Monday, May 23, 2011

A WARM WELCOME TO FANTASY ARTIST, AUTHOR AND ZAZZLER KIRSTEN EDWARDS

Most people know Kirsten Edwards as Hinterland Harmony Illustrations by KLeighE. She also signs her art with the name KLeighE. Born in Kentucky, Kirsten has lived in Texas since 1969. She and her husband and fur babies now reside in Sanger, Texas.


Kirsten enjoys being out in nature and listening to the birds sing. She loves books, especially old ones and loves reading. As Kirsten is fascinated with how imaginary characters come to life, her favorite moves are animation and fantasy.


As a child Kirsten loved coloring books and was careful to keep everything ‘in the lines’. As she got older she doodles and colored ‘Doodle Art’ posters. In 1977 she started drawing, but after high school she put it down and left it behind her. Kirsten began drawing again in 2001 in order to illustrate her first book ‘The Hinterland Faeries in the Quest for the Flower and the Pearl’. That project took several years as it involved coloring 44 pictures with Prismacolors and Kirsten was also working full time.


Kirsten draws cartoons for children and adults who are children at heart. She loves drawing faeries, but also does child characters and likes to play with fantasy scenery. Her outlines are a darker color than the filled in area of the design and she likes to add lots of detail. Kirsten didn’t realize or pay attention until last year when she realized that Disney art is drawn in a similar manner. She has always loved Disney and thinks that has had some influence on her art.


Inspiration for Kirsten comes from things she sees in life, social issues or just ideas that pop into her head and insist on being expressed!


Kirsten is a self taught artist. In 2006, after an auto accident, she really began to focus more on her artwork. It was a diversion from the pain she was in. She says she is happiest with her nose stuck in her computer drawing a faery and bringing her to life. Kirsten’s style has changed some over the years as she has grown as an artist. She collects items from nature such as leaves, sticks, rocks and flowers, and scans them into her computer. Then she manipulates the resulting images in Photoshop to create fantasy realms for her faeries to live in, or wedding invitations and other designs. Her characters are drawn on paper with pencil first. These drawings are then scanned to create digital images, which Kirsten colors digitally using her Wacom tablet and pen in Photoshop. She is now teaching herself Adobe’s Creative Suite 5 and animation with ‘Toon Toom Animate’. This artist and author now has two published picture storybooks available for purchase and is working on several more.

DAVID SEIDLER writer of 'The King's Speech' with KLeighE's Hinterland Harmony Image Collection

POP STAR ASHLEE KEATING with KLeighE artwork


In July 2010, Kirsten became a member of ‘The IndiExibit’ and participated in the ESPY Awards Gift Lounge. It has been such an exciting adventure that she chose to send her art to more gift lounges this year. 2011 gift lounges she has participated in so far include the Golden Globes, the Sundance Film Festival and the Kids Choice Awards. The next lounge is in June 2011 at the MTV Movie Awards. In addition to participating in these events, Kirsten is also an administrative assistant for this group.







Recently, Kirsten has licensed her designs to several companies. Borealis Art Dolls is bringing Kirsten’s faeries to life through charming cloth dolls. They are all hand sewn with lots of love. Kats Magical Patches is creating fabric patches and iron transfers of Kirsten’s characters. Crafting stamps of Kirsten’s faeries and characters will be available from Queen Kats Stamps. Kirsten is also working on animating one of her books with the Toon Boom animation software.


Other new projects in the work are some exciting new characters and stories. These include a black swan faery parody, an Arthurian Rocker chick, and a Karma and Dharma duo.


Currently Kirsten’s art work is available online on t-shirts, stickers, mugs, aprons, prints, postage stamps, greeting cards, post cards, skateboards, Ked Shoes, necklaces and many other fun products through Print on Demand sites. Once Kirsten figures out eBay, she plans to offers jewellery featuring her faeries and ACEO cards.


HINTERLAND HARMONY ON ZAZZLE

KIRSTEN EDWARDS ON REDBUBBLE

HINTERLAND HARMONY ON CAFEPRESS


HINTERLAND HARMONY WEBSITE

KIRSTEN EDWARDS ON LULU


FOLLOW KIRSTEN EDWARDS ON TWITTER


All Images Copyright Kirsten Edwards, All Rights Reserved

Edited by Ruth J Jamieson, Copyright Ruth J Jamieson, All Rights Reserved

Monday, May 9, 2011

MEET OUR FEATURE ZAZZLER SWEDISH ARTIST MARIANA EWA

Ewa Mariana Asklof is known as Mariana Ewa online. Mariana lives in Hassela, a small village in Sweden about 200 miles (350km) north of Stockholm. Home for Mariana is a small farm which she shares with her partner and her young daughter. Prior to an accident with her horses a few years ago, Mariana worked in healthcare for almost 25 years. Now she enjoys life with her family, her cats and her horses and she creates beautiful art.


Mariana has been a cat and horse lover since she was 12 years old and her hobbies and interests have always revolved around her horses and cats. She has also always loved to take photographs.


For years Mariana used a Nikon analog camera. Her first digital camera was an Olympus 765. Later she bought a Canon 350D and now she uses a Pentax K10D, 18-55mm, Tamron 28-300mm. A photograph she took with the Pentax was the winner of a photo contest in a computer magazine.


Mariana does not have any formal training or education in using computers, software or in photography. She has learned what she knows along the way through trial and error. This includes creating fractals and digitally manipulating her photographs.


Inspiration for Mariana’s photographs are her cats and horses and the beauty in nature. Photographing nature has brought her more awareness of the abundance of beauty in even the simplest things around her.


In 2006 Mariana started a site on CAEDES and she learned a lot. Caedes allows artists to create computer wallpapers and share them for personal use. Creating the wallpapers prompted Mariana to experiment with her photographs and she learned a lot about digital software while doing that.


Next Mariana discovered Redbubble and opened a portfolio there. Her hope was that she might sell some of her artwork. She met many wonderful people who are now lifelong friends. Participating on Redbubble gave Mariana an opportunity to learn some new techniques of working with her photographs.


A couple of years ago a friend on Redbubble told Mariana about Zazzle and she took a look at the site. She started her store on Zazzle first to make things for her friends in her village. Mariana found she loved the Zazzle site and she made a lot more new friends. After awhile she opened her store to the public. Recently Mariana started a second store on Zazzle, Mariana Ewa Pattern. The store will feature digital art patterns on all of Zazzle’s products.


Mariana also has a store on Artamatik where you can find her art on jewellery, watches, clocks and a lot more.


Coming soon Mariana is planning on adding more digital art to her stores on Wedding products. She is planning on themed collections in colors such as lime, lilac, blue and so on. As well she always has more beautiful photographs of cats, horses and nature in general


MARIANA EWA ON CAEDES

MARIANA EWA ON REDBUBBLE


MARIANA EWA ON ZAZZLE


MARIANA EWA PATTERN ON ZAZZLE

MARIANA EWA ON ARTAMATIK


MARIANA EWA ON FACEBOOK

MARIANA EWA STORE ON FACEBOOK


MARIANA EWA ON TWITTER

All Images Copyright Mariana Ewa, All Rights Reserved

Written by Ruth J Jamieson, Copyright Ruth J Jamieson, All Rights Reserved

Monday, May 2, 2011

TODAY’S FEATURE ZAZZLER IS AMY MARIE

Amy Marie currently lives in New Jersey, U.S.A. However, Amy loves to travel and has lived in New Jersey, Maryland, Oklahoma, South Africa and Germany … for lack of anywhere else to be!!! She is a very spontaneous person and if someone said to her tomorrow … ‘hey, wanna move to …’ they wouldn’t have to finish the sentence and Amy would already be packing, and wherever she goes, she takes her camera.


Travel is Amy’s life. She loves to travel anywhere and everywhere! She LOVES Germany, especially Heidelberg and she would move back there in an instant!


Amy has always been a doodler. Her mother is an art teacher and her grandfather was a professional artist. Amy’s Peace People shop is comprised 100% of these little guys she used to doodle on her notebooks from the time she was about 10-11 years old. These characters always held peace signs, as they do now, although now their message has evolved to reflect the broad spectrum of Amy’s liberal-hippie-tree-hugging persona.


Amy loves color. She hand draws and edits purchased clipart, always adding bright, vibrant colors. She also loves photography, especially bright vibrant flowers and architecture. When she lived in Germany her roommates made fun of her because 1/3 of the photos she took were photos of doors, windows, stairwells, awnings, chimneys, roof lines....and other things they would overlook. But Amy loved the artistic value in them and the shots came out great! Even they had to agree, after they saw some of her shots, that they never saw things the way she did, but that her shots were beautiful. Some of those friends even had copies of Amy’s photos of the old house they lived in as their screen-savers by the time Amy left.



Life is what inspires Amy... she is inspired by what she sees. She is also inspired by her customers. Amy lives by the mantra ‘I am not the shopper’. So she does a lot of work based on what the customers seem to want. Her Zazzle shops based on this mantra are the part of Amy’s business that make her the living and allow her the ability to work on the other shops with the art she loves. This includes her Peace People shop. She gets so much more excited when items from that shop sell than when a hockey design from Just Sports sells for example.


Amy took grade school art classes along with her classmates. In College she took a Ceramics class because she needed an art class. As a child, Amy went along to many of her mother’s college art classes and learned with her mom. Amy’s grandfather, a professional artist who drew the yellow pages (before computers), looked after her after school and she watched him drawing and stenciling letters into little boxes. He would give her some of the special papers and she used to color on them. For years after he retired she used sheets of that paper for her school notes and to doodle on. She still has a few pieces of her grandfather’s art, a painting and a sketch. Amy is completely self-taught on computers and graphic programs. She has learned a lot by trial and error. She says she makes a lot of errors, but some of them work out great.


Amy Marie is a member of a small local art center near her home. She doesn’t actively participate in the gallery there, but she has given private lessons to members on how to set up a Zazzle store, setting up an eBay account and Paypal account. She will be teaching a class on beginners Photoshop this spring about how to do some basics of photo-editing in Photoshop.


Lately Amy has been playing more with her Wacom tablet. She has had if for about two years and is still not very proficient with it. So she has been using it a lot lately trying to get better so she can expand more into freehand drawing.


I asked what is coming from her easel in the near future. Amy said, ‘Ask me next week ;)’


Amy sells her art and designs online through Print on Demand sites. She currently has shops on Zazzle and Skreened. The Skreened shops are quite small right now because they require a different file type than Zazzle.


AMY MARIE’S ZAZZLE STORES:

Shopaholic Chick
Say I Love You
Dragon’s Lair
Alien Nation

Witches Wardrobe
Graduation Station
Binderific
Kiki Kitty
Edibility
Peace People
Same Sex Marriage
Triple Goddess

Anime Nation
What If
Occupation Station
Just Sports
Addicted To

B is for Birds

Chasing the Gnome
Kooblees
Left Handed Cards
That’s My Baby
Clown Town

From Santa’s Desk



AMY MARIE’S SKREENED SHOPS:

Shopaholic Chick
Liberal Hippie

AMY MARIE’S BLOGS AND MICROBLOGS:

Zazzle Showcase

Shopaholic Chick on Blogger
Feature Designs
Printed Paradise
Feature Designers
Amy Marie Designs
Zazzle Collaboration
Design of the Day
Edge Postcards
Restaurant Couture

Just a Mugger
Zazzlerific
Doggie Fashionista
Shopaholic Chick on Wordpress
The Bichy Witch
Shopoholic Chick on WP Blog
Shopoholic Chick on Posterous

AMY MARIE ON TWITTER:

The Bichy Witch
Printed Paradise
Amy Marie Designs

SHOPAHOLIC CHICK ON FACEBOOK

All Images Copyright to Amy Marie, All Rights Reserved.


Edited by Ruth J Jamieson, Copyright Ruth J Jamieson, All Rights Reserved