Swag

While in NYC to attend the Society of Illustrators Student show, I picked up a few items of note. Postcards from the Met are great to use when determining colors in a composition. They had a gorgeous exhibit on 19th and 20th century painters: Vuillard, Mucha, Sargent, Lautrec, Van Gogh, ect. I was very pleasantly surprised and awed by the touches of perfect color in the Degas pastels.

I finally found a watercolor travel kit I like, a Pentel Aquash set from Kinokuniya, which I removed the provided colors from and filled with my favorite colors instead (naples yellow, permanent red, perm alizarin crimson, venetian red, permanet violet, lavendar, antwerp blue, turquoise blue, davy's grey & payne's grey: a very earthy palette).

At the Strand, I picked up a Moleskin storyboard sketchbook, Strand tote and Lemony Snickett's The Composer is Dead, featuring music by Nathaniel Stookey and illustrations by Carson Ellis, an inspirational culmination of story, sound and visuals. When I can afford to, I'm picking up Neil Gaiman's new children's book The Dangerous Alphabet and Meomi's first Octonauts book out of sheer love.

The disassembled book on the bottom is friend's copy of Oliver Twist, which I will be re-binding sometime after the 22nd as a bookbinding demo for friends. If you're in the area and you want to know how to stitch & bind signatures as well as make a hardbound cover, let me know.



I also ended up making a set of three small hardbound portfolios: illustration, painting and black & white illustration. The pages are removable and they fit neatly into an envelope I made to protect them for carrying them easily in my purse.

Plenty of plans coming up for the summer, including teaching figure drawing, working, as well as a few secret projects. Keep up on my interests and updates on Twitter.