About a year ago, my mother got a new picture frame for our house. She wanted to keep the frame up all year but couldn’t decide what kind of picture would be bearable all year long. Summer vacation photos wouldn’t do in December and the rest of our photos always seemed to involve snow in some way, and who wants to see that after the third blizzard in April? After searching through computer backlogs of photos that weren’t deemed worthy to be seen by respectable members of society, we still couldn’t decide on an image.

During this time, I had been searching for a new project to occupy my creative time. I had recently rediscovered some watercolors under a pile of gel pens from the third grade and some glitter glue that had long turned into a glitter brick. Even though I used to hate watercolors, I found that when I combined them with the pen and ink style that I had been recently using, they created something other than a watery blob. In fact, I quite liked the range and subtly of the colors that I could achieve through the watercolors and latched onto my new project.

Each month, I decided to create a seasonal picture to put in my mother’s new frame. Every painting would respond to the colors and activities that I associated with the season and see what kinds of moods those hues developed. In winter, I think of soft, hushed grays and blues that remind me of snow falling at nighttime. Spring time is full of pastels and flowers that grow more vibrant each month. Fall is my favorite and is full of fiery reds and deep golden browns contrasting with the sharp blue skies. I haven’t finished all twelve months yet but take a look in the Color Section and check out the nine months that are up!  Here is my picture for December.

Seasons Greetings!

~Katharine

Confession Time: I love clothes. And when I say I love clothes, I mean I have a closet half the size of a dorm room and it is color-coded within an inch of its life. Don’t even get me started on shoes. From A-line dresses, tall boots, button-down shirts, anything with houndstooth on it and a never ending supply of cardigans, I’m always on the look out for another creative piece to add to my wardrobe.

So when I found out we would be doing fashion-style drawings in my studio class, I was really excited. Our model brought in a ton of different vintage outfits with a variety of accessories and I went to town. We were working in a unit on gestures at the time, so most of these drawings were done in only 2-3 minutes. I started off with one vibrant watercolor  to get the basic shape and movement of the figure and then went in with black ink and an old-fashioned fountain pen to fill in some more of the details. In my pieces, I emphasized the nipped-in, wasp waist and exaggerated the long legs to give it that classic fashion illustration style.

We played around with this set up for a few days and the results were great. Each person’s gestures were completely different and had so much personality. Take a peek in the Figure Drawing section of the site and check out the new drawings!

~Katharine

“The Hunter and the Hare” always brings back fond memories for me. Whenever my family went to visit my grandparents, they used to read us stories from a book called “Slovenly Peter.” As a child, I always liked the pictures but never thought terribly hard about the content of the stories themselves. The book contained an assortment of different stories and rhymes about children that I always assumed  were a sort of generic children’s fairy tales.

About two years ago, I rediscovered my grandparent’s copy “Slovenly Peter” in a bookcase and eagerly drew it open to revisit the old stories I had almost forgotten about. But they weren’t quite the warm and fuzzy bedtime stories I remembered. These tales weren’t exactly concerned with today’s safety precautions, tender feelings or mental turmoil inside the heads of youngsters. In fact, the morals of these stories were about as subtle as getting slapped across the face with a live carp. For example, in the story of young Mary, if you play with matches (and neglect the advice of your wise feline friends) you will burn to a crisp and your two-faced, back-stabbing cats will steal your best hair ribbons right off your smoking pile of ashes. Or  if you suck your thumb, a man with long legs and a giant pair of scissors will bust into your house and cut off your thumbs (and you thought the Kool-Aid commercials were scary).

Upon further investigation, I found out that “Slovenly Peter” was actually one of the first children’s books, originally written in 1845. If you think these stories are harsh, evidently there was an even greater lack of children’s books at the time. The author, Heinreich Hoffman, observed this deficit and decided he would write some of his own to give as a gift for his three year old son. And in good Victorian Fashion, the lessons are burned into your brain in a highly effective fashion. They certainly worked for me, because I NEVER sucked my thumb and always listened to the advice of my cats.

So while I was thumbing through the pages of the book, I was fascinated by the stories but thought the pictures just didn’t do such wonderfully bizarre stories justice. In particular, “The Hunter and the Hare” sparked my imagination and I thought I just had to illustrate it. I won’t give away the ending, but the moral is definitely there in good ol’ carp in the face fashion. Go learn something!

~Katharine

How lovely to see you! Welcome to my wonderful new website where I’m trying to give the best illustration of my illustration skills that I can. I’ve had a passion for drawing ever since I can remember and the pieces here are just a few of my favorites that I’ve been working on for the past several years.

So far, I have a few of my running projects posted. The Watertower is a paper written at the University of Vermont that features a quirky combination of opinion, satirical, political, fashion and general life-in-Burlington pieces. The paper still uses all hand drawn illustrations and it’s a treat to see what kind of piece I get to illustrate each week.

I also have my ongoing Alice Project, which has loads of new material to follow. The project started about two years ago when I found a blank book with an Alice in Wonderland illustration on the cover. Inspired by the multitude of characters and fantastical vignettes found in the works of Lewis Carroll, I decided to fill the book with different styles of Alice illustrations. I try to make each drawing different by using various styles, pens and times. I make a point not to do any sketches in advance so that the drawings are kept loose and whimsical.

I am also currently taking a wonderful figure drawing class at the University of Vermont. The human form has always been one of my favorite subjects to draw and I’ve been loving the class. Once again, lots of good stuff to come!

As I’ve mentioned, this site is a work in progress so please be patient as we upload images and text and try to figure out the formatting. The computer world is not my natural habitat and I’m much more comfortable with a pen and paper than a laptop. I hope you enjoy the site and any constructive comments, questions or concerns are music to my ears!

~Katharine