Plum sugar

My upstairs neighbour, Joyce, asked me months and months ago to paint a little portrait of her grand daughter, and at last I did this for her. I am not a portrait artist in the least (as you can see from my illos on this blog), and get quite daunted at the thought of painting something by hand, as much as I love it. Doing this digitally would have been interesting and much easier, but for the love of earth and water, I've got to use my brushes!

When it comes to art by hand, I am most comfortable illustrating in pen and shading with a combination of hatching and watercolour. I usually only use the black cake to create greyscale watercolours (so simple and classy) but thought some colour would be nice in this one. Hope you like it, Joyce!

1970's romance

I thought I'd share a little black-and-white watercolour I did of my parents when they met, before getting married and having my brother and I. This was in downtown Chile, after the summer of love, when everything felt new and hopeful in the dawning of a technicolor world of peace in the age of Aquarius...

Permanent black-out

Peak oil has been on the mind of late. Here is a drawing I just finished of a possible vision of our future city in the absence of electricity, a permanent blackout. (See post below about my new blog relating to peak oil.)

Cat girl

I lied. The Swamp Thing sketch wasn't my first superhero sketch -- this one of Cat Girl was! A quicky marker sketch for Brian during the comic con this past spring -- I believe he built up quite the collection of sketches!

My swamp thing

I gave Alan Moore's Swamp Thing another try this past weekend, about 5 years after trying to read it the first time and simply not being able to get past the nauseatingly garish artwork! But I'm so glad I read it, and without getting too "I love Alan Moore" like every other non-comic-reading girl, this series is such a beautiful description of life and nature and how everything is connected because we're all made up of the same thing -- the radiant energy of life. It resonates completely with how I've been seeing life in the universe, and here's a hero that's, first of all super buff, but also totally depressed, but also green and earthy like the swamp itself. Who wouldn't fall in love with him?

Anyhoo, here is a sketch I did of my beloved Swamp Thing, with a few alterations from the series' beast, namely he has a kelp beard -- obviously! Also his lower half is all soft long grasses, his "ribs" are mud, and his hands and feet are wood, like tree roots. I love him with flowers and moss growing on him, and some leaves sprouting from his viney veins.

There you have it, my first comic super hero drawing. I also love Frankenstein.

La Parra

As much as Victor Jara is a hero to me, he was influenced enormously by Violeta Parra who was also a folksinger in rural Chile, singing songs about political injustices against the poor, among other things. Here she is playing the charango, a crazy little guitar with 10 strings that is often made with armadillo shells. My charango is vegan. When I play it it sounds like the noise an armadillo might make. But not Violeta. She played it like an angel.

A hero to many

I am working on a personal project of "heroes". This is a result of thinking and pondering and realizing I had no one to look up to as a mentor in anything meaningful to me. How many people are lucky enough to know someone like this in their lives? Also, I thought more specifically of unsung heroes, especially Latino ones. This is Victor Jara, a folk singer from Chile who sang songs of peace and el pueblo before being executed during the military coup on September 11, 1973 in my birth country.

You may notice a variety of style in the Fran Pages... I have yet to narrow it down to a bonafide style of my very own, and may never do so...!