April 2023 calendar — talismans and amulets

These calendar pages are made possible by patrons, who get them a little bit early, along with alternative colourways, and other sneak-peeks and behind-the-scenes art: patreon.com/tanaudel. It is also supported by those very kind people who throw a few dollars towards it via the tip jar: ko-fi.com/tanaudel.

I was thinking about objects that fit perfectly in the hand — just the right weight — and pocket-pieces and lucky charms and cheap old plastic brooches and pendants from cereal boxes… 

Some of these are based on ones I’ve seen pictures of (art deco cicadas), or have (the cat in plastic, a bat in silver, a hedgehog-gnome from a Kinder Surprise), or love (the faïence hippopotamus). Others (the bear, the hound, the cormorant) just felt like they belonged in a story.

As usual it started as tiny sketches in my notebook:

Most importantly, a faience hippo (apparently there are over 50 known examples of blue faience hippos, a joyful thing to exist in the world).

For those who like to see the very rough construction lines — here is a short timelapse video of the sketch I used as a basis for the inks (done in Procreate on the iPad). For a while the cormorant was going to be a duck, and I went through a few frogs.

I used that sketch as an underlay on my lightbox, and inked the art with a brush (#10 round, I think) and Dr Ph. Martin’s Black Star Ink:

Then I scanned the inks and coloured them in Photoshop. Supporters on Patreon also received an extra colourways.

I am planning a repeating version of the design, and will let you know when it is available as prints, etc.

And below (for personal use) are the printable versions — pre-coloured and to colour in yourself.

You can contribute to the calendar (and get it and other behind-the-scenes things early) at patreon.com/tanaudel (starts at US$1/month) or tip the artist (me) a few dollars through Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/tanaudel. Either is greatly appreciated! And of course many previous designs are available as prints etc on Redbubble and Spoonflower. Also, I have a very infrequent mailing list for occasional updates/major announcements: Mailing List Sign-Up

Illustrations and a talk! Spowers & Syme / A Matter of Looking at QUT Art Museum

Two new exhibitions have just opened at the QUT Art Museum at QUT Gardens Point, Brisbane (alongside the City botanic gardens) — Spowers & Syme (a National Gallery Touring Exhibition), and the companion exhibition from the QUT Art Museum’s collection, A Matter of Looking.

They are both warm and vivid and generous exhibitions. I highly recommend checking them out, particularly as many of the fragile works in Spowers & Syme — with all their interwar energy — may not be on exhibition again for some time.

And, accordingly, I was thrilled to be asked to design illustrations for the activity space, getting to spend time staring at all these works and distilling them down to a tumble of black-and-white energy. (I love playing in others’ worlds, whether artists or authors, trying to see through their eyes and then again, anew, through my own.)

AND the museum has just announced that they are part of the Brisbane Art & Design festival this May! As part of that, I will be there for an artist floor talk!

Join QUT Galleries and Museums Engagement Officer, Renae Belton in conversation with local illustrator and writer Kathleen Jennings who has been commissioned to design an activity space where people can explore pattern making, drawing and creative play whilst visiting our current exhibitions, ‘Spowers & Syme’ and ‘A Matter of Looking: 20th century works from the QUT Art Collection’.

Date: Friday 12 May
When: 12:30 -1:30PM
Place: QUT Art Museum
Free, bookings essentials, registrations via Eventbrite.

‘Spowers & Syme’ is a National Gallery Touring Exhibition supported by Visions of Australia, Major Patron David Thomas AM, and the Gordon Darling Foundation. ‘Spowers & Syme’ is a Know My Name project.

Album cover process: Ballads for Lovesick Bandits

Foulweather Bluff, who previously featured my mermaid-and-sailor linocut on their album Love Songs For Jilted Mermaids, commissioned a new image for their latest album: Ballads for Lovesick Bandits. The album is now available on most streaming sites, including Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music and YouTube. (And the art is available on Redbubble, should you desire e.g. a bandit shirt, case, or set of coasters.)

Here are the early sketches.

We went with A, with a wanted poster swapped in for the tombstone (although I still love that idea).

I traced that down onto the carving block — or tried to. This particular surface did not want to take any sort of transfer, and also had a lot more spring than the block I used for the (much smaller!) mermaid. It was a struggle, but an invigorating one.

I made quite a few little prints, adjusting and correcting, and then getting a few that were clean enough to scan in.

After I scanned it in, I vectorised the image so it would scale cleanly, tidied up a few areas, and worked out a couple different treatments of the ink and paper texture. In C, for example, there’s a lot of variation in the depth of blue.

We went with the simple single texture in H — reminiscent of a rough woodblock effect (and also slightly tilted the eyes on the poster to be closer to the interim sketch).

The album is delightful — clear, sweet, mellow and moody. Check it out on various streaming sites (including Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music and YouTube).

And the image is also available on Redbubble on shirts, cases, coasters, scarves, etc, for all your banditry needs.

February 2023 Calendar: 12 Dancing

These calendar pages are made possible by patrons, who get them a little bit early, along with alternative colourways, and other sneak-peeks and behind-the-scenes art: patreon.com/tanaudel. It is also supported by those very kind people who throw a few dollars towards it via the tip jar: ko-fi.com/tanaudel.

It has been a while since I played with the “Twelve Dancing Princesses” story, and I’d recently been flipping through some books of European costume history, so here are the ladies!

They began as digital sketches.

But I inked them with a brush, before colouring them digitally.

If you want to see the sketching and inking process, here is a timelapse. The digital sketches are drawn in Procreate on the iPad; the inking is on Canson illustration paper with a round brush (#8? maybe?) with Dr Ph Martin’s Black Star Matte Ink (usually I use Winsor Newton for drawing), and a light box/light pad.

The video switches from digital to ink at about 2.10.

Patrons also have access to a more muted full spectrum, and some lovely soft greens. And I’ve also attached the yellow-and-white version because it was the original idea, and for the sake of some 1970s murder mysteries involving reproductions of ancient Greek pottery that I had on in the background while sketching.

And below (for personal use) are the printable versions — pre-coloured and to colour in yourself.

If you like these and/or like supporting artists, you can contribute to the calendar (and get it and other behind-the-scenes things early) at patreon.com/tanaudel (starts at US$1/month) or tip me a few dollars through Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/tanaudel. Either is greatly appreciated! And of course many previous designs are available as prints etc on Redbubble and Spoonflower. Also, I have a very occasional mailing list for occasional updates/major announcements: Mailing List Sign-Up

All the 2022 calendar pages

Every month (with the support of patrons) I make a printable (and colour-able) calendar page. (You, too, can support the calendar, receive the files early, and get occasional alternative colourways here: patreon.com/tanaudel).

Here are all the designs for 2022:

To view the art larger, as a gallery/slideshow, click the images below.

Many of the designs had multiple colourways in the original posts (and a few extra for patrons). You can see those, and descriptions of the process, under the calendar tag or here: January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December.

I’ve also made a colouring book of the line-art for patrons at the stationery level.

Note: Want to support the arts? This calendar is made possible by patrons, who get it a little bit early, along with other sneak-peeks and behind-the-scenes art (patron levels start at very low amounts!): patreon.com/tanaudel. It is also supported by those very kind people who throw a few dollars towards it via the tip jar: ko-fi.com/tanaudel. And many of these designs are available as prints, clothes, cases, etc on Redbubble, as fabrics and wallpaper on Spoonflower, and as prints in InPrnt. 

A gleaming fox for a stolen heir: an under-cover reveal

Cover art by Sean Freeman, design by Karina Granda

Holly Black’s next Elfhame novel, The Stolen Heir, has been announced and is now available for preorder!

Return to the opulent world of Elfhame, filled with intrigue, betrayal, and dangerous desires, with this first book of a captivating new duology from the #1 New York Times bestselling author Holly Black. 

A runaway queen. A reluctant prince. And a quest that may destroy them both...

I can only show you what Holly has shared so far, but that includes what’s under the dust jacket — a foiled fox-and-heart, by me!

Photo pinched from Holly’s instagram

Process posts will follow once the book is out (patrons will get first look).

Kanagawa University mini exhibition

As part of Australia Week at Kanagawa University and the Festival of the Fantastic in Australian and Japanese Arts, there is currently a poster/print exhibition of art by Jazmina Cininas and me! It runs from 14 until 28 November 2022, and if you are in Kanagawa, you can find the more precise whereabouts in this Instagram post from their English department.

Includes art for Frances Harding (Utz Books), Juliet Marillier (Serenity Press), Corella Press (University of Queensland) and Wildendrem (Phantom Mill Games)

And you can have a look at other free in-person and virtual events on the website for the Festival of the Fantastic in Australian and Japanese Arts.

Wildendrem — Kickstarting (funded in two days!)

I had the chance to illustrate the cover for Wildendrem, from Phantom Mill Games, a fantasy campaign setting that is kickstarting now. At the date of this post, there are 20 days left to run in the campaign, which funded fully by its second day

Wildendrem is a land lousy with knights, where the quest is the chief currency, and where the dark dreamings of the ancient world still seep from the shadows. It is a land gone strange: picture a black light Avalon, or the Knights of the Round Table in the grips of a sorcerous hallucination. The Wildendrem style of fantasy adventure is a vibrant combination of high medieval and deep weird.

The subject of this first volume is Gnolune, the Valley of Flowers, one of Wildendrem’s nine provinces. It is a place of decadence and dangerous beauty, in which flower knights roam the meadows in search of challengers, monks make wine to inspire visions of a lost empire, and a sorceress tends to the eons-long birth of a vegetal godling.

You can support the game, pre-order, and perhaps push it into stretch goal territory here: Wildendrem Volume One.

The Knights of the Upended Goblet. (Illustration by Evangeline Gallagher)

November 2022 calendar — iconographies

These calendar pages are made possible by patrons, who get them a little bit early, along with alternative colourways, and other sneak-peeks and behind-the-scenes art: patreon.com/tanaudel. It is also supported by those very kind people who throw a few dollars towards it via the tip jar: ko-fi.com/tanaudel.

For November, and my sore elbow, here is a set of tiny motifs — I drew them half-size with a different pen than usual (a Kuretake Zig Mangaka flexible pen, instead of a Hunt Crowquill 102 dip pen), to spare my arm.

My heart is still with the dip pen, and I will return to it as soon as my elbow mends, but I do enjoy the graphic qualities of these images.

I was also trying to use a different colour scheme, but managed to circle back around to my old favourite blue and gold.

Patrons also got a bubble-gum and raspberry version.

I’m planning a repeating pattern, but I’m also in transit at the moment, so that will probably be a little while away.

Below (for personal use) are the printable versions — one pre-coloured and one to colour in yourself.

If you like these and/or like supporting artists, you can contribute to the calendar (and get it and other behind-the-scenes things early) at patreon.com/tanaudel (starts at US$1/month) or tip me a few dollars through Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/tanaudel. Either is greatly appreciated! And of course many previous designs are available as prints etc on Redbubble and Spoonflower.

Also, I have a very occasional mailing list (not a newsletter), if you’d like to keep up with any major announcements: Mailing List Sign-Up

Fabrics and wallpapers: Enchanted forests and musical skeletons

Samples have arrived from Spoonflower, which means the enchanted forests and skeleton orchestra designs are now available as fabrics and wallpaper!

(photo taken in haste on my mother’s striped ironing board!)

This grasscloth wallpaper is gorgeous, by the way — extraordinarily textured and very crisp.

I highly recommend ordering swatches first. Spoonflower has a variety of fabrics and wallpapers, which means colours can print subtly differently — for example, the cottons tend to be a bit more muted, the velvets are more saturated (and the Celosia velvet brings out yellow tones), while the wallpapers have crisp lines on a range of textures.

You can find them all at my Spoonflower shop — and as well as allowing you to buy lengths, Spoonflower also offers some pre-sewn bed and table linens. (And for other objects, there’s Redbubble.)