Monday, April 29, 2013

Studio Clearance Print Sale



Studio Clearance Sale!!!

Happening over at my etsy shop right now!


Friday, April 19, 2013

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!

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Perfume and Rouge


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







Monday, April 15, 2013

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



Sunday, April 14, 2013

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?

Friday, April 5, 2013

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!