I made these guys for Spring YART 2022. I’ve got a few of them left up in my Etsy shop as 4×6 prints signed and drawn on with metallic copper ink, and otherwise as with all of my creations, you can always find ’em on my Teepublic and Redbubble shops.
In the meantime, SPRING YART 2023 is just around the corner!!!
This was the creepy phrase that a friend’s child recently uttered at the snack table (or something like that). My buddy forthwith wanted to see what a “Goddess of Closed Eyes” would look like. So, I did my best to oblige. I took a more muted and sepia horror magazine illustration I had done years previously and did my best to make it a psychedelic riot of eyes fit for a goddess! Hopefully I did my friends proud. Publishing on Christmas because…this is a Christmas present of course! Can’t you tell by how festive and merry it is?
Recently for the 2021 Arts Council of Southwestern Indiana Spooky Art Show, I redid a piece I have been meaning to revisit for a really long time: The Colour Out of Space.
Here’s the new piece I did in 2021:
And here is the first time I attempted to draw the story, back in 2012. At that time, I did a “down the well” view instead of the squirming mass of colors beneath, before all Hell broke loose and the alien evil emerged.
I took more of a “vexel” approach with the 2012 one, although I wanted to use strange colors and inorganic shapes in the new one too. Overall, when I went back to look at my old work, I enjoyed seeing the differences between the two approaches! I definitely think I’ve branched out more in the years since 2012.
Which style do you prefer?
I spent the month of October 2018 (or #inktober2018 if you will) doing a series of ink drawings based on stories contained on the SCP website. If you haven’t come across them yet, they’re a treasure-trove of cooperatively created weird fiction and horror. I may do another SCP series one day: the stories are always being added to.
Below is the entire series. The first one is a kelpie or river horse, another favorite creature/monster of mine but not drawn from a specific SCP story. Continue reading
“Twin solo shows” probably sounds a little weird, but basically I’ve got exhibitions running concurrently at The Dapper Pig and Blick Art Materials, both in Evansville, Indiana. They both run through June! Continue reading
100 Keys is taken directly from the description a friend gave me of her recurring nightmare, some years ago. When she first saw it, she said I had “taken her breath away.”
100 Keys will later be completed as a short comic.
First off let’s get the link out of the way: http://tapastic.com/sandpaperdaisy
If you hit that, you’ll see my profile on there. On the far right is the Series column, and I am going to be stuffing that column in the months to come! The first of these is called Awake.
Awake premiered in Winter 2006 and came from my own life. I was newly married, slowly learning to stop objectifying my husband and start loving the real, three-dimensional imperfect man. The first stages of my love, where I thought of him as my angel who was there to fix me, were more empty…an emotional echo-chamber. Once I recognized him as a complex human, someone wholly apart from myself, our love became more rich, warm and satisfying.
Awake will update once a week, every Monday. It is 30 pages long. But the comics don’t stop there. After Awake, here’s what you’ll see:
The Ruby Machine
The Stone Squirrel with new material: *true ending*
The Pretty Sun
The killing of Dreams
Tales from the Clarkside complete online for the first time
The Ocean with new material, comic finish
R_VE___
That, is going to be a lot of damned comics. And after all those, I will have merely prepared the way for what I truly want to show you.
But first, I invite you to walk the path I have walked. I hope you enjoy yourself as much as I have.
Robot Mermaid was featured in this article where I was initially credited as Heather Landrey AKA Sandpaperdais (in case you came here from a search). I’ll update on here when my name/handle get updated, but in any case I was very happy to be included with all these awesome artists in what has turned out to be a truly amazing art show. The show closes this Saturday, so head on down to New Harmony Art Gallery if you get the chance!
As the article explains, my Robot Mermaid was created from fractals. I love the idea of math creating artistic forms, and math seemed the obvious approach for robot art since robots rely so heavily upon math to be designed and created and then go on to perform functions. In this case the fractals form speakers that the mermaid uses to project her enticing song and lure sailors.
The canvas from this show has found a new home, but anyone wishing to have their own Robot Mermaid can email me at sandpaperdaisy@gmail.com and I’ll get you set up with your own canvas or matte paper archival print!
Hey guys, I’ve had the majestic Ergo Sum hanging at Toast for sometime now, but recently I added three new canvases. See if you spot them on your next visit! Trash Rose, A Message, and Endless Forest are all archivally printed, stretched and sealed by myself, with additional hand-drawn accents in white paint pen. They’re all 16×20 and only $85 each! Just ask your server or management if you want to take one home.
Here’s Toast’s website: http://www.toastevv.com/
They’re located at 1550 Mesker Park Dr, Evansville, IN 47720, inside the Helfrich Hills Golf Course.
I did this piece for the 4rth annual Mythmaking show at PG. The show hangs until April 15 and has a ton of amazing art, I’ll try to get down there and snap pix before it comes down.
As for my piece, it represents a couplet from the Ripley Scroll, a medieval text on magic and alchemy.
“The Bird of Hermes is my name/Eat my wings to make me tame.”
The Ruby Machine 6 page comic has been uploaded in full to read from this website, enjoy!
Here it is! http://www.indyplanet.com/front/?product=109508
44 pages printed, all color, with pin-ups, $5.99. I am incredibly thrilled about this and pleasantly surprised. I FINALLY have it in print, online somewhere for people to buy. Who knows what approach I’ll ultimately end up taking with my comics, but I finally took my first big step getting this one out there!!
A note about the IndyPlanet digital download pricing:
You may notice a $0.99 digital download option. That was entirely my fault, I didn’t notice the “digital download” field when I set up the listing. I actually intend for all digital downloads to be $2.99 to be in line with the Kindle listing, where a comic of The killing of Dreams’ file size can’t be listed for such a low price. However, several comics have already sold at $0.99 so I’m in a rather interesting position at the moment! The only solution I can think of that will confuse the least amount of people (hopefully) is to honor this price mistake until my comic goes off the front page of IndyPlanet. So feel free to take advantage of my mistake! Don’t worry I’ll still be making a bit of money so you’re not ripping me off or costing me money.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Date: 05/05/2014
Contact: Heather Landry, sandpaperdaisy@gmail.com
Local artist publishes horror/dark fantasy comic, “the killing of dreams.”
Heather Landry’s 42-page comic one-shot explores forbidden love and coming-of-age themes as well.
Evansville, IN – Award-winning artist Heather Landry is extremely active in the local art scene, recently helping to organize the wildly successful 2nd annual Franklin Street Earth Day Art Crawl. Her work has been featured in numerous local shows and galleries including the Bower-Suhrheinrich Foundation Gallery and a solo show at PG Gallery and Cafe, and her light-hearted autobiographical comic “Things Fall Apart” appeared in the local entertainment magazine News4U from 2004-2008. An active member of the Arts Council of Doom, a local counter-culture art movement, Landry is exploring darker themes with The killing of Dreams.
“Most of my artwork is based on my own dreams and this comic is no exception,” says Landry, who goes by Sandpaperdaisy online. “The killing of Dreams began with a nightmare I woke up from one morning in 2006. Now almost a decade later, I’ve finally been able to realize my dream in concrete form and offer it to others.”
The comic preserves its nightmarish feeling through the use of limited colors and heavy shadows, a stylized “painterly” approach and a closed-set feel leaving the reader feeling uneasily trapped with the disturbing events unfolding before their eyes. The story centers around two girls, Claire and Else, who find their tenuous relationship threatened by deadly forces beyond their comprehension.
Landry is new to publishing and her humorous article “Everything I did wrong when I tried to make a digital comic file” offers an unblushing perspective–as well as helpful pointers–to anyone interested in the rigors of self-publishing in the digital age. This article as well as information on her new book and all her other shows and projects can be seen at http://sandpaperdaisy.com. Right now Landry is finishing a new project to debut at Cincy Comicon, coming up this September 5-7. After that she will be working on several new comic projects including Dog Street, a compilation thematically centered around childhood and the horrifying and nonsensical wonderland associated with it. Her published comic short The Ruby Machine will appear in this compilation and is available to read online.
You can also find Landry on Twitter as @sandpaperdaisy and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/SandpaperdaisyArt
Her new book “The killing of Dreams” is available on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K1WBM3Q and is available in print from IndyPlanet here: http://www.indyplanet.com/front/?product=109508
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Yes, after two solid days of wading through the conversion and publishing process, I finally managed to slap my comic up on Amazon. And let me tell you, I had to have made about 6 .mobi files and changed my book info about a jillion times along the way. The Amazon folk (or more probably, the Amazon robots) must hate me by now.
That link again: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K1WBM3Q
Incidentally, I think my next post might be “everything I did wrong when I tried to make a digital comic file.”
In the meantime, I’m waiting on my comic to (fingers crossed!!) be accepted for Comixology. In any case I shouldn’t have any trouble getting it into IndyPlanet. Both of these offer digital comic publishing (kindle or otherwise) and IndyPlanet additionally has the option of purchasing the actual paper comic.
My digital comic is 42 pages (the back cover appears as a page), $2.99 USD no matter what site you get it from.
My paper comic is 44 pages, $5.99 USD (it includes 3 extra pin-ups you can cut out!) I’ll update when it hits Comixology and IndyPlanet!
[Edit: Available on IndyPlanet here: http://www.indyplanet.com/front/?product=109508%5D
[Final Edit: Available on comiXology here: http://cmxl.gy/1jREVom%5D
I posted wips of this comic before, here’s a couple of pages to give you a taste of the finished product. It’s horror/dark fantasy with some surreal and lbgtq/coming of age thrown in. Or as I described it once, “cannibal schoolgirls.” (Not really…well kinda?)
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See that little black fish blockprint on the right? That’s the real-world form of these little guys:
As you can see, he’s pretty cute in color too, huh? I’ve intended to use COPIC markers to add color to a few of my “Bait” block prints before now, but haven’t done so. Perhaps in time for the art crawl!
Incidentally, my “keyfish” idea started out with a simple photomanipulation of three objects in my house, a soapstone fish and two pendants from a broken necklace, a big key and a heart-shaped lock. I photographed everything and combined the keyhole with the fish, and history was made. I like this little fella and intend to make some sort of more developed digital artwork out of him!
I took the name for this traditional linoleum block print from the ancient Greek legend of the singer Orpheus and his wife. Orpheus and Eurydice were deeply in love and happy, but on the night of their wedding Eurydice ventured out into a field (some say to dance) and was bitten by a snake and died. Orpheus then descended into the Underworld and got Hades to agree to allow him to take Eurydice back to the realm of the Living, provided he did not look back at her on the way. Tragically, Orpheus looked back almost as he and Eurydice were about to be reunited, and she remained in the land of the dead.
The high heel shoe implies dancing to me and a beautiful woman, and the bear trap in the field shows the misfortune and the sudden snap of deadly jaws that sealed Eurydice’s fate. Below are the different sketches I made before making my print and adding watercolor to it. Eurydice was originally made for Hand Prints 2012 and went on to appear in mixed-media collage form in last year’s Earth Day Art Crawl (above).
Possibly my most successful photo-manipulation and also one of the simplest concepts I’ve done: a fantasy forest that is unending, no sky but only graceful trees above and below. As with everything else I posted this week, this will be at both Art in the Wild Saturday and the Earth Day Art Crawl on the 19th.
Endless Forest is now available on Society6||Redbubble.
Photo credits:
http://carro-stalk.deviantart.com/
http://umbradenoapte-stock.deviantart.com/
This painting of a jellyfish/bomb was responsible for creating one of my favorite customers of all time, a little boy no more than ten and probably not so old as that. He and his sister admired the different digital paintings at my table at Evillecon 2011 and their mother told them that they could each buy a print if they wished. The little boy considered long and gravely and then asked me the meaning of Atomic Jazz. I explained pretty clumsily, how the city is meant to be dull and drab but suddenly, this impossible amazing thing has happened, and this great creature of color and vitality has descended upon it to shake up all the people in the city.
Wide-eyed, he said “So they jellyfish didn’t come to destroy the city…but to transform it??” I couldn’t believe my ears and I felt no end of amazement at this sweet child and his marvelous insight. He asked his mother if he could buy Atomic Jazz and receiving her assent, handed me the money with trembling hands and asked if it was really okay for him to have it and take it home. Aside from my own boys I can’t remember the last time a child touched me so deeply! Wherever you are, young man, you will always be one of my best memories!
Atomic Jazz is on Society6||Redbubble.
And now I am curious: have any of you been deeply touched by a customer, artistic or otherwise?
Yep, I’ve been seriously tired this week…very busy too! Thankfully it’s all been happy occasions, like family visiting. But I’ve definitely been slipping up more then usual.
I’ve selected the related piece “City Moon” as the featured art for today. This was commissioned to hang alongside City Eye as matched pair, so the boy shown here purposely shares the coloring of the young lady from City Eye. This painting was commissioned as an exclusive so there are no prints available of it! However, the client has kindly consented to let me share my wistful tagger boy with you all as he stands there in the rain, regarding the woman standing across from him on my client’s wall.
Sandpaperdaisy Art 