Commuting continues

Oh dear, I see it's been more than a week now since I last posted. Please do excuse me for not posting more often, I know some of you are daily posters, and I feel so far behind. However, I do try to post images daily to my Flickr account, so I hope you will visit me there as well.
I continue my commuting and so have kept up my subway sketches series, although this week I have had to drive twice. The drawing here I did on the train Tuesday. There are always fresh subjects, fresh angles to draw, and I really enjoy it. Here my trusty sepia Pitt pen I've been using for four and a half months is running dry. I have a finer gray one which I have also used a lot, but isn't running out, so I will continue on with that until I need to go get some new ones at the art supply store.

September Artistamp Entry

Here is my sheet of Artistamp ATC's for the September swap before I cut them apart and mounted them. I did a single drawing in pencil, then scanned it and duplicated it, then color penciled them all in at one time. The stamps are made individually, each sketched and then watercolored; then I cut them out with my perforation scissors (yay! thank you Ria for getting them for me!!), and glued them on the ATCs.

Thank you, Karen!

My friend Karen Cox, who is SO nice! gave me this award today! That was so sweet of her! Thank you, Karen!

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!

Flax

Hi there! I apologize for neglecting my blog here this past week, there's so much going on! Anyway, I posted this painting awhile back on Flickr and got the tentative identification that it is flax, so if anyone else can confirm that I would appreciate it. Talk to you all later!