Featured Artist for Eureka Friday Night Market 2026

Eureka Friday Night Market is coming up again, and it marks a year since I first started selling my artwork in a live venue. Last year's market was the first time I'd set up my booth for my digital print art instead of my wearable art. I'd had greeting cards and various other pieces available for purchase online, but I'd never put up a table and put myself out there in person. 

And what a difference that choice made on my life and career path. 

Since then I've participated in over 30 different events as an art vendor, joined the Redwood Art Association as one of their lead volunteers, and met a world of people I am proud to call friends. Humboldt County has welcomed me in with open arms, and they've been very good to me. 

So I was thrilled when I was contacted by Charlene Cook, Humboldt Made's Marketing and Program Director, to do the poster for this year's Friday Night Market. Humboldt Made mounts Friday Night Market in both Eureka and Arcata. I've been a member for a year now, and it was because of Humboldt Made's first mixer of the 2025 year that I met a lot of people who are dear to me. The second day after moving here, my husband and I attended that gathering knowing we'd committed to doing Friday Night Market for the first time, site unseen. And through that event, we met a deluge of genuinely nice people who extended their hearts and advice and networks to help us settle in. 

It is an indelible truth that without Humboldt Made's Friday Night Market experience, I would not be doing my art the way I'm doing it. I would not have found a unique, community-reciprocal path forward to making my art. I've taken dozens of suggestions, created lovely pieces that speak to the flora and fauna of the region, and been able to then offer it back to the community I call home now. I feel like my work is somewhat linked, hand-in-hand, with the nature of this area in a way that I would never have envisioned myself. I'm incredibly happy with the body of work that has resulted, and look forward excitedly to making more. 

The poster design was one of several iterations. I discovered halfway through the initial conversations that I'd proposed ideas that were strikingly similar to a local iconographic event called OysterFest, and had to step back and revise what I'd suggested with different choices so the posters wouldn't have the same colors, motifs, and bird imagery. 

So I settled on a Night Heron I'd made previously for a very different-looking limited edition print of my own, and created an Art Nouveau-stylized expression framing it. I love these framing devices. They're very organic to my eye. I strive really hard to make sure they look traditional, with lots of texture and highlights and shadow. Even though it's completely digital (I do it all on my iPad Pro in an app called Procreate), I try to create the appearance of something tangible. 

The process requires a lot of layers, with a variety of different layer modes. I also use brushes from specific sets I've purchased over time that create a kind of "thick paint" effect that can appear to have impasto effects with a bit of tweaking. 

There are a lot of artistic influences on my work, but none so much as Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, who lived around the turn of the 20th Century and was one of the first females allowed into the Glasgow School of Art in the mid 1890s, along with her sister Florence. Macdonald Mackintosh was highly influential on Gustav Klimt and the other Vienna Secessionists, and her particular style of Scottish Art Nouveau and Arts & Crafts art is rich with texture and layering of gesso and glazes. I love her pieces. 

So my poster is my own digital riff on the aspects of her work that I relish. Some of her work I'm not too enamored with, but some of them sing to me. 

I'm thrilled to be able to offer this piece for this summer's Market, and I'm honored to be named this year's Featured Artist. I'm hoping it will put my work out there for folks who haven't seen it yet. I'm really happy that they're selling it as an exclusive print at their booth, and I hope it makes at least a little bit of money for them. I tried really hard to create a poster that I felt wasn't a simple promotional graphic but something that was a piece of art worthy of collecting and hanging on a wall in a frame. 

And most of the artists I admire from the past did similar work. Mucha as well as Macdonald Mackintosh and her husband Charles "Rennie" Mackintosh (the famous architect) all did program covers, book covers, and promotional materials like ads. I like to think I'm walking in the steps of giants. We'll see what the future may bring!

As the featured artist, I got a phenomenal spot for my booth, and a newspaper article all about me and my art business, Coreyartus Imagery.