In Progress

I'd planned on posting a sketch I did last night of Brook Shields in truly weird movie called Wanda Nevada, but I can't find it! So this is just a little work in progress. I love pieces when they're half finished. There's just such a great feel to them. Recently Target had a bunch of cups and plates with preliminary sketches from Disney films on them. I loved them. The pencil lines and the placement marks, I love it before it's all finalized and complete.

Of course what I've posted is already ink over and the pencil lines erased,  I have yet to figure out how to scan in my pencil pieces and make it dark enough to show up without ruining the pencil-y quality of the work. If anyone knows how, let me know!

Summer Beauty

This isn't anything new, if you've visited my store during the summer at all you saw this print go up, but it's one of my favorites and I haven't posted anything on here for a while. I'm pretty proud of her skin, I can get white skin right, no problem, but darker colors often end up unrealistic for me, so this I felt looked pretty good.

I'm also completely in love with the color pallet I used. I'll be honest, I used colour lovers to pick it out, I usually do my own color choices, but I was just not feeling inspired that day and colour lovers came through for me!

Blue Girl

Nothing fancy, just killing time. Her clothes & hair are all the same shade of blue layered over and over in different blending modes. With her freckles and not-so-natural hair she reminds me of the strawberry shortcake or cherry merry muffin

The Others

Some artists tell me they don't buy other artist's art, because they make their own.

I will never understand this.

I love other artist's art, they tell different stories and see them through different eyes.

So these are some of my favorite others.

Matilou

Hailing from France Matilou ( Anne Cresci ) sells gorgeous prints of lovely girls in fanciful places.
You can also check out her blog and her flickr feed.

Hillary Bird

Hillary's work is modern and folksy all at once. I love the shapes and colors she uses. I love the fantastic stories she looks in on.

Chanyeevon

YeeVon is a designer & illustrator from Malaysia, living in Australia. I cannot help but be in love with her elegant and mysterious illustrations. The soft and romantic pallet, the lines of the hair.

Kecky

I absolutely adore this New York (?) artist. Her profile says she is a Disney castmember, but her art looks as though she should be animating their classic films. I first discovered her illustrations on Deviant Art and I fell in love.. Brilliant work.

Life at Random

Some more snippets of pictures, with a little glitter added on.

Most of these aren't the main elements in any of the drawings I'm cutting them from, but they're lovely all the same, so I think they deserve their own close ups.

Aside from drawing, reading is what I do most, so whenever I need to draw someone doing something I want them to be reading, even though action-wise that's not all that interesting. I tried to give the girl a little more action by having her read outloud to her teddy-toting brother. She's reading from an edition of Mother Goose's nursery rhymes that I had as a kid. The little boy's jammies are one of the rare instances of patterned clothing in my art. I hate drawing patterns, but dots are hard to mess up.

Nothing special about the church, I just thought I would note that those wooden pews are terrible when it's hot and you have a dress with buttons down the back. They stick. And then every time you try to adjust how you're sitting everyone can hear them popping off the pew.

I clearly have an addiction to bangs and side-parts. I can't help myself.

Curly Girls

These were just little practice doodles for an illustration of the little girl with the little curl in the middle of her forehead. The one on the left is minorly based on a girl in an old cocoa advertisement  and the one on the right is somewhat based off Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.

I just love the ruffled collar and apron on this girl. And her sweet face, which I can't really duplicate in my style of drawing.
 But I didn't want her to have just plain braids, I really wanted to emphasize the curly hair, so looked to Dorothy's style (from about the same era) for how to do those curls.

God Is Bigger Than You Think

Check out my flickr stream to see a bigger, better version of this.

This piece started out as a sketch during youth group, I often do fun things with the message titles and since we were talking about how huge the universe is I added this little girl with her telescope.
I never intended the background to be so grungy - but I just kept adding textures. Almost entirely from Bittbox though the stars are from JoannaStar on Deviant Art.

Hopefully I'll have this available as an 8x10 print in my etsy shop soon.

All Images are property of Melody DuVal, please do not use in any way without permission.

Leah Duncan Give Away

The Ardent Sparrow is doing a great giveaway of your choice or tea towel and print from Leah Duncan's cute, cute selection!

For my day job I do a lot of period illustrations (1930s-1940s mostly). I have (on loan) a battered primer from the 30s that I use to get an idea of the clothing and I also rely on  blogs dedicated to old advertisements and photos. Beauty Is A Thing of the Past has all kinds of great photos from hair dressers magazines that are fantastic in figuring out how to style hair. And Found In Mom's Basement is a terrific source of vintage advertising. I've learned a lot doing these illustrations.

I've also done a ton of Amish illustrations. If you're ever up in Shipshewana, IN you can look out for the Childhood Chuckles, Farmyard Funnies & Thoughts with Thelma book series. The first two are collections of stories sent in by (mostly) Amish people and the Thelma series is a series of stories by a local Amish wife and mother who lives on a diary farm.

All of this is great fun and I adore it. But sometimes you just want to draw something modern.