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.

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!