Merry Christmas!

Just finished watching Scrooged, ate some good ham and now I am watching the Lady Gaga Holiday Muppet special! Yay! I hope your holidays are swell!

Kimekomi!

While in Japan I learned the awesome art of kimekomi! In short, to make the dolls you cut the fabric and lay it over the wooden figure, shaping the fabric into the grooves with glue and special tools. You can buy kits in Japan that are really fun! Before gluing the fabric there might be some sanding, chiseling, and maybe adding on to the wooden figure base.

Here are the photos of all the kimekomi I have made so far!

Back to normal life... Oh Japan, I miss you!

So I finally had the time to draw for myself in between my freelance work that I have been doing for the last couple weeks:

Yay the final forest girl!

Japan was Amazing!!! During our three months there we stayed in Nogoya, visited Kyoto twice, Osaka, Tokyo, climbed Mt. Fuji, bought too many Kokeshi dolls, shopped too much in general, learned the art of Kimekomi, got awesome Japanese nail art on my hands and feet, visited the Totoro house, and ate so much wonderful food!!! I loved every moment of it and didn't want to leave... although I missed my animals back home.

Since then I have been making a few of the dishes that were a staple in Japan and now I cant live without. Pork Udon is one of my favorites to make.

And its picture time!

There were so many pictures it was hard to narrow them down! A couple of other highlights were the Robot Restaurant in Tokyo which was AMAZING!!! So worth the money! Also while in Japan we hit up two music venues (I got to see BUCK-TICK OMG OMG OMG), went to Universal Studios and Disney World, along with another amusement park that was similar to Cedar Point. It was a complete blast!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope you had a great one!

Instead of posting my last Forest Girl today... the skunk, along with some of my Japan pictures, I felt like drawing a Turkey Girl for T-Day and saving that for my next post! ^^

Inspired by my lovely feast for the day and the many leftovers... YAY!

Squirrel Girl while in Japan!

I've been in Japan almost three months! I drew this at the beginning of the trip and forgot to post it. I will be leaving soon and will have to make a big post about my travels. It's been a blast and I have many pictures!!

Lady Bunny

Its been pretty rainy around here lately... which has been great for our lawn but not really good for anything else... hah, I want to go to the beach!

Anywho, here is the next illustration out of what I am thinking will be a series of 4 of these Forest Animal Ladies!

Here I Am! and here is a Foxy Lady with her Little Owl Friend! ^^

I feel like I have been all over the place lately... well not really hahah, I have just been in my house making patterns, but my mind has been all over! I think its settling now so I can begin to start doing my illustrations again and sharing them with whoever happens to poke by!

I will have to make sure to update on a regular basis and am excited to share that I will be traveling to Japan in like a month and half... cant wait! CANT WAIT!

Here she is: Hello Foxy Lady!

Also I did a little refurbish project a couple days ago. I found a cute old jewelry box that was just like the one my mom had that I would sneak in her room and play with when I was a kid... shhhhh! She had lots of fun little jewelry and buttons and such to play with. I'm not sure if hers also played music but this one does which is sweet. It has a crank in the back and when you open the bottom drawer it plays.

I ripped out all of the inner suede type material from the drawers, in the top and also the sides of the walls and floor in the necklace hanging areas and replaced it with some cute scrapbooking paper that I had lying about. I don't think you can tell in the pictures but I did do a little dry brushing on the metal nobs with a metalicy green to give it a little pop. Also I just love the paint color, it was a sample Pantone color paint, Emerald Green, that I found at Lowe's the other day. I bought two of them and now need to find lots of stuff to paint green hahahah. I have a breadbox that I put letters in that I think I will do next!

Goggles Girl Nia

This piece is based off of a face I saw in some decoration that wasn't supposed to resemble a face... I couldn't even look at it without seeing this goggled face and curled hair. I see many faces when I look around at random patterns, trees, etc. Wasn't there a twilight zone or something with a story about a person that went crazy from seeing faces everywhere? hmmm.