Are you a creative? What are the essential tools that you use for your creative practice?⁠⁠ Would you consider them to be strange or out of the box? What tools serve multiple functions in your process?
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I’m really excited to be partnering with Wacom to bring you a special treat — An article all about creating illustrated novels and more specifically how I use a tablet for each stage of the process!⁠⁠

This year, one of my goals is to regain a lot of lost time spent on social media while growing my online presence. When I refer to lost time, I don’t mean the lost hours of endless scrolling looking at friends posts, what I’m referring to is the tedious task of maintaining a business presence online.

For too long I’ve operated without a plan in place and, like many, posted sporadically and often in-the-moment. Neither of these things was working to grow my following, and neither helped get me more time off my phone.

This piece is a reflection on the past year and bringing the flood of creativity, growth, and change into the new season.

When getting serious about becoming an artist in this digital age one of the many things that you’ll probably here is that “you should have a newsletter.” In a nutshell, a newsletter is a way to connect directly with your audience in their inbox. Since the beginning, I’ve kept a relatively simple bi-monthly newsletter for this very reason, and I'm happy to add that it works.

Every year on May the 4th I paint a few Star Wars pieces in celebration. This year I had a very hard time choosing which Baby Yoda piece to work on (so you get to see both) and I loved creating a young teen version of Han Solo and Princess Leia. I hope you enjoy watching and hearing a little bit about my process. May the 4th be with you!

To start, here is the reference that I created in VR using Gravity Sketch to quickly lay in some rough rock shapes and build up the large rock that Ora is made up of. I used the map that I had already created of the city (above) as a rough template for scale and worked on top of it.

How do you effectively produce 104 images that remain consistent throughout in color, value and style and produce them quickly yet at a high quality?

A gorgeous email from a fellow artist landed in my inbox. It was an art-filled experience and a conversation and I loved it. That email got me thinking about how I would like to send emails in 2020.

Enter, my deep dive into the pros and cons of 3 email marketing platforms and which one I chose to go with.

I want to share a little behind the scenes with you of how I became an author and wrote my first novel.

When I began this journey I actually didn’t set out to write a full-length novel. Originally I thought I’d tackle to project without words but as I outlined and explored some of the early world and characters I quickly found that I wanted to give them voices. Thus began my journey to becoming an author.

There are so many resources out there for Independent artists it can sometimes be hard to know where to begin. Here are my top 4 books that I would recommend an artist read to get started, especially if they’re of a more “entrepreneurial” mindset.

Follow me around for a day in the life of an artist and fantasy illustrator. As a freelance illustrator, each and every day is new, exciting and different. Today I thought it would be fun to share with you what goes on during one of my days as a working artist.

I get a lot of questions about my art style, so today I'm sharing a little bit about how I found my art style! We dig into some of my old sketchbooks and I go through some old art!

How to Design an ARTIST Portfolio Website As a professional artist, you need to have an online space that is yours to showcase your artwork and reflects your goals as an artist, illustrator or creative.

In this video I take you through some of the steps to set up a website and a few best practices in building an artist portfolio website.

When we last left off in this worldbuilding series I shared a little of the "why" behind starting my own world.

Today I want to continue onto the how I found seeds of my story and started crafting a narrative. It's one thing to have a desire to create a world, to understand your "why" around building it, but many flounder while trying to find a concrete “something”  to attach their “why” to. This is where narrative and story come in.

The word "worldbuilding" can feel a bit all-encompassing, depending on who you're talking to it can mean a whole set of different things. To me, worldbuilding means crafting a fictional world, including a cast of well-rounded characters, that is believable and inviting.

Hi! I'm excited to share that I've written a guest blog post for the One Fantastic Week blog, a business and art focused community that I am apart of.

Since I share frequently my resources in how I run my business I think you will find this educational, especially if you are thinking about going to any sort of show or convention further away.

Since the beginning, I've been creating artwork on the road. My first watercolor palette was a simple travel set I picked up on a whim. Travel and being able to work while mobile has shaped so much of my process and how I work I decided it was about time I create a list of some of my favorite supplies that I use on the road.

This fall I took on a whole new type of art show, The Harvest Festival, and I wanted to share a little bit of my experience with you.

As an independent artist that is building an audience and making a fair portion of my income from shows like this I think it's important to share my own takeaways in the hopes that someone else can learn from my experiences. If you follow my YouTube channel you already know that I'm fairly candid with the information I share and I hope to be able to bring that same kind of candor here to my blog as well.

This year was my third year attending one of my favorite art events of the year, Illuxcon.

Illuxcon is it's own kind of show. It's hard to describe because there are few shows that I've found that are similar to it. The best that I can do is use their own words. Illuxcon is:

A ground-breaking art show, symposium, and celebration dedicated solely to imaginative realism—bringing artists, students, collectors, and art fans together for an annual gathering intended to inspire and create further awareness and zeal for imaginative realism and all that’s encompassed in the realm of the fantastic.

I started this painting in a location where I have started many others, out at the coffee shop with a friend. There is something about being out in the bustling environment that allows me to focus in on things that I normally could. To harness ideas that I normally wouldn't approach.

For this painting, I wanted to play with more underwater themes. I love the drifting sea and the magical elements one can find within it. I love the ocean and would like to play more around these themes in future.

I created the original line work for this piece last fall for the Month of Fear challenge. I wanted to explore a quiet place, not necessarily frightening or scary. I've been exploring many connected ideas revolving around the jungle themes I've been writing about jumped at the oportunity to pull this piece back out and paint it.

A watercolor painting for the Month of Love challenge theme "Secrets".

This year I will be creating art centered around my foxdragon character and exploring more the relationship between it and a little girl and more my fantastical environments. "The Book of Spells" was created for the challenge theme secrets. I loved the idea of these two friends meeting in a vast leafy jungle, hidden under layers of monstera plants.

I created this piece with spring in mind. I don't know about you but during this time of year, I really miss the sunshine. We've been getting a lot of rain recently and so I decided to paint a piece to cheer myself, and hopefully others up.