The online home of Adventure Cartoonist Lucy Bellwood
After looking over the Big Weirdies at a recent show, a friend said with a wink-wink laugh, “I’ll have what he’s having.”
He’s welcome to it! What I’m having is fun.
I really like this post from my pal Christopher about his approach to “super-saturation and world-building” in his paintings without the use of psychedelics (despite what many people seem to think upon viewing them).
I’m joining the inimitable Carson Ellis for a conversation at Bart’s Books this month! Come help celebrate the release of her new book, One Week in January, on October 12th in the Bart’s courtyard from 6-7pm. We’ll be chatting about creative booms in funky towns, spending time with our younger selves, and finding community in rural spaces. Event details here.
Here’s a bit more about the book:
In January 2001, […] 25-year-old Ellis moved into a warehouse in the Central Eastside with a group of fellow artists. For the first week she lived there, Ellis kept a detailed diary recording only the minutiae of each day, mostly as a brain exercise to stave off what she perceived as memory loss. A couple years ago, having recently rediscovered the volume in a crate of letters and keep-sakes, she set to illustrate the two-decade-old journal with rich gouache paintings, evocatively capturing a specific cultural moment of the early 2000s.
Offering here a snapshot of a bygone era and a meticulous re-creation of quotidian frustrations and small, meaningful moments, One Week in January is a meditation on what it means both to start your journey as an artist and to look back at that beginning many years later.
You can also see all the original paintings from the book at Nationale in Portland through October 19th!
There are tons of things I love about this project, but I’m specifically delighted by it as a time capsule of the Portland that was already dissolving when I arrived there as a college student in late 2009. I know the buildings and markets Carson mentions in her diary! I’ve visited friends’ painting studios in those same warehouses! I’ve shopped at those corner stores! But the version of the city I found was slightly newer, the grime a bit less visible. The city I visit now—the one she still lives outside of—is newer still.
And then, of course, there’s the collapsing tunnel that flings me back further in my own life. A year after writing this diary, Carson would illustrate the cover of Castaways and Cutouts—the first album from The Decemberists, fronted by her now-husband (and frequent diary apparition) Colin Meloy. By the time I started high school in 2003 I was eagerly bringing their songs to play at Morning Assembly. As a tall ship sailor in the late 2000s, it was basically mandatory that one listen to a band with so many raucous, anachronistic, shanty-like tunes under their belt—not to mention the nautical art Carson made for each release. The thought of sitting down as something like peers to discuss Carson’s work from that era is surreal in the extreme.
Now that I think of it, one of my favorite reads from this year, Dear Sophie, Love Sophie, likewise begins with the recovery of a painfully earnest diary and spins it into something compassionate and affirming in the present day.
It’s more graphic novel than pairing of painting and text, but equally heartfelt and charming. (I’m just a big fan of Sophie Lucido Johnson, generally speaking. Her newsletter is great.)
Oh, Carson has a newsletter, too! It’s called Slowpoke.
Okay, I think that’s it for promotion. See you at Bart’s!
An unexpected bit of Promotion on the blog today:
This collection of poems by Tara K. Shepersky features loads of full-page watercolor illustrations by me and gorgeous printing from our publisher, Bored Wolves. (You can even grab our first collaboration, Tell the Turning, as part of the campaign—not to mention a host of other goodies like postcards and special bookplates by calligrapher Amber D. Stoner.)
The book is a love letter to a particular river in Northern California, and to Tara’s peregrinations from north to south along various West Coast highways and byways over the course of her lifetime. Her work is contemplative, rich, tender, and full of love. It’s an honor to be in conversation with her words through watercolor. When describing the book, she writes:
Serpentine is blue and green: many shades, from cerulean to viridian to young-alder to haze-above-the-Pacific. She’s soaked with sun, even when the particular poem takes place at night or in deep shade. Sunshine permeates. Blooming permeates. Celebration permeates. Refuge permeates. Serpentine reaches out to help you shuck your anxiety and displacement. I hope Serpentine will turn out to be a strong companion for you, as she has been, for a very long time, for me.
Once again: HERE’S THAT KICKSTARTER LINK. This is a short campaign (just two weeks!) so I’ll be writing about it again with some more watercolor work before things wrap up.
To paint the sea: is it a process or is it a state? Maybe one leads to the other?
Anna Iltnere, discussing Philip Hoare’s Risingtidefallingstar
If you follow me elsewhere on social media, you know I’ve got a massive penchant for drawing challenges. Inktober is a perennial favorite, so this year I tackled 31 6×6″ watercolor paintings of sunrises and sunsets. Each image was painted from life wherever I happened to be on each day of the month, starting with a basic silhouette of the sky at dusk or dawn.
The final result spanned Portland, Long Beach (WA), New York, and Richmond, and looked something like this:
While prints of all these images are available in my online shop right now, I’ve also decided to sell off the original paintings themselves to help raise some end-of-year cash to help with book printing in 2018.
Buyolympia will be listing the originals (unframed) in batches of 5 over the next few weeks every Tuesday and Thursday. If there’s one you’ve got your eye on, be prepared to act fast! The framed pieces that pre-sold at Portland’s tiny llama gallery earlier this week went real quick.
You can check out the current selection at Buyolympia and take advantage of their free shipping promotion to snag some other gifts for the holiday season while you’re at it. Happy shopping!
I had a ton of fun wrapping up these watercolor paintings for my top-tier backers on the Baggywrinkles Kickstarter last week. Here’s a look at the final lineup of paintings:
Clockwise from upper left, we’ve got El Galeon (hiding behind PDX YAR’s First Mate), L’Hermione, Brig Niagara, and Kalmar Nyckel (in disguise under a different paint job, for reasons outlined in this Tumblr post).
In the process of getting all of these done, I learned a bunch about making time-lapse videos, which you can check out below:
And if you’re curious about the tools used for these projects, here’s a sneak peek at a post I put up for my supporters on Patreon all about my watercoloring setup:
I put up an informative essay each month about some aspect of my creative process, along with a load of other content for folks to read/watch/listen to/generally enjoy. I serious adore Patreon as a platform for making more of this work possible, so if you haven’t already checked it out, go take a peek! (There’s a lot of free stuff there, too, if you don’t want to commit to chucking some money my way each month.)
More news coming next week! Stay tuned.
Something a little different today: a process GIF from a recent illustration commission! This cat portrait was done start-to-finish in Manga Studio with Frenden’s blue pencil and Hairpin Sable inker brushes.
You notice how the cat really comes alive in that last frame when the white highlights in the eyes come into play? Every time I add those to a piece I get this really vivid memory of going to art classes as a kid.
My teacher’s name was Sharon Butler. She was a realist painter from South Africa who painted waist-high stones to look like living cheetahs, crouching in the greenery outside the studio. The two rooms in her establishment were filled with the perpetual, chalky scent of pastels and Prismacolor pencils. We’d get pieces of illustration board handed out every time a new project began, cut down to the appropriate size. I completely lost track of time every session I spent there. My only job was drawing, as well as I could.
This was pre-internet, so Sharon kept a morgue file in the inner room. It was a metal filing cabinet—dull beige and taller than I was at the time—crammed full of photos and magazine clippings. There were folders for horses and dolphins and birds and architecture and chairs and people and costumes. Every manilla folder had a grouping by subject, and since Google simply wasn’t around yet we’d fight over who got the best picture of the dolphin to draw from.
I drew a lot of animals when I went to those classes with Sharon. She’d stop by while I was struggling to render a hummingbird as something other than a crude cartoon, giving suggestions on how I could better train my eye to see what was actually in front of me. The second-to-last touch, before the fixative stopped our pastel smudges from scattering off the page, was to add a dot of white in each eye. She taught us to use a Q-Tip or the back end of a paintbrush.
At the time it felt like wizardry—the amount of life that tiny dot of white could bring to an otherwise flat animal.
It still does, kind of.
Wrapped up this little triptych of sea creatures last week for a client in Seattle. They were so much fun to paint! I really enjoy working with vibrant watercolors. He asked for a layout where they could hang staggered on a vertical plane, so I overlapped the elements from each one to give them a little continuity. I couldn’t really get them to match up perfectly in the WordPress interface, but this is close.
If you’re interested in a small watercolor commission of your own, I currently have some slots available. Get in touch at lucypcbellwood[at]gmail[dot]com for more info!
Wrapped up this little painting today. Aren’t boats just the best?
Sometimes people say things and they stick in your head until you make an illustration out of them. This is one such illustration.
