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