Loose Color Sketch for Mural

So I never did post the first mural I finished in the basement over a year ago, so hopefully I'll get some pics of that this week to post. It's very tricky to get a good photo, since it's in a long, skinny hallway with dim lighting. Hmmm. Anyway, here is a very loose color sketch of the mural I am starting this week--the colors may vary slightly, but you get the general idea. My parents (who commissioned the mural) wanted something with greens, resemble an abstract forest, with echoes of the arts and crafts style. This is my own take on the abstract, and has similar themes to my first mural (which I will post later) especially the contrast between swooping arcs and straight lines. The colors are taken from a William Morris wallpaper design, "Arbutus." The final mural will measure just over 6 x 9 feet.

Ethiopian Codex

One of the examples of the books I constructed last semester in my Papermaking & Book Structure class. Coptic binding, wood cover stained with acrylic--hopefully more books to come! I need to get better photographs of them.

Nine Lives

So, here is the final I did for my folk art and folk life class. My idea was to collect and illustrate various stories from my dad and his 8 siblings, and the idea evolved a bit along the way. I definitely improved my inking, and enjoyed working with minimal, vintage-y color (I've always loved the limited color palette of children's books like "Blueberries for Sal") The tales themselves are another story--many have tweaked or added elements, just to help them fill out or wrap up in a slightly cleaner way. I'm not very fond of the re-telling of the stories, mostly because the book was put together during a very limited time frame, where I was spending most of my time trying to ink, scan, and color the illustrations. It never ceases to amaze me how long inking takes (always about 3x longer then I suspect it's going to take. . .) Anyhow, here is the "finished" book! I think the babysitter and car seat comps are two of my faves.

A Few Style Buddies. . .

So for my fashion illustration class we had to "dress" these dolls every week with designer fashions (or just random street fashions) These are a few of my favorites. It was kind of a lot to do these every week on top of our regular class work, but I feel like it really helped me improve my tablet skills and short-hand methods for depicting different types of surfaces.

Mount Royal Elementary/Middle School Arts Evening

My work-study is at the elementary/middle school down the street, so to earn some extra hours I did the postcard and flyer for their upcoming "Arts Evening." Here's the front & back view of the postcard and the flyer design. . .

Mental Disorders: Get in the Know (Concepts Final)

So I've been revisiting this idea of the ocean and sea creatures and how this parallels the human mind and the subconscious. (see my Dick and Jane series from a while back) It was a topic I explored freshman year a little bit and I wanted to re-engage those ideas in a different way for my Illustration Concepts II final.

I've been wanting to work with this specific imagery of sea creatures interacting with human anatomy, and my professor challenged me to find a real-world application for this idea (apart from a purely visual piece, which is what I had in mind) I came up with the idea of an awareness campaign for mental disorders, titled "Mental Disorders: Get in the Know" (cheesy, I know...) headed by the National Institute for Mental Health.

These posters reference early medical illustrations, but each image is a visual representation of a particular mental disorder and/or symptom. The idea would be to have a half-dozen or more of these posters, one for each mental disorder falling under the common categories (Mood, Psychotic, Anxiety, etc) The roman numerals are not meant to be sequential, merely a visual reference to the classic anatomy plates. As always, images can be clicked on and zoomed for a more detailed view! (I recommend it :)

Vice & Virtue Final

Vices and Virtues: Sketch Phase

We had to choose one of the seven vices and its corresponding virtue to illustrate as two posters. I chose pride and humility, here is the sketch phase--update to come next week!