Sacred Well Holiday Artisans Faire

Upcoming Appearance!

November 20
Sacred Well
536 Grand Ave
Oakland CA
11AM - 8PM

If you're a local, come enjoy the Grand Lake Farmers' Market and then stop by the shop for this intimate holiday faire! If there are any items in particular you would like me to bring, please feel free to drop an email before the event with your request. I'll have books, prints, tarot, calendars, originals, but feel free to visit just to meet and chat! The Sacred Well will have a rotating group of artisan guests throughout the month of November. Check their website for the full schedule.

New Batch of ETSY Pendants & Voottoo sale ending soon

New batch of ETSY pendants posted today! Lots of new designs in this installment, from my more recent paintings.


Also, don't forget if you want to get a 20% discount on skins, the VOOTTOO sale is only lasting until the end of this week (october 31). Just enter the code "STEPHLAWYES" when you checkout with your purchase to get the sale price!

Mab of Dreams

Mab of Dreams
Medium: Watercolors
Size: 17x12 inches
Prints & Original: -here-
Detail Closeups: -here-
Sketch: -here-

* * *

The colors for this piece ended up being a surprise. I'd intended originally a rocky outcropping jutting into the dark blue night sky. Somewhere along the line that quickly changed instead into the dusky green of forest shadows. The initial intention of golden butterflies/dreams/souls took on a different aspect than I'd planned as well, with rich blue hues. I wanted to create in Mab, a creature of otherworld fae beauty; but beware and do not forget that she has a dark side, stark and icy, a masterful manipulator of man's deepest desires.

* * *

Shakespeare - Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, Act I, scene IV :

And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love;
O’er courtiers’ knees, that dream on court'sies straight,
O’er lawyers’ fingers, who straight dream on fees,
O’er ladies ‘ lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are


* * *


And Thomas Hood, "Queen Mab":

A little fairy comes at night,
Her eyes are blue, her hair is brown,
With silver spots upon her wings,
And from the moon she flutters down.

She has a little silver wand,
And when a good child goes to bed
She waves her wand from right to left,
And makes a circle round its head.

And then it dreams of pleasant things,
Of fountains filled with fairy fish,
And trees that bear delicious fruit,
And bow their branches at a wish;

Of arbors filled with dainty scents
From lovely flowers that never fade;
Bright flies that glitter in the sun,
And glow-worms shining in the shade.

And talking birds with gifted tongues,
For singing songs and telling tales,
And pretty dwarfs to show the way
Through fairy hills and fairy dales.

But when a bad child goes to bed,
From left to right she weaves her rings,
And then it dreams all through the night
Of only ugly horrid things!

Then lions come with glaring eyes,
And tigers growl, a dreadful noise,
And ogres draw their cruel knives,
To shed the blood of girls and boys.

Then stormy waves rush on to drown,
Or raging flames come scorching round,
Fierce dragons hover in the air,
And serpents crawl along the ground.

Then wicked children wake and weep,
And wish the long black gloom away;
But good ones love the dark, and find
The night as pleasant as the day.

Calendar (Spanish)

A question -

I have 20 of these 2011 calendars (potentially) available. 13 months on it. The publisher has some copies for me, but unfortunately shipping from Spain is expensive! So before I tell him to go forward with that, I wanted to see if there would even be any interest for purchasing these. They are in Spanish, however there isn't a whole lot of text on the dates so the language wouldn't be much of a deterrent to use. You can see some sample pages below. The layout and choice of artwork is quite nice. Price would be $15.00 + shipping. Interested anyone?

Queen Mab Sketch

Mab of Dreams

Sketch for next painting. This is on the board now and ready to be painted. It's been hard this past week to drag myself up to being motivated to finish the sketch and get started painting for some reason. But hopefully now that the hard part is done (brainstorming, research, design, sketching) I can settle in and get working on this.

An earlier stage when I was just noodling around with the concept in my sketchbook:

Keyword Sketch Cards

clockwise: spirals, larimar, maenad, hades, fabulous, compassion, salamander, masquerade, owl

clockwise: music, foxes, soaring, mountain, time, aslan, hummingbird, fairytale, juniper, author

Skins Discounts for October

Now through the end of October, Voottoo is offering a 20% discount off of skins. Just enter the code "STEPHLAWYES" when you checkout with your purchase! Here are some samples with various devices:

Lots of art to choose from, including my zodiac series!

Filling Up the Sea

Filling Up the Sea
Medium: Watercolors
Size: 17x12 inches
Details: -here-

My dad saw my sketches and sent me a link from the Chinese Wikipedia with a beautiful jing wei painting at a railway station. It's painted on a dome and has a very interesting point of view - from directly below the girl/bird as she is defying the ocean!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Tinajin_railway_station_ceiling_0857.JPG

"Jingwei" is a diameter of 40 meters, 21 meters high, separated by 10 stone pillars surrounded by 600 square meters round arched dome painting. Located in the Tianjin Railway Station on the dome of the hall, in 1988 by the Chinese Artists Association, vice chairman of Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, Professor Qin Zheng and his five students WANG Yuqi, Wu Enhai, horse park, Wang Xiaojie, high Dongren United draw.

The Books are In!

My husband's a sweetie. He complains about Shadowscapes taking over every available nook in our tiny house, but he did help me move 3000 pounds of books this afternoon from the curbside into our garage. 100 boxes of Shadowscapes Minor Arcana books are now safely ensconced there. I'll start packing them up this week. It'll take me a week or two to get caught up with the pre-orders before I'll start on new orders, and as always if you order the sketch option, please be a little bit more patient. I shall be sketching away for the next few days to get all those custom orders ready as well!

Meanwhile, Jing Wei will have to have the pause button pressed until I can get all this stuff out the door. It's off to a good start though! I don't really have any plans for the colors, just kinda letting it develop organically.

Jing Wei Bird Sketch (Final)

Here she is again, ready to be painted now.

I did another painting based on this story almost 10 years ago now (yikes that went by fast)!

Here's the older version.

Strangely, though I remembered doing this older version, I didn't recall the pose at all when I sketched this new one; and yet she's still more or less in the same attitude, though viewed from a different angle!

Jing Wei Bird Sketch

This Chinese fable was first told to me by someone when I was in college.

The youngest daughter of the Emperor one day took a boat out to sea. As she sailed, the Ocean grew fierce and a storm blew up without warning, capsizing the boat and drowning the girl. She was transformed into a magical bird, living on an island rock in the middle of the Ocean. Each day she would fly back and forth from her rock to the Ocean, dropping one stone or twig at a time into the pounding waves, crying, "Jing wei jing wei!" as she did so (and thus how she came to be called the jing wei bird).

One day the Ocean grew tired of her pestering. "Why do you throw your little stones into me day after day?!" the Ocean roared.

"I will fill you up with my twigs and stones, that you claim no other hapless victim!" the jing wei bird responded.

The Ocean laughed. "Foolish little bird. You cannot fill me up! I am vast and endless!"

The little bird was not deterred. "I will continue to throw stones into you, and I will succeed even if it takes me a thousand years!"

And so the saying came about that One has the indomitable spirit of the jing wei bird.

* * *

From the sketchbook, scribbling after Claire went to sleep the other night:

Refined sketches for transfer to the illustration board. The Ocean:

Jing Wei bird:

Keyword Sketch Cards

These went out on Friday. Clockwise: Skuld, cat, mist, sunbeams, organized, life, china, climb, wolves, melusine, serendipity