Studio Clearance Print Sale

Studio Clearance Sale!!!

Happening over at my etsy shop right now!

Crazy Cat Lady at 26

A new illustration for a written rant my good friend Sasanki wrote  about deciding to become a crazy cat lady at 26. Her piece is in the process of being published for a way awesome magazine - if all goes well my picture will be accompanying her writing.

Stay tuned for my screaming glee if we are published together. Fingers crossed!

Perfume and Rouge

A couple of the touched-up illustrations for the fashion and product sections of my new illustration portfolio...

King Matty Collage

With the new illustration-site up, I tried to collect the few decent scans I had from the extensive illustration project I worked on last year (60+ paintings illustrating the folktales of Hungary and Transylvania). Sadly, the photographs I took to document each new piece were terrible quality, and without the originals physically with me I had to cull almost all of the works as inferior quality to showcase on the website.

We did manage to save a few, and my adventure-man did his best with photoshop to get them looking clean and professional. Here is one example - and the link to the portfolio: book illustration

King Matty the first - written by Janusz Korczak, illustrated by Monika V. Diak

Illustration Website Launch

I am very proud to be able to present the first version of my new illustration-portfolio!

It's very basic, but we made the entire site ourselves (A HUGE shout-out to my adventure-man, without his immense help this site would be nothing more than a pile of sketches scattered around my studio.) We hope that it is simple and straightforward to navigate, giving a brief overview of how amazing the site could be with heaps more commissions, collaborations and awesome illustration projects to showcase - so please, take a look, give us your tips and feedback - and PASS IT ON!!

without further ado (drumroll....) I present...

 www.monikadiak.com

www.monikadiak.com

Stop-Motion Portrait

My adventure-man and I put together a short stop-motion clip of a small portrait I painted in watercolours for the "about" page on my new illustration portfolio. 

It's the first time we've made something like this, and we'd love to get some feedback. We've had a couple of tips already, (like placing the camera on my left side) which we'll have to do a bit of studio re-arranging to accommodate, but all good ideas! (we won't be able to do a birds-eye-view one because as you'll see in the clip, I practically lie all over my drawing as I work, so a continuous stream of the back of my head might not be so interesting! hehe)

Later we made a "zoomed-in" version too, with different music (perhaps in some countries the old video cannot be played because of the track chosen to accompany it)

which do you like better?

Poesy Illustrations

A mosaic I put together of some of the illustrations I created for Victoria Buckley Jewellery as displays for her poetic poesy rings and gorgeous precious jewellery - see her Pocket full of Poesy Etsy shop for more.

I'm working on an online web-portfolio specifically to present my illustrative work, both book illustration and commercial product and fashion illustration. I think the first preview (with a fair few "coming soon" pages) should be able to go live fairly soon!