Weekly Wishlist: ACEOs by Renee Nault

So I think I'm going to combine "Monday Multiples" and "Wednesday Wishlist" into one Weekly Wishlist post, because this blog is threatening to turn into a "cool stuff I found on Etsy" blog, when it's supposed to a "what I'm making/writing/doing/seeing in my yard" blog. (For the "what geeky thing am I in love with now" see my other blog, BFG, and for "what has Niko learned about bones/archaeology/palaeontology" see my other other blog Osteosophy.)

One of the things I've been working on lately (and I'll post more on this in my next post) is an ACEO or ATC (basically, trading cards for artists) to trade for one like this. I've become fascinated with the tiny trading card format, so I started researching ATCs (and ended up writing an article on them for Handmade News). The latest result of this, my newest distraction, is that I've found some wonderful illustrators. One I just had to share is Renee Nault. Here's a taste:


Not only does she make gorgeous ink and watercolour paintings (see her work here on Etsy, here on her own website, and here on illustratedATCs), she's also from my old hometown (inasmuch as I have a hometown) of Victoria, BC. I'm absolutely going to buy one of her ATCs, as soon as I can decide which one. And one of my goals is to get accepted to illustratedATCs (it's a juried site), so I can trade for her work, and the work of some of the other fabulous illustrators who hang out there. Whee!

Airship Blueprint

One of the things I'm working on right now is a commission for a large-scale blueprint-style airship drawing. I recently posted six concept sketches on my Flickr and had the client look at them. He sent me his comments and ideas, so now I'm working on a sketch that incorporates everything.

The Jules Verne is Frisland Air Ships' flagship, and is most famous for having carried the infamous Dr Sophia Shallowgrave around Frisland on one of her early exploratory journeys. Currently, the Jules Verne is a luxury passenger liner, with regular sailings to Frisland's far north, as well as to destinations overseas.

DAV Santos-Dumont. Darwin Aero Vessels prefers to keep the gasbag entirely separate from the gondola and observation posts, and frequently chooses non-rigid and semi-rigid designs.

Though Frisland Air Ships currently builds only rigid airships, it has experimented with semi-rigid designs, such as the Lebaudy-Julliot.

The pirate ship Flying Fish may have been constructed by the pirates themselves, as there are no records of it being built at any of the shipyards or workshops in Frisland.

Courier Ship Shooting Star, built at the Mountain Vista Shipyards in Peak City, Frisland. This ship features a single steam ray cannon, multiple black powder rail cannons and two experimental steam propulsion units.

The HMS Sgian Dubh was secretly constructed for Queen Victoria by Frisland Air Ships of Darwin, Frisland, as the Royal Air Navy's flagship. Armaments by Darwin Cannon & Sidearms Manufactory of Darwin, Frisland.

Now I think I'll repost this over on BFG, due to the extremely geeky nature of this particular project.

Wednesday Wishlist: Winged Scarab Necklace

Unfortunately, today's wishlist item was sold some time ago, but I love it so much I just had to feature it anyway. Behold the Winged Scarab Necklace in Copper by Clockwork Crow.


You'll find Clockwork Crow's Etsy shop full of other lovely adornments in copper, silver, brass and found objects. The airship pendant is also very, very nice, and would have been my pick for the wishlist if the scarab wasn't so stunning. You can also find Clockwork Crow on Facebook.

And The Winner Is . . .

I finally got myself organized and chose the winner of the 2010 "Flying Machines: possible and improbable" calendar.


I determined the winner my counting up how many entries each person had and writing their name on that many slips of paper. Then I shuffled the papers, put them in a box and shook it vigorously, opened the box and shook it a little more, than asked my lovely assistant (the fabulous BillyZ) to draw one of the slips.

So without further ado, the winner is Sunshine Folk! Yaaaaaayyyy! (Imagine Kermit the Frog and his arm-flailing enthusiasm--and if you don't know what I'm talking about, get thee to a video rental place and get some old Muppet Show episodes.)

I didn't get the huge response I was secretly hoping for, but I think the contest was successful in its own modest way, and I'm thinking about having another contest sometime in the not too distant future.

If you didn't win, and you're very sad about it, you can still buy a copy of the calendar on Etsy or ArtFire. And if you read this blog, I'll give you a secret free postage discount. Just post here, and I'll make a special Etsy or ArtFire (your choice) listing just for you. There's no time limit on this offer--as long as I have calendars to sell, you can get free shipping by posting here. (If you want to buy several items, let me know and if the postage isn't too high, I'll give you free shipping on your whole order. If the shipping is a bit steep, I'll knock off the cost of the calendar shipping from the total.)

Anyway, THANK YOU!!! to everyone who entered. You guys are the best.

2010 Flying Machines Calendar!

On Tuesday I finished the last printing I needed to get done before the new year: my 2010 "Flying Machines: possible and improbable" calendar.


On Thursday I trimmed, hole-punched and packaged all 30 of them, and of course signed and numbered them. I had already pre-sold two at the Halifax Crafter's Market, and had two other people interested in buying when they were finished. So I've now sold 5, will keep one for my files, and will probably use 5 or so for gifts. So that leaves 19 for sale in my Etsy shop and my ArtFire shop.

The calendars are printed on one of my favourite (non-handmade) papers for letterpress: Mohawk Via Vellum 80 lb cover. The 100 lb is nice, too, but doesn't fold as well for greeting cards, so I usually buy the 80. The vellum finish gives it a soft texture that doesn't interfere with the printing as heavily textured papers sometimes do. I chose warm white for this, rather than my usual cool white--although cool white tends to have less affect on the ink colour, the warm white seemed better suited to the subject matter, and goes well with the brown ink.

I printed the names of the months first, using a different historic wood type from the Dawson Printshop's collection for each month. I added a lot of transparent base to the ink, and printed relatively lightly in order to get all the texture and imperfections of the old wooden type to show up. For printing the wood type, I used the shop's Vandercook Universal 1 proof press.

Then I printed the numbers and the images at the same time, from polymer plates. I used quite a bit of packing on the cylinder to bring up the pressure and get a nice deep embossment (technically debossment, I suppose). The letters for the days of the week were printed the same way, only with a different colour of ink, of course. The polymer plates were all printed on the shop's Vandercook Universal 2 proof press, a very rare press (apparently only 50 or so were made).

All of the images except two are ones that I found in my various history of flight books (I have a small collections). Many of them are Victorian, and a few of them were in full colour, which meant I had to remove the colour in Photoshop before converting the files to vectors. The two images that weren't ones from my own books came from a file of miscellaneous images on the Printshop computer. Some of the machines pictured actually flew, while others are simply exercises in imaginations.

I'm going to post a contest here soon, where you'll be able to win a copy of the calendar. I think what I'll do is make it a trivia contest, where you'll have to identify some of the machines--maybe which ones actually flew, for example. More on that very soon.

Comic Book Madness

Well, so far I've managed to spend most of the weekend fiddling around with comics, doing a bit of scanning, some organizing of my Webcomics Nation site, and lots of button, banner and logo making.


Also, as you may have guessed from the "a bit of scanning" comment above, I now have a working scanner. Futureshop had that scanner I've been wanting marked down--about $100 less than the original price, which makes it almost $200 less than the new price. And I had a FS gift card (thanks, Dad!). So I splurged. And now I can get to work on some photo projects as well as comics (and explain that weird grocery list I posted way back when). It's very exciting. I haven't actually scanned any photos yet, but I'll start soon. I need to have an application for the grad show in by mid-February, so I need to get at least that one image finished by then (that is to say, scanned and cleaned up and looking fabulous).

What I have been doing with the scanner is making some images for my new comic series, which will debut on Webcomics Nation tomorrow!! My aim is to do weekly updates, but I don't have a big store of completed pages like I do for Fey, so I don't know how long I can keep that up. The drawings are smaller than Fey drawings, though, and I seem to be able to do a two-page spread in about the same time as it would take me to do a single page of Fey, so there may be hope for the weekly schedule.

So yeah, look for it tomorrow.



(Typefaces in both logos are from the fabulous Scriptorium. (Except the text that says "Fey"--that's all me.) Yes, I even paid for them.)

Fey!

I'm finally getting around to posting comics online again, but I need a new scanner. My old one works just fine, but in an attempt to get the plug-in working with CS4, I discovered that I'm not sure it was ever working on this machine at all, and the drivers won't install. Not even the newest ones downloaded direct from Canon. Sigh.

So in the meantime, I'm moving Fey over to Webcomicsnation. You'll find all my stuff at http://www.webcomicsnation.com/feynico/ eventually. If you were hoping for new pages, sorry. For now I'm going to be reposting old pages once a week. When I get to the end of them, I'll hopefully have lots of new pages and a new scanner. I will finish this series eventually. I'm also working on a completely new series called The Fabulous Forays of Aeryn Daring. I'm very excited about it. But again, nothing until a new scanner.

The scanner I have my eye on in the Epson Perfection v700 Photo (or the v750-M Pro, except it costs significantly more). Yes, it's very pricey (and I just noticed the price is $100 more than it was when I looked a few weeks ago--I thought the prices on tech were supposed to go down, not up), and it can't even scan anything bigger than 8 1/2 x 11, but it *can* scan negatives all the way up to 8 x 10. I have a crapload of medium format and 4 x 5 negs I want to scan and work with digitally, at least to put them on deviantArt and create a digital portfolio. So. I'll be looking for ways of making a bit of extra cash so I can buy this thing, starting with finally getting some stuff up for sale on Etsy. You'll find me at http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=6315023, but there's nothing there yet. First, I have to organize and photograph and acquire a postal scale to figure out how much it will cost to mail things.

Anyway, more soon.

Icons!

More and More

More finished, more half-finished.

I finished Tom Sawyer, which turned out to be much better in big chunks than in small doses, so two reading sessions later, it was over. I'm still not sure why I had trouble getting into it, but now I'm ready to tackle some more Twain. Well, once I've polished off some more of the half-read books on the list.

And speaking of half-read books, yes I found a couple more. One is The Great Airship by Lt. Col. Brereton, a truly abysmal boy's adventure novel from sometime between the wars (I suspect--there's no date on it). It cost me all of a dollar in a tiny "bookshop" located in a garden shed in New Brunswick. I actually have quite a fascination for boy's (and girl's) adventure novels from around the turn of the century and just after. I have a small collection of them that feature airships and am always looking for more--but I think I'll make this a post all on its own. The book has a certain appeal, despite the terrible writing.

The other book is one I picked up on sale at the book fair when the Congress of Learned Societies was in St John's in . . . 1997, I think. It's called Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, edited by Jane H.M. Taylor and Lesley Smith. It's a proceedings from a 1993 conference, published with additional essays in 1996. Very scholarly, which explains why I didn't get very far before setting it aside--I was researching and writing my Master's thesis at the time. I picked it up again last night and decided to start over at the beginning since I didn't remember the two essays I had already read very well. Really interesting stuff, and so far quite readable.

It reminds me, for some reason, of an ex-boyfriend. I had seen a book on Celtic archaeology at the bookstore where he worked one day a week--it didn't have a price, so I asked him to check next time he worked. As I recall, my birthday was coming up, and I hinted that it might make a nice gift, if it wasn't too expensive (though I also suggested that it probably was too expensive). I have a small collection of Celtic archaeology books, and this one was a thick anthology of essays by different scholars. So he reports back a while later and it was pricey, as I had suspected. "You wouldn't want it anyway," he said. "It was really technical and full of charts and diagrams."

Erm. First clue this was not the man of my dreams? (Actually first clue was probably that he was a Christian Scientist, but I did try to be open-minded.) I guess he never noticed that I actually sometimes read scholarly books for fun. And maybe he forgot that my BA is in archaeology. One lesson I learned: it's a bad idea to go out with a man who feels threatened by your intelligence (assuming he finally figures out that you have it).

Airship Coat

Oh, won't someone get this for me for xmas . . . Warm wool coat (did I mention the weather has turned very chilly here), airship insignia. Airship insignia!! Anyway. I could use a coat. (I should probably measure myself and see if it would fit. I think it will. But I should measure.)