I drew this cute Bichon Frise piece for fun! It’s an original copic marker piece, framed. It’s up on etsy if you’re interested in bringing this cute dog home! [...]

The brood is super into Moana this year, so it made picking a holiday card theme pretty easy. It’s the first year I made all four costumes from scratch though, so it took a while. Thankfully they were all fairly simple. Photography by the always amazing, Jeff Kuo. Photoshop and graphic design by Doris and Cheryll. We knew we wanted a beach background, but there was no way I wanted to attempt a photoshoot on the beach in November, so it was back into Jeff’s garage with the green screen. We started with the classic family poses… And then just for fun, we decided to try out a “boat pulling” pose with some rope. Marcus wasn’t sure we should use an action shot for the card, but they came out great. (And obviously, he changed his mind since we ended up with one of these shots on our final card.) We figured out pretty [...]

One of my resolutions this year was to take better care of myself and to take more short weekend trips to beautiful places! I did both of those more this year and that’s awesome! We even got to enjoy the Super Bloom in the poppy fields! I did my first Kickstarter! I dyed my hair an unnatural color for the first time (and loved it!). I started making my first doll room! I made my first ita-bag. I made another Victorian gown which we shot photos of in an awesome location (one of my favorite things to do!) I made my first faery costume, and cosplayed a dragon, Sophie and Wonder Woman! Here’s some photos that remind me of what happened this year!   Photo below by Amanda Rynda Photo below by Jason Nishi           [...]

This year I mostly worked doing storyboards for Matt Groening’s new animated tv show, Disenchantment, which isn’t out yet, so I can’t show you anything! I feel like I got better at my shot selection and composition this year. I’ll keep working on it! I sold at ECCC for the first time and it was great! I did my first Kickstarter this year and it was successful! These pins were funded! (They are currently available in my etsy shop) I did several fun art shows this year for QPopShop, Meltdown Comics and 3Tarts. I also did some fan art pieces for fun: And I did a lot of development drawings for a children’s book I’m working on for fun. (Here’s a few below from that.) [...]

Sorry for the delay getting the rest of this tutorial up! Getting our holiday card done ate my brain for the last 2 months.  If you missed it, part 1 of this tutorial is here. Ok, so back to making Moana’s top… I made the top as a tube top with a shirred back piece. The first thing I did was to do some shirring tests. I needed to figure out how much my fabric would shrink when shirred. (I learned to shirr by googling “shirring tutorial” and reading a couple tutorials. It’s really easy!) Because the number of rows of shirring affects how much the fabric shrinks, I shirred a piece of fabric that is as long (top to bottom measurement) as my final piece was going to be. I tested how far apart I wanted my rows of stitching to be. I found that a 10″ piece of my fabric shirred would shrink [...]