redwood grove

an invitation for a redwood grove wedding. the bride is a san francisco urban forest and urban agriculture coordinator who saved some trees i really like from being cut down at zeitgeist. hooray!

i love this little bug party:

i spent some time at the botanical garden in golden gate park to do my research. they have a redwood grove tucked away in a little corner by the moon viewing garden. i was really delighted to find that it was carpeted in hearts (wild ginger and redwood sorrell), perfect for a wedding. PERFECT!!

these were the sketches that were smushed together to make the final painting:

i was a little sad to abandon the bats, but i’m sure i’ll find a use for them one day.

welcome eliza jane

for wee eliza, born this spring on the day of the solar eclipse. i was there for her birth! (thus the ferns. i know, i am so sneaky)

picnic

livetrace in illustrator has some great potential! i have to mess with it some more. i used it to make some damasks out of the collateral bits + pieces left over from a commissioned picnic wedding invitation:

gotta figure out where to use that sweet lemonade pitcher and firefly jar:

this was said couple’s invitation, a good opportunity to practice the vector illustration skillz i’m learning at my design job:

sweet gerber daisies, sweet couple!

bike kitchen, birdseye

a couple of my friends are bike kitchen volunteers and they very nicely let me occupy the ladder for a couple hours and spy on the general kerfuffle from my lofty perch.

dr. sketchy’s bicycle night

i get in a rut of drawing side facing bicycles all the time. dr. sketchy’s to the rescue!

two for mirth

for two mirthful ladies, melissa and jill, on their wedding day. i liked this one so much i made one for myself!
based on a very old rhyme i love to bits:

quilt

my mama made me this book quilt for my birthday:

i am so lucky!

tintyped

my dearest wish was to get tintype portraits at photobooth done for my birthday. et voilà!

here’s the studio setup (i have achieved this unnatural good posture by leaning against the hidden noggin propper-upper):

chuck your car

finished this one a few days ago for bicycle times magazine, for an article about getting rid of modern conveniences whose contributions to our quality of life are questionable:

i’m feeling triumphant, cars are wicked hard to draw! (it’s a 1968 volkswagen squareback, by the way — it was my high school self’s dream car)

san franciscans will notice that he’s stuffing the squareback into one of our blue recycling bins. my friend richard says, “Oh no!!! Reuse *before* recycle…. [sigh]”

this article also featured a demonic microwave (hah!):

granny gear

an illustration for bicycle times magazine about using your granny gear on steep hills. it’s out now — i saw one at our local whole foods in the checkout line. it’s always a thrill to see work i’ve done out in the wild!

a preliminary sketch of the grocery-laden wife:

it’s hard matchmaking for drawings, so i asked around on the internet: who was her husband? the consensus was: beardy. and that’s how mr. shaggy suspendersman up there came to be.

into the woods

my illustrator pal carrie sometimes drags me out of the house and we have a ball drawing at cafes and cackling. here are some woodsy things i got up to last time we met up.
party animals:

i got really excited about labeling my party animals in logs and ended up drawing a whole alphabet:

heh, check out my double-l ligature! i am discovering the usefulness of alternate glyphs at my design job.

sweet banana seat

schwinn stingray krate bikes doing awesome jumps, where awesome=freaky, rickety, kid-built, corroded plywood, bust-your-teeth-in. i wanted a banana seat bike so bad in the 80s! a friend of mine had a beautiful blue one with a white wicker flower-bedecked basket in the front. mine was a blue and yellow boys’ huffy, clearly inferior and much less magical.

new on thumbtack press

i’ve put some new prints of paintings i did this year on thumbtack press: http://www.thumbtackpress.com/artists/liza-ferneyhough thumbtack press makes lovely & affordable prints on high quality paper. i know you want a fruit corset or bowerbird up on your wall!

black birds

a series of animal collectors.

crows love shiny things. there are seven here, for a secret.

a magpie collects things for its nest.

bowerbirds love the color blue.

bike basket pies for bicycle times

For Bicycle Times issue #11 (out on June 1st), I made a painting of Bike Basket Pies’ baker and biker, Natalie. (Some friends pointed out that I have a nifty start to a food delivery bike oeuvre, what with having illustrated the Soup Peddler a few years ago as well.) I was just gonna draw Natalie and her bike, but I know she delivers in the Mission district and thought it would be fun to make up a little storefront. I love papel picado, so I made up some bicycle ones, and a San Francisco bike rack really needs a guerilla knit cozy (knitta please!!).

here’s where I started:

You’ll notice I got a hold of one of her pies, a yummy but important step in my research.

here’s step two, with a photoshopped actual storefront temporarily standing in:

javelinas

bike kitchen

I spent a lovely evening at the Bike Kitchen the other night. It’s a community bicycle repair space where a couple friends volunteer. I got to lurk in a corner and watch all the chaotic action and draw lots of nifty collections of gadgets.

a proliferation of gears…

a clanging of rims…

a jumble of forks…

…and finally, my pal esther!

fruit corset giclee prints

new to my etsy shop, lovely giclees of my Fruit Corsets in History painting.

historical fruit corsets

^^click for biggerer!

new painting!! this was so much fun to research. the antique corset gallery and bridges on the body were especially helpful. while i was working on it, i liked imagining who would be wearing these undergarments. elizabeth bennett reading impassioned letters from mr. darcy in her blueberry underpinnings… laura ingalls walking on the prairie in her apple corset… mary poppins in that sassy s-curve banana… ladies on the titanic sinking in that skinny boob-to-hip constriction… me own nan in a postwar pear girdle.

i painted this for jessica ayre, who made me the strawberry corset which was the original inspiration!

tikis

these little dudes were a commission. i’m especially fond of the squatty one on the upper right, the standing easter island-headed guy, and the sassy ones in the skirts.