Merry Christmas!

Here's a little something I made for my cousins Mary, Kaitlin, and Katie--we're all around the same age and exchange Christmas gifts every year. Christmas with my dad's side is always a lot of fun: he has 8 brothers and sisters which makes for lots of cousins! I used a few photos for reference, did a line drawing in graphite, and colored it in photoshop with my Christmas present from mom and dad: a wacom tablet! It's small but very portable and gets the job done. Unfortunately I haven't been able to install the software on my laptop yet because my disc drive is broken. Not sure how to get around this-we've tried various methods with external hard drives, but nothing seems to work. Anyway, I'm excited to use the tablet for a few upcoming projects involving superhero characters: more to come!

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!

Google vs iPhone: Revisited

Here is a reworking of an earlier illustration I did for my Concepts I class. In this updated version I changed the colors of the environment to suggest a slightly more aggressive mood (if you look at the earlier version you will see that I had originally colored the background a light green similar to the one in the buildings) The illustration is for an article about the new Google Droid, a rising competitor to the iPhone.

Simulator Santa!

A holiday card I designed for VI grade--the cover is a play off of their product "Car RealTime," a software used to create vehicle simulation environments (http://www.vi-grade.com/index.php?pagid=vehicle_dynamics_carrealtime)

As always, click the image for a larger view!

Character Development Final

My Character Development final--a movie character I designed based off an environment provided my my professor (a photo of an abandoned factory covered in snow) Kaneq was a veterinarian before the snowy apocalypse forced her to seek refuge in an abandoned factory. Once a cat lover, she now has to fend for herself in a world where the only survivors are packs of mutant feral cats that are constantly on the prowl. Using gears and pipes from her home in the factory, Kaneq fashions weapons with which to defend herself, making the physical and mental transformation from a tender-hearted veterinarian to a feral cat huntress fighting for her life in a post-apocalyptic world.

Kaneq's latter character dress was inspired by attire of the Arctic Native Americans; her name is the Inuit word for "frost."

Drawings in graphite; coloring in photoshop.

Business Card

My business cards! (front/back) Still need to order them from gotprint.com (great site) in preparation for MICA Art Market next week, but I'm happy with how the design turned out.

Business Card--preliminary drawing

Front/Back design for my business card for Art Market (next week!) Still need to color and print.

Boogeyman Re-design

This is an assignment we had in my Character Development class earlier in the year--everyone in the class did 30 quick sketches of a "boogeyman" character. We were then assigned another person's sketch in the class to re-design, keeping the essential qualities of the character idea, but re-executing it in our own style/interpretation. The topmost image is the original sketch by my classmate, the other two are my re-interpretation of her idea.

Ocarina Salesgirl

This is slightly dated--we had to design a new character and environment in my Character Development class for an existing video or computer game. I chose Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (Nintendo 64) My character is an Ocarina Salesgirl who travels around Hyrule Field with her large pack, selling ocarinas and other special instruments. The environment shown is my first attempt at digital painting in Photoshop, something I hope continue and improve upon.

Battle to the Death!

Spot illustration for an NPR article about the new Google phone, a rising challenger to Apple's iPhone. Concepts I class--I was told to change the background color to something more intense (I'm thinking orange...) The palette is inspired by vintage comic covers. My second-ever experimentation with coloring digitally! (First was an environment for my character development class that I'll post later in the week)

Character Design-Jungle Queen

For my Character Development class we designed a comic book character that was inspired by an interesting object we brought into class. My objects were an assortment of doll hands, which eventually developed into the idea for a character with interesting/additional hands and arms. I have not thought of a name for this character yet, though I imagine her to be a villainous jungle-queen of some sort. The final piece is done in watercolor and ink, with graphite sketches.

Old Photographs from an Old Camera

Some of my favorite images from an old roll of film that I just got developed...I've been trying to upload sketches from the summer for a while but it doesn't seem to be working. Hopefully I will have those up later this month. The horses and cows are from a trip to upstate New York with some friends over Spring Break, the portraits are friends and family, and the aerial artistry is from a performance at MICA last spring (I was amazed they turned out, since my camera has no flash!) The cornfield is from my home in Michigan and the city scape is from my home in Maryland...quite the juxtaposition!

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...

Queen of the Bees

My Illustration II class got the opportunity to go see "A Circus Family: Picasso to Leger" at the BMA before spring break.  The exhibit was worth every dollar--I have always taken an interest in Picasso's paintings and studies of circus people, and it was amazing to see some Toulouse-Lautrec prints in living color.  I wasted no time filling my sketchbook with studies of the posters--their strong compositions and energetic layouts will be sure to inspire me in future Illustration assignments.  For our "circus portrait" project in Illustration II, we were to depict a well-known celebrity as a circus performer (acrobat, lion tamer, ringmaster, etc) that somehow related to their image or persona in the real world.  I was inspired by Amy Winehouse's towering hairdo, and so she became a circus freak known as "Queen of the Bees."  (it was between her and Mary-Kate Olsen as the Incredible Shrinking Woman) As always, click for a larger view!

Lighting Workshop

These are from last semester--all Illustration majors were required to attend a lighting workshop in the BBOX performance space.  I'm not sure if you can read my scribbled handwriting, but the topmost sketch is drawn from 2-point side lighting, the middle from "Rembrandt lighting" (creates a triangular patch on the cheek) and the bottom from bottom lighting (also called "up" or "foot" lighting..)  All are five-minute exercises executed in sharpie.

Blood Type

For my Hand Letters class we were assigned a project entitled "Nature's Alphabet," where we had to render an alphabet inspired by natural elements.  (Leaves, birds, vegetables, etc)  I chose the circulatory system, and used my handy 1940s anatomy book to aid me in depicting realistic vein and artery structures.  I apologize for the low image quality; the file size had to be greatly reduced in order for me to upload.  We used this alphabet in a later project---I will post it later this week, if I can recover my lost flash drive!

Ponytail Type

Fun With Dick And Jane

Collaged image for my printmaking class, Hand-Drawn Photo.  Continuation of a series I started freshman year of Dick and Jane characters interacting with deep-sea creatures (see color illustrations below)  All text is from the original readers; only recontextualized.