I hope everyone got to see the moon, Venus and Jupiter on Monday night. Very cool. I couldn't resist stopping on my drive home to snap this picture of the 3 planets over the Potomac. I absolutely love my drive to my day job since we moved (from Fredericksburg, VA to Alexandria , VA) about 8 months ago. I used to commute by train a total of 3 hours a day, now it's a quick 10 minute trip down the GW Parkway past Mount Vernon and along the river to work. A few weeks ago, I saw 2 bald eagles wrangling over a fish in the morning fog. It was pretty amazing, and the sunsets are always spectacular. As you can see, this one was a brilliant orange line under the deep blue clouds. Anyway, I'm off to fulfill one of my husband's Christmas presents, seeing the Dan Band at the 9:30 Club. It should be a good time, we're meeting a few of his friends there and I'm sure will be shouting the words to cheesy girl power ballads sprinkled with obscenities along with the rest of the crowd after a beer or two!

Yay, the Christmas card is done!

One less thing is off my plate for the holidays! Maybe now I can get to some shopping. I've been picking up small things here and there, mostly from Etsy. I got my husband a few prints from John Golden's shop- the "Belongs to You" and "Beats for You". We have a brown bedroom (from the previous owners, Dev likes it so I agreed to keep it brown for awhile but really I am just dying to paint it blue like nearly every other wall in my house), so I thought the red hearts would pop nicely. I also got my sister a bracelet (and myself a turquoise bead necklace which I LOVE) from dorelabear. I know Dev got me a bunch of stuff from Etsy as well, but I don't know what yet (despite my best efforts). I do love these squirrel vases from Pretty Random Objects, which I think are very fitting for a DC girl such as myself, since we have so many squirrels here!


I'm also working on my next few prints: Baltimore, Boston, and another DC. I'm still in the sketching phase of all 3, which I use to help me decide what view I want to use, perspective, etc. They're not much to look at right now, but I thought I'd upload them to show a bit of my process, since I do spend a lot of time coming up with the final designs. It doesn't always come as easy as I'd like to get a view that people (both tourists and locals of a particular city) will recognize and enjoy, to get a feel for the city as best I can, and to get a view tall and thin enough to accomodate the size constraints of gocco that will also make the people in the view a relatively similar size in all of the prints. And to make it pretty and all. So, here are my (very preliminary) sketches for B-more, Boston and DC:

So, I'm pretty excited to make the more detailed drawings and get them in the shop soon (I hope). Also, here are some gift tags I made today to go with my gift wrap, inspired by, of course, Rory.
Now it's time to go home and set up my new drying rack and drafting table!

So, it feels really great to get Chicago Love and Philly Love finished. Chicago gave me some issues, mostly because fountains are kinda hard to draw in the strictly black and white format that gocco demands (I know, I can use shading, etc. to achieve grays, but I haven't done that in any of the other prints, and I want them to have a visual continuity), but I think they came out well. Right now I'm kinda frantically trying to get my parents' office holiday card finished (I always wait until the last minute) as well as Baltimore Love done this week. Baltimore is foiling me a bit because I like doing vertical prints, and the inner harbor really lends itself to a horizontal rendering. So, I'm still thinking it over.

Here are the cards I've done for the office in the past (the old town Alexandria ones) and my own from last year, which I did in burgundy gocco ink.

The one I did for us was when our rabbit, Puppy, was alive and before we got Rory. Puppy (and Shark, our other rabbit who passed a few years back) will definitely be missed this Christmas. Especially by the cats, who in holidays past got chased around by a 6 lb. mini lop rabbit, and now are chased around by a 32 lb corgi. Poor Wahoo will never have peace, as I am sure we will end up with more pets (soon, if have anything to do with it)!

Hello!

Hello, I'm Megan, and this is my new blog! It'll mostly be about what sort of shenanigans I'm up to in my art studio and Etsy shop, but I'll also be highlighting my favorite finds from other Etsy (and I'm sure plenty of non-Etsy) artists and other sorts of random things. I have a passion for printmaking and illustration, in particular fashion and childrens' book illustration, so there will be plenty of that as well. And I'm sure you lucky people (if anyone ever reads this aside from my mother) will get to hear all about my 3 fur-kids, Wahoo, Killian and Rory. Which, come to think of it, may make my mother stop reading because she hears enough about what sort of nonsense those 3 get into on a daily basis (I am still trying to scrub out all of the black india ink that Rory LOVES to eat from my white couch- she chewed through a bottle of it that was in a box on the dining room table (quite a feat, considering she's a Corgi), dumped it on the hardwood floor, rolled in it, and then rolled all over the couch, on 2 different occasions).