Fit for a Pirate Queen

I sold a painting through my Etsy shop! My take on Pirate Queen Grace O’Malley—from Eve Bunting’s P Is For Pirate—has found the perfect home. My patron and his girlfriend are pirate history aficionadoes whose house they transformed into a pirate museum, Musee Libertalia. “It’s named after Captain Mission’s fabled pirate paradise—Libertalia, on the Island of Saint Marie off Madagascar.”

She looks right at home.

I’m so happy. What an honor!

Post scriptum—If ye’ve a mind, shape a course in this direction for a fantastic reading of Treasure Island.

Moonraker Tea—designs

Moonraker Tea Shop is a fun, new startup on Ocracoke Island, North Carolina (the notorious pirate Blackbeard’s lair, by the powers!). My client, Maria, opened this summer in time for the October Blackbeard’s Pirate Jamboree.

Here are the designs for the sticker and banner. I’m an idiot at the computer. Luckily, Elicia at Best Printing in Oil City, Pa, is a genius designer and handled all the design aspects of this project. You can see in the gallery below how she fooled around with wrapping the lettering around the ship image and getting that just right. Elicia also came up with these nice color variations for the banner. It probably helped that she’s also a pirate afficianado. Here’s more of Best Printing.

My client, Maria, included the latitude/longitude coordinates for the sticker—a really nice touch. Here’s the rough layout she gave us:

I love doing this kind of work—the daft piratey type design. You can poke around here to see more of my handlettering samples. And of course, here.

Ahoy, ye sea dogs!

P is for Pirate is here!

As long-time readers know, the subject of pirates is a favorite of mine. You can imagine how happy I was when Sleeping Bear Press asked me to illustrate Eve Bunting’s latest, P is for Pirate. 

Here’s how the jacket art came together. Some rough sketches, a tight sketch based on the approved rough, the painting in progress. I lost something in the tight sketch—the pirate doesn’t have the same aggressiveness & oomph—so I went back to the rough sketch to paint from. That’s my dear old African Grey, Sherman, sitting on his shoulder. How I miss him! I like this low-key palette, mostly blacks, greys and red. The talented Felicia Macheske was my art director on this project. I will show more images throughout the month.

I’m using a palette knife to scrape red paint over the black background.