Meet the Artist
Erin Darling is a storyteller and illustrator from Tacoma, WA. She uses watercolor and ink to share original anthropomorphic characters. She is a queer Christian and single mom. Themes of community and inclusivity are important in her work.
When Erin started this website in 2009, she blogged primarily about simple living and homemaking. Some of her most popular posts to this day are about cheese.
Which is funny, considering what she is doing now…
How You Can Experience Erin’s Work
Erin’s latest project is Calico Jill and the Search for Cheese, a serialized story in zine format about a mouse pirate who navigates an urban landscape in search of food and finds community along the way. You can follow new chapters of this story as they release each month on Patreon and you can discover extra tid bits about the characters in Erin’s blog posts.
Erin’s first storybook was Coco and Olive: The Color of Love, a book by international adoption advocate Michelle Madrid-Branch, telling a story of blended family and borderless love. In this children’s book, a family of dogs adopts a new puppy as their youngest family member.
Queer representation and LGBT+ advocacy are central themes in much of Erin’s work. Transgender representation shows up time and again in Erin’s paintings, in either obvious or subtle ways, and she often chooses trans models for her subjects without outing them.
She is the artist behind the Affectionate Animals series turning vintage photographs of queer couples into anthropomorphic portraits. This series was initially developed for a gallery showing at PCAF, formerly known as Pierce County AIDS Foundation. Through her partnership with this nonprofit she is continually raising money through fundraising efforts.
Get in touch with Erin
To get in touch with Erin, click here for her contact page.