Sketch for Summer Fairy / July's Print (Patreon)

Hello again wonderful Patrons! 

July's print is in the works and the plan is to get started printing this week. Thank you for your patience as I get both July and August's prints out asap to get back on track after a crazy July. 

I'm finally at a place where I'm confident moving forward with this Summer Fairy sketch! Next up is final line art, although I think I've noodled enough on the fairy and the tomatoes to call the line art partially finished already. I'm thinking this print will be called Garden Fairy, because I'm adding so many garden-heavy elements, complete with caterpillar-rabbits!? lol I wanted to make little fantasy creatures surrounding them like I did for the Chestnut Fairy!

This piece is partially inspired by my mom's garden in North Carolina, where she has sunflowers, tomatoes, eggplants and basil growing faster than she can harvest them! Still debating whether or not I want the floating lanterns, or if I want them to be dangling from the tomato plant so there's more of a sense that this fairy lives here all year round. 

Also very excited to make washi tape from the borders again, like I did with Chestnut Fairy. Hopefully soon I'll have time to make washi of the Bug Fairy decorative borders as well!

Work station set up

Below is a photo of my work area! I'm using a Wacom Cintiq with Photoshop, a grippy on my wacom pen, my water that can't be more than an arms length away or else I get <c r a n k y> and the Chestnut Fairy and Bug Fairy resting on my laptop so I can reference the compositions and details regularly while drawing! I want to make sure these all feel really fun together and not too repetitive, or too different from one another that one looks out of place or they don't feel like a cohesive series. Also, not pictured, is my ipad I have set up on the other side to look at reference (how does tomato) and change the music without looking at my phone (the death of my work day). 

Here are some close ups of my favorite parts of this sketch so far. The little rabbit caterpillars are killin me. 

I also added a grumpy frog blob and a dragonfly! Let's see how they change in the final line art but I'm thinking they stay. 

Updates and Events!

This Friday in Los Angeles I'll be reading my little zines Mad Girl and The Demon on Sourwood Mountain (and maybe some new work!) for NY based publisher CRAM's book tour. Catch me and three other cartoonists at Skylight Books on August 11th- check my instagram or @CRAM_books on instagram for more info!

See you this year at Lightbox! Not sure if I shared here or not but I've gotten a few questions about it so I thought I'd let you know I'll be at Lightbox this year in Pasadena in late october.

After Lightbox are two big trips- In November I'll be in London before heading up to Leeds/Harrogate for Thought Bubble. Would love to have a little meet up in London! And then the plan is to visit Tokyo for some conventions! Or just for fun and see friends, make a little residency for myself out of it where I just make a ton of sketches for new work and prints. I haven't been back since my residency in October 2019 and I've missed it a lot. Would be great to Riso print from there and use some cool colors banned by the FDA there lol!

Ok, that's it for now! Will circle back in when I've finished the line art and rough color and heading into printing! Also just finished the Howl rough sketch, still needs some cooking on that one but I'll share it soon ^_^ really excited for that one!

xo natalie