Peak Oil blog of Hope

Is it possible to have too many blogs? Well, who cares, I started a 4th blog about a matter very much at the forefront of my thoughts lately: our civilization's relentless unsustainability leading to a Peak Oil crisis starting right about... now.

If you haven't heard of Peak Oil, it's the phenomenon of beginning a steady decline in the amount of crude oil being extracted from the earth now, which will lead to crises of energy, economy, peace and general chaos. You know, on top of global warming. Have you seen An Inconvenient Truth yet?

Despite tales of doom, which may or may not be accurate, there are communities in the world that are making fantastic examples of themselves with becoming self-sufficient and promoting equality, cooperation and sustainability, and we need to see this!! In my new blog, Our Pueblo, I'll be cataloguing these inspirations. Perhaps it will spur positive actions of our own, or at the very least promote a collective consciousness of hope.

Zodiac calendar drawings

I'm thinking of mass-producing a zodiac calendar using these illustrations I did for my own personal project I did a little while back. Each drawing represents a sign, and describes a person's traits, their planet, their plant, and is coloured to reflect their element (water, earth, fire, air).


This is me, a Cancer (water), using my intiutive healing to help the sick :)


This is my friend, a Libra (air), and her partner, as she is very suave and romantic.


This is Sagittarius (fire), depicting my brother-in-law chillin' by the campfire.

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!

New template!

I got sick of all the bugs with the original (pretty, earthy, fanciful) design, so hope y'all like this new look!

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.

Kid's bedroom as sanctuary

A new book just came out for kids that I illustrated, about decorating your own room... it's kinda nice, discusses colour concepts, layouts, tapping into your "uniqueness" -- stuff that I think would resonate with a 9-year-old!

Here are some of the illustrations for the book, called It's Your Room (...excuse my super cheezy bio if you go to this link, I don't know what I was thinking!) by Tundra Books.

Another year, another birthday

Yeah, we can either laugh or cry at relentlessly getting a year older every twelve months... or we could go with the flow, lay back and enjoy a good cubano!

I'm 32 for another week, and in this past year I think I learned a little something, something very liberating, and that is that most of the stuff I spend my time worrying about is really really really unimportant. No, really! It is finally sinking in that we're such tiny blips in all of existence through time and space, that a lot of stuff we fret about isn't really worth our sweat. Or the paid work we devote our waking hours to might not deserve our attention at all. I am simultaneously rejecting most of what is out there in our society, while really appreciating what there is. And being way more picky about what I choose to spend my energy on, and what I choose to worry about.

I think I'm going to be late a bit more often. And maybe I'll get a tattoo. : )

Fan mail

I've been teaching Saturday art classes to kids recently and got my first piece of fan mail ever! There's a little girl named Claudia in the class, and we have a routine greeting each Saturday: she says "Hola, Claudia!" and I say "Hola, Claudia!" At the end of the morning it's, "Chao, Claudia!", "Chao, Claudia!" The only thing sweeter is her drawing for me, of us. I think she meant to switch the "from" and "for" since she's the little girl...!

"Las Amorosas" colour piece

I've been having fun with gouache, the medium I've never managed to get right, but thought I'd try it out for a colour piece for the Dear Pablo story I posted earlier. Maybe this would be a nice back cover (I picture the front cover being graphic, and if I do a series of these stories perhaps only the cover colour and title would change, as opposed to having an illustration on the covers pertaining to the story inside -- boring! predictable!).

I like hot reds, pinks and oranges next to greys and dark browns like I used in this piece.

Sweet stuff

I recently finished 63 illustrations for a kids' book on the history and culture of sweets, to be published this fall by Tundra Books. Here is a sampling (no pun intended) of the work I did on it. Incidentally, a few nights ago on CBC there was an excellent documentary on the history and politics of sugar, called Big Sugar. I had nightmares that evening. Thankfully I've been off sugar for a few years and plan to keep it that way.





The book is quite appropriately called "Sweet!"

Chirp, chirp!

Most of my commissioned illustration work is in my digital style, using Illustrator for the shapes and colours and then adding shading in Photoshop, no outlines. This is one of my first successful pieces that was a vertical double-page spread published in Chirp magazine in 2002 as a family tree photo project. Guess where the family photos go... : ) I'm happy with this piece because I hate drawing animals but think this turned out cute, with that quiet winter feel of a grey day.

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.

Dear Pablo

In my mind a superhero should take care of wounded souls and show some compassion to disregarded victims of love crimes -- and truly, aren't all crimes betrayals of love? I present Las Amorosas, a trio of urban women who work as sous-chefs at Juice for Life. Their love for humanity at the personal level has given them the power to sense others' pain and help heal them through unwavering compassion. This first story shows an Amorosa attending to one such broken-hearted lad.
















Pen on paper, digital collage and photoshop.

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...!

To deaf ears

A summer ago I realized how preposterous my neighbours' behaviour was when it came to front yard care. Behaviour that included watering the interlocking brick (no lawn), presumably to clean it (instead of using a broom), and watering the garden as rain clouds were rolling in. These are a few little drawings that resulted from those observations, which I put together as photocopied little flyers and put in each neighbour's mailbox, many of which I found flying around the street later in the day. Drawn in pen and black watercolour.

Hello, friends!

Despite already having 2 other blogs (Fran's House of Ayurveda and Dumplings of the World, Unite!), I felt compelled to start a third, this one for my personal drawings, ongoing art projects and commissioned illustrations. I hope you enjoy them and I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you see.

This blog I think will push me to do less work and more art in my day, which is always a goal. On that note, til soon!

~ Claudia