Mishka Jaeger

Peace and Love 2017 Artist Interview

7/7/2017 By Mishka in Cards, General, interviews Tags: peace hamsa

Reposting my artist interview from Maker Mentors Art Sale now that the sale has ended. New purchase options are at the bottom of this post.

ARTIST PROFILE: MISHKA JAEGER

What is your background?

Because everyone kept telling me I wouldn’t make a living as an artist, I took a degree in scenery design for theatre with plans to become an Art Director for feature films. I loved theatre and film and thought I’d make a career there, but things turned out differently. I had a brief career coloring comic books and then fell into the Dot-Coms in California beginning a 20-year career in digital new media, graphic design, and animation. I made a living.

How long have you been an artist?

I’ve been creating as an artist ever since I could finger-paint with my mashed peas and pureed chicken.

When did you know that you wanted to be an artist?

I’m not sure I ever wanted to be an artist. I think it was always just been what I am. It’s how I move through and deal with the world. Bad things happen, good things happen, and I’m driven to create.

What kind of art do you create?

To be honest, I can get inspired by anything at random if I’m in the right mindset, but it’s all mostly positive and light subjects. Really, the best way to describe my art is very colorful and mostly “Family-Friendly.”

How would you describe your style?

Bright, fun, and optimistic.

What is the name of your piece featured in our Art Sale?

Peace and Love

What inspired the piece featured in our Art Sale?

I’ve been following the work of a group called The Peace Factory for many years. Their aim is promoting peace, mainly in the Middle East, through grassroots approaches based on the idea that when people get to know and understand each other and are no longer nameless, faceless statistics, they can find care, common ground, and perhaps friendship and peace.

In recent years, the ancient, mystical symbol of protection claimed by everyone in the region, the Hamsa (which means “five” in Arabic), has also begun to be used as a symbol of peace and friendship.

The original concept for my Hamsa is also based in the Jewish principles of Tikkun Olam – Heal the world. It is my sincere hope that someday when the children of Israel and Palestine come together in peace, the rest of the world may follow.

Can you talk about the process you used to create it?

I started with a fairly detailed sketch then scanned it into the computer to clean up and enlarge. I then printed it out very lightly on art paper and applied the color pencil. I scanned that back into the computer and did some digital touch-ups.

How is your personality reflected in your work?

I like to think I’m a happy, friendly, outgoing person. That probably comes out in my bright color and subject choices. Even my moody pieces are accessible.

What is your favorite medium?

Right now it’s colored pencil. I didn’t realize I liked it until fairly recently. I’d been struggling with mixing watercolor and digital art with moderate success but I’m not really a watercolorist. In 2015, I began a series of illustration challenges where I needed to work faster and be more portable so I thought I’d give the pencils a try. Turns out they’re awesome!

How do you decide what subjects to include in your art?

I like my pieces to tell a story, so I tend to do a lot for children. But I also really like to draw food!
I am also a spiritual person, so that comes out in my work. I work a lot in the themes of female empowerment, yoga, some history and fantasy, and Jewish spirituality.

What do you love most about creating and being an artist?

What I love most about being an artist is the control I have over the little worlds I create — each little image in each little story. I can create vignettes and slices of life the way I want them to be. Having a creative outlet helps me to get through the things I can’t control in my life.

Art has the power to change and influence people’s moods and how they relate to the world. If I have that power at all in my work, I’d like to think I use it do to good.

Where do you see yourself in the future?

I would love to make my income solely off my art. I’m working in that direction. I don’t think I’ll ever stop creating. And, of course, I’d like to continue living a reasonably happy, healthy life with the possibility of being a grandmother someday.

What are you doing when you are not creating? Do you have other hobbies?

I’m always creating—even within my hobbies, and they have a big influence on my art. I enjoy cooking, baking, and my yoga practice. I’m also a huge history nerd. I love historical fiction in books and on TV.

That being said, I have two small children at home, so I’m limited to what I can make time for. Do children count as a hobby?

Original Mitsubishi Uni colored pencils on 8″ x 12″ Bristol Vellum

Prints Available: InPRNT

Products Available:

Personalize-able greeting card: Greeting Card Universe

Available for license

Pomegranate Love Anew

6/11/2017 By Mishka in Cards, etsy, General Tags: pomegranate

And now for something completely different. I started this piece a year ago for a new series concept integrating words and pictures (and food). I finally made time to finish it and I’m very pleased with the results. Though I love the recent trend in hand-lettering in watercolors, this lettering is not my hand, it’s traced and augmented from a font called “Autumn in November.” Also I use colored pencils, not watercolor with similar but still visually different results. I think there will be more to come in this series.

“Pomegranate Love Anew” is a piece about renewal. Early last spring I met up with a friend. She was telling me about how she’d discovered her boyfriend had been cheating on her and that she’d left him but had recently fallen hard for a new love who treated her so well – in ways she was not accustomed to.

Originally, I’d wanted to write her a letter and then incorporate part of that into my art. I had been thinking about correspondence and the letter writing that most of us no longer do. I used to spend hours recopying my letters to make sure I had them all exactly right before I sent them. Thanks to computers and email, this is now an arcane art. As it’s been over a year since I began this piece, I decided not to write a letter – I was so far out of that moment in time now. So I searched for a poem that would suffice. I found this from cavalier poet, Sir John Suckling, who – it would seem- was known for irony and wit. As we’re 400 years removed from his original intent I decided to use his words literally.

Text from the poem, “The Honest Lover” by Sir John Suckling (1609–1642):

If by this thou dost discover

That thou art no perfect lover,

And, desiring to love true,

Thou dost begin to love anew,—

Know this:

Thou lov’st amiss,

And, to love true,

Thou must begin again, and love anew.

The pomegranate represents life, rebirth and renewal across many cultures. You may recall the story of Persephone where she is tricked by Hades into eating some of the pomegranate seeds and is then obliged to return to the underworld for part of the year, causing winter. Her return from the underworld, from darkness into the light of spring causes the rebirth of the world and the turning of the seasons. Sometimes we have to go into the darkness to be reborn into a place where we are open to our renewal.

I heard that my friend has recently moved in with her new love and I wish them well. To my other friends who’ve had a rocky time with their relationships in the past year, this piece is also for you.

With love,
Mishka

Original Prismacolor and Derwent colored pencils with white guache on 8″ x 6″ Fluid Hotpress 140lb Watercolor Paper $225

Prints Available: Etsy

Products Available:

Available for license

Coming Soon: Maker Mentors Art Sale

5/17/2017 By Mishka in Cards, General, Updates, Work

I need some objective help!

I’m participating in an on-line collective print and greeting card sale next week. The theme is “Friendship” and the art featured needs to be something a friend would gift to another friend.

“Customers can purchase an Gilcee Art Print or Greeting Card featuring the artwork of their choice. As a bonus, they can have their art shipped directly to a friend along with a personal note.”

8X10 Giclee Art Prints on WaterColor Paper
5 x 7 Giclee Greeting Cards

I’m trying to select a piece from my available art that fits this theme. Please help me decide! Voting doesn’t obligate you to buy anything, but if you WERE to buy one of my pieces as a card to send to a friend, what would it be? The pieces I’m considering are below.

Comment with your vote or votes (sure you can pick more than one!), or with an alternate suggestion from my available pieces – like something from my Artomatic Showcase:

My Artomatic 2017 Artist Interview

4/24/2017 By Mishka in Artomatic, Deco Era Fairytales, General, interviews, Little Yogis, Shows

For Artomatic, we’re reviving the Artist Interviews. These are written interviews that will appear only on our Facebook Page. Please keep your responses in the question & answer format.

1) Who are you and how long have you been an artist?

Mishka Jaeger: I’ve been an artist since I could finger-paint with my mashed peas and pureed chicken. I love creating and I’m scatter-brained. I’m not sure if that’s a bug or a feature because my media are inconsistent. In general, I like telling stories through my art. My focuses are children’s’ book illustration, women, food, music, and spirituality.

2) What medium(s) do you work in & why?

3) What is your creative process like?

See “scatterbrained.” I tend to have too many ideas at once and many projects in the works at one time. I’m working on dialing in the focus and boiling everything down so I can be a bit more prolific. But I don’t really rough sketch. What purport to be my sketches tend to be more polished (which is why I’m showing some of them in my AoM display), and my sketchbook tends to look more like a journal. I often write out what I intend to draw instead of rough sketching because with rough sketching, I can’t always read my own visual handwriting later on. Once I’ve got a sketch that I like, I usually put it on the computer and noodle the layout around until I like it. A varying process of printing, light-boxing, inking, and re-digitizing are involved to clean up the lines. I use colored pencil over a 10% K-tone printout. I outlined this process in a little more detail while creating Art Deco Cinderella on my website blog in September 2015 (“Enchanted: A 1920’s Cinderella”).

4) What is the best art-related advice you’ve received?

Really it’s from Jane Yolen who is an inspirational master of organization, focus and creation, and a phenomenal human being and author. Her main thing is “butt-in-chair.” That is to say, you need to do the work. You can’t do anything if you don’t do the work. After that, it’s that art is a business and if you want to succeed at it, you need to treat it as such.

5) What is the biggest challenge you face as an artist?

I still have small children at home, so actually finding the time, energy, and focus to do the work is a challenge. Apart from that, my challenge is to generate a following and then monetize my work (you wanted honesty, right?). I need to tell a better story so that people want to hear more from me. And then I need to tell it louder.

6) Choose one piece that you currently have on display at Artomatic and tell the story of that piece:

I’d been working through the 100 Days project when I had the privilege of attending a workshop with yoga master Tao Porchon-Lynch who turns 99 years old this August. She told us many stories about her childhood in India between the wars. One of her more popular stories was that she’d lie on the ground and listen to the grass grow. She said she could really hear it. That story inspired the first of my Little Yogi illustrations, and I drew my version of a young Tao lying and listening to the grass. Later that week while cleaning out my 20 years of magpie-collected papers, I turned up a bookmark that read, “I breathe in and out and my whole body calms down.” It was fortuitous. Now there are two things I strongly believe we need to do to live happier, healthier lives. The first is to get a good night’s sleep (and I’m still not so good at that). The second is pausing to breathe mindfully. It gives you time to think before you act, and deep, slow breaths do calm you down. So “Breathe” became my next Little Yogi. Now you can have a card to remind you to breathe too. Pick one up in my AoM space #3402 behind the theater.

7) What is your favorite part of the Artomatic experience so far?

It is always meeting new local artists, seeing what they’re working on, seeing what we have in common, and learning from their work and creative processes.

8) How can people find you online?

Always by my name:

www.mishkajaeger.com

https://www.facebook.com/mishkajaegersketchbook

https://www.etsy.com/shop/MishkaJaeger

@mishkajaeger on Twitter and Instagram

Read more about my Artomatic 2017 Show…

Artomatic 2017

3/24/2017 By Mishka in Artomatic, Children's, etsy, General, SCBWI, Shows

Artomatic, the area’s largest free pop-up art museum returns to Crystal City!

This year features over 600 artists, performers, musicians, and creatives of all stripes showcasing their talents on seven vacated floors of a former Department of Homeland Security building at 1800 S. Bell Street in Crystal City, Virginia.

Living in the DC area definitely provides some weird opportunities.

Anyway, look for my work in space#3402 on the third floor behind the movie theater. Look for this sign:

As you see, I’m sharing the room with my talented and creative friend, the incomparable, Alexandra Zealand!

You’ll have to check out the project she’s working on as well!

My little helper. Maybe we should put her to work painting the living room now?

The small works I’m showing this year were created for illustration challenges Kidlitart28…

…and the 100 Days Project that produced a series of food illustrations and the Little Yogis series. It’s also where I discovered that I love working in colored pencil.

I noticed I haven’t posted much about my other works from the 100 Days project. I should fix that.

A tweet that wondered what fairy tales would look like in the style of Erté inspired me to begin a series set in the 1920’s.

Other subjects I frequent include children, food, goddesses, spirituality, and Jewish themes.

My daughter (who is now almost 6) watches me in the studio. She often asks me to print out my line art so she can color it in HER way. She wanted to help create this display. I figured why not?

Where else but Artomatic can you really let your child crayon on the walls? She says she wants to be an artist when she grows up. But she’s an artist now (goddess, help me!)

Prices for original colored pencil pieces range from $35 – $350

Archival quality prints of everything in the show are available — just write me for details. They’re $12 for 5 x 8 — $17 for 8 x 10 exclusive of shipping.

Some prints are currently available in my Etsy shop. 8 x 10 archival prints are $17 until May 8th – throughout the run of the show. Use promotion code, “AoM2017” at checkout.

I will be making more prints available in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, see you tonight at the opening of Artomatic 2017!

8th Annual Virginia Women’s Business Conference

12/3/2016 By Mishka in General, Women, Work

This isn’t the sort of post I’m used to writing on this website. Things have been mostly quiet here since I returned from SCBWI-NE last spring which is usually a pretty big no-no in the social media world. Obviously I’ve been busy working on various projects but nothing really post-able. Mostly, I’ve been working on another contract building digital high school math course curriculum for k12.com and I’ve started picking up smaller info-graphics and corporate graphic jobs again as well. My k12 contract ended this week and this is the first weekend I haven’t had to work in months!

My husband, Bill’s, job also ended in October. After 14 years in federal business development, prop and grant managing/writing and tech writing/editing on staff for various companies, he decided he wanted to stay freelance and support smaller businesses. Because we both are now freelance, we decided to file for an LLC the day before Thanksgiving. We’re still waiting on the name and number before I make us some cards and an online presence for the new biz which, if all goes well, will be called Illumination Services, LLC (as in – illuminated manuscript – the combination of words and images). So today, at the Virginia Women’s Business Conference, I found myself handing out my illustration business cards with this website URL because that’s what I had on hand.

I didn’t actually plan to attend this conference. Actually, I didn’t know about it. Despite 20+ years alternating between employee and contractor status, I am still just starting to wrap my head around the idea that I’m a businesswoman. Today happened… by a confluence of events.

Last year, my friend, Dana asked her friends to start collecting bras for a project that helped homeless women. We were (really she was) so successful that she started a non-profit company called Support the Girls (which has been getting a lot of press – here’s one from the Washington Post). At the end of this summer, she asked me if I wouldn’t mind doing another collection. I can’t say no because this isn’t hard. So I asked my friends in the MOMs Club, the Preschool, on-line, and a Facebook group called Buy Nothing Reston for donations (the final count this year was 102 bras and a kitchen garbage bag full of feminine hygiene products!).

On the Buy nothing group, Kim Lysik Di Santi noticed my post requesting donations. She and I were still strangers but she had met Dana a few years back and was very impressed with Dana’s work both at her primary company, Accessibility Partners, as well as Support the Girls. Kim has attended and volunteered for the Virginia Women’s Business Conference since its inception. She asked me if I would like to nominate my friend for their annual Stellar Woman Award. I said sure! and she emailed me the forms. My eyes crossed a little. This was more Bill’s bailiwick than mine. I asked him and he very kindly helped me put together the nomination with additional help from Dana’s colleague, Sharon.

Surprise! I was informed two weeks ago that Dana was a finalist for the award! Wooooo Hooooo! So, slightly unprepared and glassy-eyed, I attended the conference today as Dana’s guest. I participated in some informative business 101 sessions and a fascinating legal presentation by Nancy Greene. I met a bunch of truly fabulous women in all stages of the business world, and ultimately felt a lot less like a fish out of water than I’d expected to.

And the icing on my cake – DANA WON THE AWARD!!!

And now… back to work.

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