLE WEBSTER and can be found here. They were only $10 which is a steal.

I spent about an hour this morning gathering reference photos and sketching to create my best octopus piece yet. I wanted to do an underwater cliff scene with one big octopus and a bunch of spooky ghosty little octopus in the back.

It currently looks like this:

3.5 hours later...

I can't believe 3.5 hours have passed... I thought I had been working on it for maybe an hour?

BORING BARNS

Today I worked on the subway illustration a bit further, but I'm trying not to rush it, so I've walked away for now and will likely resume tomorrow.

I have been meaning to start drawing more landscapes and backgrounds, because I am definitely weak in that area, and I was really inspired by Mike Yakovlev's fantasy landscapes after looking at his new website. Look at these beautiful pieces he has done:

Unfortunately for everyone this inspiration lead to me creating the most boring picture of all time.

WAMP WAMP WAMP. I think I've seen this in a sad living room somewhere. Or a hospital bathroom.

I even tried to jazz it up a bit...

(I'm only kidding).

Hopefully the next piece I make isn't this drab. And check out Mike Yakovlev because he is fantastic and I'm pretty sure he is quite young as well.

FLOWERS & BUNNIES

I have been making a lot of progress on the flower book now that I have switched to working on it digitally.

Today I am working on a page that I was dying to draw, because it gives me a bit of a break from drawing flowers, to draw.... A BUNNY!

FLOWER BOOK CHANGES

I have been feeling really uninspired regarding the flower themed children's book I have been working on (or not working on). I began the illustrations in acrylic, even though I am not the strongest painter, but as I began improving digitally I wanted to make these acrylic paintings less and less.

I decided to scrap the 3 pages I had complete, and start anew digitally.

This was the best decision. Below is a villain type, Old Lady Pansy. Note her intentionally horrible villain makeup.

And this is our (currently faceless) protagonist. The book is written by my magical and very talented friend over at Random Acts of Pastel. And the whole book is going to be dreamy and pastel.

And now she is only partially faceless!

I might need to walk away from this for today...

FANCY EARL ILLUSTRATION

This is one of those pieces that I could work on forever until it is completely overworked and horrible, so I think I need to stop (it's killing me though). This is the final piece, I am going to print it today and hopefully it looks beautiful!

MAGIC BOX HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT #1

I have finally gotten around to starting my first assignment for Chris Oatley's MAGIC BOX course. The assignment is about atmospheric lighting and colour comps, and for some reason the assignment is to combine a funny animal with the outfit and lighting from an old painted portrait.

I don't know any animals that are funnier than my dad's dog EARL.

I can't stop laughing as I work on this ridiculous portrait of Earl in a dress with a dainty hand on his cheek. Just ridiculous.

NEW WEBSITE IN THE WORKS

Yesterday I signed up for a 2 week trial with SQUARESPACE, which allows you to design your website but it is not viewable to the public until you start paying the monthly amount. So far I love it. It is super easy to design a beautiful website through it. So far i am keeping the website really simple.

I have also been working on the final wolf illustration from the wolf colour comps. I want it to look messy and sort of frantic, but I think it needs a bit more work (and some sort of background element... no ideas yet). Here it is so far:

Also working on some simple practise poses - they're quick to do and great practise so I might try to do 5-7 a week. (Ignore the horrible claw hand)And another!

WORKING FROM HOME: WEEK 3

On Friday I went and printed out all of the work I have done in the last 2 weeks, (that sounded like it was a lot... it was 5 pages). It's really nice to see your work on paper rather than a screen. The illustration of the girl from the last post printed BEAUTIFULLY. The colour were so vivid, and it is shocking to me that I created something so bright. I usually stay away from bright colours.

This week I have decided to work on the Illustration Friday theme, which is "TOTEM". I'm going to be drawing a dad with kids and pets hanging off of him, looking sort of like a totem pole (and it will also give me practise drawing people, which I NEED).

So this is where it is at right now: (please ignore the zombie eyes, I'm getting to them)

Also, I read a beautiful children's book this week.

MIGRANT illustrated by ISABELLE ARSENAULT

Edit: Almost forgot I have been working on colour comps for a little wolf illo:

EDIT 2: COMPLETE!