Art Market Review

Here is a sample of the prints I sold at Art Market last week, a four-day student and faculty-run event at MICA that raises money for the sellers and for scholarships for students at MICA. Pretty cool! I bought a few Christmas presents, sold some of my shark litho prints from last year, and sold out on my hand-lettered dragon alphabets! All in all the Illustration department had a strong showing, I saw a lot of impressive and creative work from my fellow illustration majors (everything from hand-painted pendants to printed tees to printed books and cards) For a sampling of some of the MICA Illustration work, check this out: http://blogthelab.blogspot.com/ I'm definitely going to participate in Art Market next year, with a focus on packaging and overall branding of my work. The experience was great practice!

An American Wedding

front^

inside^

back^

So while I've been a counselor at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in Twin Lake, Michigan (http://www.bluelake.org/) for the past few weeks, I had the opportunity to design wedding programs before I left for a friend who was married just last Saturday.  Everything is completely hand-drawn and fairly low-tech: I don't have the resources at home that I do at school (scanners, printers, Photoshop, etc) so I had to keep it relatively simple to create and inexpensive to reproduce.  The illustration is graphite and ink, drawn at about 175% size to allow more detail when I reduced the image for the program.  I did the entire program in one go, then scanned and printed the image of the happy couple to attach to the center of the front cover.  The entire program was then photocopied for the wedding guests.  Congratulations Sarah and Mike!  

Dragon Alphabet

Part of a sketchbook alphabet I developed further for my Hand Letters class.  The dragons are hand-drawn and colored in Photoshop.

Circles

An older hand-drawn alphabet, but I recently resurrected it for another project I'll post later this week.  I've been behind in my updates due to a sudden and catastrophic hard drive crash, where I lost everything from Spring 08 until now.  After researching hard drive data recovery, I have found the expense to be upwards of $1,000; so unless I can find another (affordable) alternative I am going to suck it up and replace the hard drive with a new one.  The massive loss is mostly my fault--everyone knows how important it is to back up all your files, but it's something I failed to do.  Since this is the second hard drive crash in less than two years, you can be sure I'm going to purchase an external hard drive and back up everything from now on.  It still doesn't help the sting of losing everything---personal photos, class papers, photographed/scanned artwork, etc.  Hopefully my next post will be a brighter one...

Ponytail Type

The Fall of the House of Usher

The Illustration department at MICA has been buzzing for the past few weeks because of the upcoming experimental production of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher."  Sets, posters, flyers, and programs are all being designed by MICA Illustration students--the image depicted above is a detail of a poster design by Cameron Shojaei that I converted to black and white and adapted for a program.  My entire Hand Letters class had to do the same assignment: take a portion of one of the poster designs and incorporate hand-drawn type into the grayscale image.  One of the faculty will select a few of these designs to print for the show.  I'm looking forward to seeing what the set looks like, and how the performance plays out.  It is a brief show, only about 15 minutes long, but one of my roommates will be on stage so that makes the event even more exciting.  That's all for now--I'm hoping later this week to post some more of my work from Hand Letters!