{Originally Published on Artists Who Blog}

Leah Giberson’s paintings are beautiful, and how I wish I could see them in person! I’d love to hop over to Boston and have a studio visit, but for the time being I’ll have to be happy with the possibilities the Internet offers us. Leah is not only a gifted artist herself, she is also one of those artists who encourages others. It’s been great to get to know her online this year, so I am especially happy to have her as a guest this week. Leah sells top quality archival prints of her work, as well as a selection of originals in her Etsy shop. She has a blog, and posts frequently on flickr. Enjoy, and please don’t miss my questions for you, dear readers, at the end of the interview

Why did you decide to start a blog?

To tell you the truth I really hadn’t paid much attention to blogs up until last March when I opened my Etsy shop. Not only did I soon discover a world of other artists selling their work online, but I also found a seemingly endless world of inspiration on their blogs. I’ve had never had any interest in public journaling about my personal family life or reading about others quite frankly, but when I discovered how artists were using their blogs to share artistic inspiration, new work and news, I was thrilled. Then when I started getting visitors to my own blog with their clicks, views and comments I was hooked.

{Originally published at Aesthetic Outburst}

I start teaching Book Design again next week and have been searching for interesting images to show my students. Libby recently posted these typographic tree columns by why not associates. They’re being made in collaboration with Gordon Young at Crawley Library (UK) and reminded me of the floors at The Seattle Public Library designed by Ann Hamilton.

{Originally published at Joie Studio}

Here is Joie Studio’s first anatomy lesson, where I’ll take you through the making of a custom letterpress baby shower invitation from start to finish. Here at Joie Studio, we meld old and new letterpress techniques to get our desired results, and this baby shower invitation, more than many other projects here at the studio, showcases the different techniques we use, making it a great project to use for our anatomy lesson.

Concept
This project is actually for a very dear friend of mine, so Rebecca, the host of the baby shower, gave me a free rein to do whatever I wanted. I knew that the couple were decorating the nursery with a hippo theme, and as there is a hippo in Joie Studio’s upcoming baby line, I decided that it would be the perfect design.

The hippo is part of a safari group that was created and illustrated by the ever talented artist Matt Cox. I laid out the shower invite digitally to figure out how the layout and spacing. Here is the digital proof:

Originally posted at My Marrakesh:

It’s morning, and I am meeting my friend Benoit, a French interior designer.

We are meeting at Bab al Khemis, which means Thursday’s Door in Arabic. All around Marrakech’s old city, known as the medina, there are babs, or huge carved entryways. Each bab has its own name, and Bab al Khemis it is the entryway to the city’s equivalent of the flea market. Outside the bab, vendors are beginning to throng, displaying broken bits and bobs, as well as an occasional gem or two.

Benoit arrives, and we kiss, French-style, on both cheeks. For a number of years, Benoit designed interiors for the King of Morocco. Now he and his young family have moved to Marrakech and recently have bought a piece of land. Close friends of ours, Benoit and his charming wife Zoo, also a designer, are giving us a helping hand with our guest house interiors.

In T-shirts and cargo pants, we are ready for action. Today we are looking for antique doors and other architectural remnants that will help give our guest houses some character. We have brought along with
us one of Chris’s employees, Khalid, who can be counted on to negotiate in Moroccan dialect so fast that it makes your heads spin.

Originally posted at Allsorts

Finally! After years of thinking about trying my hand at making a quilt, I have completed all of the blocks for my very first one! I took a class last week with my Bernina sewing posse, and learned how to make a “crazy nine patch.” It is incredibly easy to make these blocks! I snapped pics along the way so you can try it, too.

First, here is one of the finished blocks:

This quilt uses 36 fat quarters. I chose 12 each of red yellow and blue 1930′s inspired fabric.

Once you’ve chosen your fabrics, wash or rinse, dry them, then give a liberal spraying of starch and iron them so they’re nice and stiff.

Using a rotary cutter, cut them into 36 squares. Mine are 12″ but you can go bigger if you like. Divide into four stacks of 9 squares with the colors arranged red yellow blue red yellow blue, etc. But vary the order and which color is first in each stack, to assure a random scattering of color across your quilt.

(click title for more)

Originally Published on Blog O’ the Baroness

The illustration on the right was for the little reader The Case of the Missing Manny,
which was done for Imagine Learning. It happens on the set of a pirate
movie, so this picture goes with the page when our detective Ace is
interviewing Bob the costume designer. Bob, btw, hates pirates and
wishes he could design costumes for sci-fi movies.

I’ve put
together a big ol’ tutorial on how I made this illustration. I tried
keep it at the level of expecting the reader to know at least the
basics of Photoshop, but if you are an expert at Photoshop, then a lot
of the information will be old hat. If I’ve left big holes in my
explanations, let me know and I’ll be happy to make some edits.

Tools

These are the brushes I will be referring to throughout the tutorial. I
am pretty lazy with brushes – I stick with what works. All three
brushes are in the default brush palette. The only customizing I’ve
done is to save a couple more spatter brushes at smaller sizes. When
I’m in a real hurry while shading, I’ll just use the soft round
brushes. The downside is that you get a slick airbrushy look that I
don’t always like. The spatter brushes give me a little texture to the
brush strokes.

Some other general type information – I have two
different setups. At my Imagine Learning office, I work on a PC. I have
two 1200×1600 LCD monitors, an Intuos Wacom tablet, and Photoshop CS2.
There’s a screenshot of my desktop a little further down. At home I
have essentially the same setup, only with a G5 mac and PS CS3. I
personally prefer the mac over pc, but I’ve worked with both for so
long, that it’s not an issue for me. (Speaking of apple love, recently
got an iphone and they are pretty much lots of awesome .)

This
whole illustration was done in Photoshop from start to finish.
Sometimes I use Flash or Painter, but for this tutorial, everything I
refer to is happening in Photoshop, and I’ll be using PC commands. If
you use a mac, just replace Ctrl with Cmd.

Thumbnail

Here is my first sketch, which is essentially a thumbnail, even though it is done at actual size but lower resolution (72 dpi). I’m using a small round brush. It looks like it was maybe at 30% opacity. I’m not consistent with that. This first sketch is just to figure out what is happening in the scene and work out the general composition. Before starting any sketches for the project, I had already done some research, finding pictures of costume studios, pirate costumes, etc. to help come up with ideas.

(click title for more)