Subway Series Continues

Life has been very busy lately, and I see it has been over a week since my last post. Even so, I still have to commute to work, so I continue to do my subway and train drawings. Above is my latest drawing, done on the train this morning. I so enjoy doing these drawings, now returning to some of the same people I have drawn in the past. This lady, in fact, I have drawn twice this week, both times knitting the same pink sweater! Check out my Flickr photostream for more pictures.

Artistamp ATC

Earlier in the summer I joined the non_cents group, which is dedicated to all kinds of paper arts. One of the things the group does is Artistamp ATC's. These are regular ATC's (artist trading cards), with a custom made stamp. You can see ones that were done for the July swap (including mine) here: http://flickr.com/photos/renmeleon/1031591142/
I couldn't do the August swap as there is too much going on in my life this month, but one of my new friends from the group had some extra cards from hers, so I am trading with her. Here is my ATC, without the stamp added yet. Heather has said she likes it, for which I am so glad. I hope you do, too!

"Spatien" German Literary Magazine Illustration Contest

My Flickr contact Kerstin Klein, a wonderful artist herself, ran an online illustration contest for the German web publication „spatien,“ a non-commercial magazine for prose and poetry for German readers, in existence since 2005. It is published online every six months.

The contest was described thus:

„What are literary weblogs“ – this is the working title [of a new book]. Why do we want to publish this book? We want to present the phenomenon of literary weblogs – still a niche within the blogosphere – to a wider non-blogging and not blog-reading audience that is up to now mostly interested in traditional ways of literature publication. Additionally we want to (re-)initiate a discussion about online literature, a phenomenon that is not as widely known in Europe as e. g. in the US and offers – especially in the form of the weblog – new and interesting ways of creative writing in a great variety of fashions.

Different authors of literary weblogs will contribute their essays and sample posts for this book for free. In a way this is a community project comparable to open source software developments. The participants participate because it pleases them and because they think what they do might be of value and importance for somebody.

We are men (and women) of the word and cannot illustrate a book like this ourselves. That’s why we are looking for an artist who would be pleased to be part of this community project and has the ideas and skills for interesting illustrations. The general topic could be freely interpreted. It may be a play with associations about web-like structures. It may be variants of untraditional text representations. It could be abstract or ornamental as well.
A series of about 7 to 9 images could also illustrate motives about literature, text, weblogs, writing processes, etc.

Well, check out Kerstin's blog about the contest: http://illustrationcontest.blogspot.com/
In doing so you will find there were only 8 entries, and the editors of the magazine picked my entry!! Wow! I'm not sure yet whether I will be doing additional drawings, or use other subway skecthes I've done, or just what. But I'll keep you posted on what happens next!

Here are the sketches I submitted:



Thank you, Kerstin, for the opportunity!