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.