Green Bee is a pen and ink drawing that started as a pencil sketch onto Arches hot press 100% cotton watercolor paper. Artist Ty Meier then inked it with permanent and waterproof Posca acrylic paint markers. He then erased away the pencil leaving only the acrylic ink linework, leaving a coloring-book like page. He painted this with a thinly pigmented watercolor paint transparent enough to let the acrylic ink drawing through. It’s the same way you’d color a coloring book with an Copic alcohol marker, in fact an alcohol marker would be better than watercolor because it’s transparent and vibrant, but the awful truth is that Copic markers are very expensive, they run out in the middle of your artwork, and they only come in bright lollypop colors. Watercolor can be mixed into down-toned colors, and one tray lasts forty artworks.
Once the drawing, inking, and coloring is finished Ty highlights the artwork with Liquitex heavy body acrylic paint, usually white and black, which is opaque enough to go over the pen and watercolor; it highlights the artwork, and full disclosure, the artist uses it to fix his inevitable and many mistakes.
Once that’s done and thoroughly dry, Meier gets a good high resolution scan of the artwork for future prints, greeting cards and stickers, all of which are easy for him to produce because he’s a graphic designer in a very supportive print shop in Concord, New Hampshire.
The original of Green Bee was sold from a weekend art market in New England a long time ago, but this print of it is glued and pressed to a hand-painted art board, then augmented with a heavy body acrylic medium- a kind of acrylic paint with no pigment. Ty calligraphically brushes the medium on with a long, thin, signpainterly brush called a rigger, and then lacquers the artwork in layers until it glows.
Once he’s satisfied with the glow, in the back of the art board he screws in D-Rings for a wire and presses his “Artist Statement” sticker on, then glues furniture bumpers on the corners to keep it from banging against other artworks in transit, or against the wall of the gallery display or the wall where it finds it’s final home.
The last step is to type a rough draft of this audiotour entry that you are listening to right now into google docs. Ty drops that rough draft into Google Gemini to see how it would re-write it, and chooses interesting or engaging phrases to include. Once satisfied he uses Elevenlabs text-to-speech to generate the voice and audio file, and then uploads everything onto his website, Sunnydaysillustration.com. Sunny Days generates a QR code for him to print on stickers and info cards, which you’ve found, and thank you so much!
The very last step, but most important, is to find a home for the artwork. Ty likes to say “One in a thousand people could care less but there’s 390 million of us, and that’s enough to have a strong audience.” He also says “Once an artist dies, he gets to see where all his art went” which helps him come to terms with the small amount of grief he has every single time he sells an artwork.
