What is Autrey Art?
Random artworks by Lucy Autrey Wilson
Sunday, April 14, 2019
Something Old, Something New
Top to Bottom
Top: Old photo, shot in Haleakala Crater on Maui in 2012, recently edited using Topaz AI sharpen software, and uploaded to my Shutterstock portfolio: LINK to my portfolio
Middle: Pen & Ink and watercolor of my memories of Maui
Bottom: Most recent photo collage combining a photo shot at Brazil Ranch in Tamales, while volunteering for MALT, with three hand painted paper collage cows (from cow photos shot in Albion)
Sunday, March 31, 2019
Paper Collage on High Quality 13 x 19 Photo Prints
Top to Bottom:
Red-tailed Hawk flying over San Anselmo
Pelican and a Boat with Galapagos Heron in Inverness
Blue Heron in Briones
Flower Man at the Estero in Pt. Reyes
Friday, March 29, 2019
When in Doubt Cut it UP
I didn't like my collage much after looking at it for a few months (bottom image). So I cut it up and embroidered it onto another painting I didn't like that much (top image). Now I like it better!
Thursday, March 28, 2019
Sunday, March 17, 2019
Little Gull: Lost at Sea Book Now Available in Print (in full color) as well as in a Kindle e-book Format
An
Interview with the Author of the book Little Gull: Lost at Sea
Interviewer: What is the story behind the story of Little Gull: Lost at Sea?
Lucy
Autrey Wilson: I wrote and illustrated
Little Gull in 2019. I love to go to the various beaches in Pt.Reyes National Seashore and am always amused by the sea gulls. We are also lucky here in California to
witness whales migrating past various sites on the Pt. Reyes peninsula. So I came up with a story that included
sea gulls and whales.
Interviewer: Is there any significance behind the names
Greta Gull and Wanda Whale?
Lucy
Autrey Wilson: No, I just thought Greta
Gull (GG) and Wanda Whale (WW) sounded good.
Interviewer: I remember you telling me that your first
book, Little Cloud, had a message of friendship and you hoped it would instill
awareness of climate change, however subliminally. Are you trying to do that again with this new title?
Lucy
Autrey Wilson: I used to write little
morality short stories when I was very young.
I was strongly influenced by Aesop’s fables (still one of my favorite
books). So, yes, I have a tendency to add
some little positive takeaway in my writing.
In Little Gull, that is a bit tempered.
Although it is fine and good to make friends with strangers, and even to
count on them to help you out in a jam, it’s not a good idea to take any kind
of serious risk hoping someone will always be there to rescue you if things
don’t work out.
Interviewer: Can you tell the reader a little bit about
your illustration process. The artwork
in Little Gull looks different from that in Little Cloud.
Lucy
Autrey Wilson: Again, I wanted to make
both a digital and a print book so needed to make as much of the art vector
based to reduce the file size. Drawing water with mathematical
lines and curves, however, turned out to be really hard. So, I took original photographs I shot at the local beaches and converted them to traced vector images for the backgrounds, and then painted in
Illustrator on top of the converted photos.
Interviewer: What source material did you use for your
illustrations?
Lucy
Autrey Wilson: All of the birds and
ocean scenes are based on my photographs.
I’ve never had the good fortune to see a humpback whale breach, however, so I
had to go searching for a lot of other reference to draw the various whale
pictures.
Interviewer: What do you hope is the take away of your
reader?
Lucy
Autrey Wilson: First and foremost, I hope
the reader is entertained. Secondly, I
hope the message of friendship and the benefits of helping others
resonates. And finally, humans have
created a mess filling up our oceans with plastic and other garbage. It is killing off the creatures who live in
and depend on the sea. So, I hope to
raise awareness to this problem as a little added benefit.
Top to Bottom Photo Reference:
Page 16 Photo shot at Limantour Beach in Pt. Reyes, 2017
Page 24 Big wave photo shot on Seymour Island in the Galapagos, 2017
Page 30 Photo shot at North Beach in Pt. Reyes, 2012
Page 4 Birds at the beach photo shot at McClures Beach in Pt. Reyes, 2016
Labels:
author,
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children's book,
e-book,
humpback whale,
illustrations,
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Little Gull,
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Pt. Reyes National Seashore,
sea gulls,
seagulls,
story,
whale
Friday, March 15, 2019
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
An Interview with the Author of Little Cloud
The children's book Little Cloud is now available in print and as an e-book on Amazon.com First published as an e-book in 2014, and a print edition on Blurb, it has now been made available as a print edition on Amazon. Here's more information about the book, in the form of an interview:
Interviewer: What is the story behind the story of Little
Cloud?
Lucy
Autrey Wilson: I wrote and illustrated
Little Cloud in 2014, at the peak of California’s driest period since
record-keeping began, between late 2011 and 2014. I was wishing for more rain so thought a
story about a rain cloud might be nice.
Interviewer: Is there a reason your other main character
is a blue jay named Jack?
Lucy
Autrey Wilson: Since I made the cloud
feminine, I thought it would be good to make the bird male. I have twin grandsons who were four years old
at the time, the age target of my story, and by making one of the characters
male I hoped to appeal to them. Neither
of the twins is named Jack, but that name seemed to fit. I was also inspired by
my backyard blue jays.
Interviewer: Can you tell the reader a little bit about
your illustration process. It looks like
your illustrations were drawn using vector software, is that correct?
Lucy
Autrey Wilson: Yes. I wanted to make both a
digital and a print book. The
requirements for an e-book meant getting the file size as small as possible. I needed to create the art using
vector software, instead of raster images.
A raster image is artwork created in a non digital medium, then scanned
in to the computer becoming a digital file made up of pixels. When these raster images are enlarged, the image
quality diminishes significantly and the file sizes are much bigger. Vector artwork, on the other hand, is
composed of mathematical lines and curves.
Not only does vector art take up a lot less digital space, it can be
scaled to any size without losing quality.
Interviewer: How did you come up with your book title?
Lucy
Autrey Wilson: The title Little Cloud
just fit the story. After I first
published the e-book in 2014, I realized it was the same title as a book by
Eric Carle, one of my favorite children’s book author/illustrators. That was certainly not intentional.
Interviewer: What source material did you use for your
illustrations?
Lucy
Autrey Wilson: I am a photographer and
am always looking for new ways to use the tens of thousands of photos I’ve
taken over the years. At the time I
wrote Little Cloud, I was also travelling up to Seattle a couple times a year
to visit my daughter’s family, including the aforementioned twins. So the photo reference in the beginning of
Little Cloud was shot in Washington State.
Where Little Cloud travels south to, is Marin County, California, where I
live.
The
tall mountains in my story are based on the Olympic mountains, as seen from the
top of Mount Walker, in Washington State.
The tallest of the Olympic mountains is Mount Olympus at 7,965 ft.
The
body of water Little Cloud and Jack fly over is Puget Sound, as seen from
Seattle.
Small
Mountain is based on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. Although the biggest mountain around where I
live, its peak is 2,572 ft. much shorter
than the Olympic mountains.
The
various flower drawings are based on photographs taken at the Botanical Gardens
in Fort Bragg, California in 2013.
Interviewer: What do you hope your readers take away from
the book?
Lucy
Autrey Wilson: First and foremost, I
hope the reader is entertained.
Secondly, I hope the message of friendship, and the benefits of helping others,
resonates. And finally, I hope there is
a little more awareness of the beautiful world we live in and a desire to help
combat climate change to keep it that way.
Labels:
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california,
children's book,
climate change,
creatures,
drought,
illustration,
Little Cloud,
Marin County,
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Mt. Tamalpais,
seattle,
storybook,
Washington state
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