Nakia Pickering Illustration

www.nakiapickering.com

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New zine??

Yes, i did make this spontaneously yesterday before the market, why do you ask?

Snag one here: https://www.nakiapickering.com/category/all-products

All Products | Nakia Pickering

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The painting vs the reference 🎨

This was a study from last week’s assignment in my RISD CE Painting Sea and Sky course. We were tasked with creating a monochromatic painting using one pigment and including a graded wash for sky and/or water. I chose Indanthrene Blue as my pigment since it has a wide range of values and created this little study of a photo I took in Ogunquit back in 2020 or so. I’m really happy with how this came out and I plan to make a full color study of this image too!

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Looooooong time no post, but I’ve got a new drop live on my shop now!

New Arrivals | Nakia Pickering

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I’ve recently started a new @risdce class called Reimagining Audubon, which means you’ll be seeing lots of bird illustrations for the next few weeks! It’s been the best kind of overwhelming so far, and illustrating skeletons is something very new to me. Last week was songbirds, but the studies were open-ended so I chose a Loon skeleton and a Red-Tailed Hawk skull.

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Here’s the piece I posted some reels of a bit ago! I had a lot of fun illustrating these Blue Mussels and Sugar Kelp with colored pencils for my RISD CE Marine Species Illustration class and I definitely plan to work with colored pencils again soon!

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Hey friends!! I'm officially reopening commissions!! I'm mostly looking to take on pet and animal portraits, but I'm open to other things as well! Read through the slides for more info, and shoot me an e mail to talk about working together!

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Post-thesis, near-graduation mood 💤

Here’s another illustration from my book, ⛓️ in my insta bio to grab one!

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Thesis install: ☑️

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April is National Native Plant Month, a month dedicated to creating awareness of the amazing native plants that grow across our country, and the legislation that is being introduced around them! To get more information, head to nationalnativeplantmonth.org

To celebrate, I’ve chosen to highlight one of Maine’s most unique native plants: the Pussy Willow! Here’s some info about the plant from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden:

- The fuzzy parts of the plant are actually flowers on the male plants! Only the males produce them.

- Female plants produce flowers that look more like hairy greenish caterpillars

- Pussy willows are dioecious, meaning there are both male plants and female plants.

- Their flowers are called catkins, also named for cats, in this case for their tails (from the old Dutch word for kitten katteken). Many other trees and shrubs, such as birch and beech, also produce catkins.

- They are a small, shrubby species of willow that can be found in wetlands and moist woods throughout much of North America.

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Blue Mussel and Sugar Kelp colored pencil process ✨ i illustrated this piece with Arteza watercolor pencils and watercolor paper for my RISD CE Marine Species Illustration class

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Working on a blue mussel and sugar kelp colored pencil illustration for my RISD CE Marine Species Illustration class today 🫧

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Happy Earth Day! It’s a great day to love your mother 🌏 while the warmer weather in April has been enjoyable, it’s overall a bad sign for climate change. Here are some organizations who are working hard to conserve our planet and keep our environment safe, so please go check them out and support their work how you can!

The Nature Conservancy

Ocean Conservancy

World Wildlife Fund

US Environmental Protection Agency

P.S. this is a sticker I designed a while back but never posted. If you catch me at any markets this summer, you can snag one from me!

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Poisson D’Avril!

It’s April Fools’ Day, and you know I can’t resist the chance to make some quirky holiday art! They call it Poisson D’Avril, or ‘April Fish’ in France. No now knows exactly why, but I won’t complain about a reason to illustrate! I chose a European Sturgeon for this piece because they’re a very important and critically endangered species. Here are some facts about them:

- They are the rarest sturgeon in the world.

- One single wild population exists in the Garonne and Dordogne rivers in France, but in former times they’ve been documented in many other places including the Atlantic, the English Channel, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea.

- Globally 85% of sturgeon species are threatened with extinction, rendering them the most endangered species group in the world, according to IUCN.

- They are diadromous, meaning they live in fresh AND salt waters!

- They can live to be over 100 years old, grow up to 16 feet long, and weigh up to 770 pounds!

- Today sturgeons are referred to as living dinosaurs as their lineage dates back to over 200 million years ago!

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Book spread number one: ✔️

I just finished the first full spread of my upcoming author-illustrator debut picture book “Be Brave, Beatrice!”, coming out later this year!

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Here’s a piece I did for my first RISD Continuing Education class I took back in January and February! I was given the prompt of “Sperm Whale” and chose to illustrate one as if he was in a children’s book. Let me tell you, drawing a whale sitting is HARD!

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I’ve been on a bit of an unofficial hiatus due to a family death, but I can’t let World Wildlife Day slip by without sharing one of my favorite animals with you all: the Prehensile-Tailed Porcupine! I fell in love with these guys several years ago after Hank Green highlighted one named Kemosabe on his show and it made baby noises while eating fruit! Here are some facts about them:

* They are small mammals

* They use their prehensile tail to grasp things, and half of the weight of the tail is because of muscle

* They live in the South American forests of Venezuela, Guiana, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Trinidad, and some extreme northern sections of Argentina

* They are also excellent climbers and spend the majority of their time in trees

* They are herbivores that eat leaves, flowers, shoots, roots, and the cambium layer beneath some trees’ bark

* They are nocturnal, typically sleeping during the day in the upper canopy of trees, although they have also been found resting on lower limbs and in hollow trunks and lower burrows. They are reported to move to a new tree each night

* Lifespan: Life expectancy in human care ranges from 12 to 17 years

* For more information, visit the Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute website

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I recently got to do yet another research project on body disposal, this time, on sustainable methods! I made a zine with some of the things I learned, and I’ll have them for sale the next time I’m at a market!