Honey-Sweetened Love

My first lattice-topped double-crust cherry pie entirely from scratch was very inspirational. Pie for breakfast? Just try to stop me.

 

 

How Handsome

Past gentlemanly contributions to the Ten Paces and Draw Project.



The sketch was heavily inspired by a love for bicycling, antiques, and cowboys, a pervading theme to my life in the virtual bicycle mecca of America's 7th Best Bicycle City. The bike is a British WWII BSA Folding Bicycle, how cool is that?

The palette of the final For the Love of Roger brought to you by the colors Not-Red-&-Green.

Celebrations

Last month I celebrated a very special birthday and I spent the day enjoying it to its fullest as a food-lover and an artist by restaurant-hopping and drawing my meals.

You can well imagine the stomach ache I ended up with after all that food, but it was well worth every bite of grits, biscuits, sausage, eggs, raspberry iced tea, soup sampler, open-faced ham and apple sandwich and dessert sampler.

This month I also celebrated another very special but different anniversary as the one year anniversary that I began a journey to transform and improve my life. From last year to this year, I worked every day to achieve a healthy lifestyle and lose 90 pounds. It's extraordinary to know that just last year I was fighting obesity whereas now I am in the best shape of my life. Through all the ups and downs, I have been reaping in the benefits every day and I am greatly looking forward to continuing this journey of healthy living for the rest of my life.

This change has lead to fun little moments of creative inspiration, such as when I designed a personal home menu to organized my meal options. It was certainly a joy to whip up and it's functional!

Finally, the good news keeps coming as I also produced on a series of illustrations for a children's story in which the author was inspired by Zhuangzi's famous butterfly dream philosophy, taking on a whimsical view of the question of self and distorted perspective. Both subject matters that match quite well to my artistic views and work in style.

Here's to another exhilarating year of continued hard work, fortune and success!

Futurama Redesign

One of my favorite tv shows is returning to air, and I'm so excited for the new season of Futurama that I took a moment to redesign the characters and the ship. The redesign is heavily influenced by the Nautilus of Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, because great design never goes bad.

As for why they are all posed vaguely like pin-up girls? The more apt question is why not.

T-Shirts? Why not.

Through MySoti, t-shirts are now available featuring the vector illustration of my favorite SEA MONSTER:

And for the tea snobs like me out there, declare your love with your choice of Green Tea:

Herbal Tea:

or Black Tea:

Monster

Got slammed by a flu or cold this weekend, which I'm still woozy and recovering from. I did see that Coop of A Patchwork of Flesh received my submission to his online blog gallery of Frankenstein's monster.



I assume from my portfolio work, people don't see me drawing dark pieces but I do like to make them. I just like to make the dark aspects subtle. With Frankenstein's monster, the surgical procedure of the creation is the part that intrigues me the most, even though I feel ill when looking at real surgery photos. The bolts and nuts have become a quintessential physical aspect of the monster, and in this case, I envisioned how they could be incorporated without putting them in the flesh as a part of a restraining device.

In the meantime, after reading the original description of the monster, I did a piece heavily influenced by Jenny Saville. The only problem is that it does not evoke what has become the popular assumption of Boris Karloff's Frankenstein's monster at all. Still, it was fun to draw and intriguing in how the second drawing begins to take on a more sinister aspect, even though that was unintended.



The request for work for A Patchwork of Flesh was a fun expendature of time and creativity. It was also a great excuse to explore new materials and their effects. For everyone who wants to submit, no matter what the level of artistic training may be, visit the blog for more information. All submissions welcomed and encouraged! Thank you, Coop!

Go North

Looking back on the 50s and 60s, ads told a story to sell the product through text and illustration. Plenty of the ad stories and illustrations were irreverent to what the product actually did, rather more like fairy tales than ads and at times not even showing the product itself. In this image I wanted to make a tongue-in-cheek ad for an AARP article, illustrated as a dreamy fairy tale inspired by those ads as well as the work of Lisbeth Zwerger.



I'm irrepressible when reminiscing about the good old days. Er, wait, that's not right.

I really really do.

So much so that I had my squid printed on a t-shirt. The squids in my sketchbook were the results of stress relief from coding my website in CSS. Style Sheets and I are not on friendly terms, unfortunately.

And then there's the little pieces I meant to post ages ago. E&M is a situational piece about relationships and showing interaction without explaining the interaction. Also, fun with patterns.



I need to do many more Soyer mastercopies to study his ability to stand back and let the piece be. It's my life's goal to get to that point.

Home

To my shame the moving in stage of moving in was delayed for a while.

While I enjoy my two office rooms, my whistling radiators, my teeny tiny kitchen, the local overly cautious SUV-drivers, the stark winter colors, my eerily quiet neighbors, the relative difference of 65 versus 67 degrees and a thousand other aspects to my new town and apartment, it has not been a smooth transition. My homes have always been built around friends and family. The new connections I have made here along with many long-distance calls have helped, but, obviously, the numbers of connections has changed greatly from what I was familiar with.

It takes a long time to move into a place if you're not sure it's really where you want to be.

In the end, this is the right thing, so during the holidays I spent plenty of time making my apartment into a home rather than just a place where I sleep, eat, doodle and teach fashion students figure drawing.

It's back to taking my thyroid vitamins and making prioritizing lists, starting with the four or five or ten projects I've managed to attempt working on at the same time, some as adjustments to existing pieces and plenty of new works. They always keep me up far longer than I initially expect, too. I also have plenty of pieces that I need to catch up on posting.

"A Lid for Every Pot" was a commission that allowed me the opportunity to get back to using the kitchen as artistic subject matter, much to my own enjoyment.



After four years of art boot camp, I've had time to refamiliarize myself with those bulky things called books. Between the Gil Evgren calendars, the debut of Patrick Rothfuss's epic fantasy and Mo Willems children's books, I spotted an enjoyable little book by author and artist Vivian Swift.



It's the book that every visual artist secretly or not-so secretly wants to publish, combining personal sketches, facts and observations into one place for no other reason than to share everything with the viewers. When Wanderers Cease to Roam is catered to the creator herself, containing paintings and information of nature, life and the change of seasons in a year as an homage to her quiet experiences. I would not choose to draw the subject matter that she has in my own sketchbook but to view the work is a lasting inspiration.

Rewind

To make a post after a long absence is always a challenge. But it becomes easier after that, or so I hope.

I have some work from Printmaking and Illustration left over that I want to get caught up on before anything else.

"The Beautiful Things" is a series of 20+ chine colle prints, using the same etching on a multitude of different postcard backgrounds. The postcards actually came from a sheet of decorative paper with rows of old postcards printed on it. I cut the paper apart according to the postcards and used them as the background to a radio aquatint etching. The pattern I printed on thin Japanese paper via solvent transfer and then glued to the postcard as I printed each piece.



This radio print was made, because I love dry-point etching and to use as stationary for my thesis proposal that I framed and set up with my thesis presentation. I really love the tone that occurs when plates are wiped unevenly or sparingly.



"Over the Land" is another deep copperplate etching in the style of my other train print. This one shows a greater understanding of how to use china marker, Sharpie, and lithocrayon, I think. On the advice from Chris of Stakenborg Fine Art in Sarasota, I've been admiring Joseph Pennell in conjunction to these prints.

The 2008 Senior Thesis with Crown Molding

The last month and more as a senior at Ringling College was a non-stop run of activities here, there and everywhere. Senior thesis and the senior illustration show opening reception preceded the final two days of classes and events, packing and family time, graduation, and finally, moving and sight-seeing. These occurrences sound so benign and casual when listed out, but they were jammed on top of each other, followed by a week spent in the car driving around the country and sometimes getting lost. For now, I'm answering my emails and such, and just trying to recover a little.

After the show opening at Foley's Fine Art gallery, I rushed to finish my thesis project for the last day of Advanced Illustration on April 22nd. The show then needed to be hung by the 101 participants before the afternoon of April 25th. I was able to sleep plenty during the final crush, but I'm glad bruises heal and skin grows back when you slice a bit off with an exacto blade.

Despite some initial doubts and worries, everything came together and the illustration class of 2008 put on a truly fantastic show. That night, it showed that everyone involved, including the faculty, administration, family members and friends, were extremely proud of the work that had been accomplished through this singularly driven group of young artists and illustrators.









As you may be able to tell from my statement of intent, my thesis project was a self-promotion campaign. To attain this, I completed new illustrations to supplement my existing work, and I made a new brand/identity system for myself. I designed and bound multiples of five unique handmade portfolios to display and promote my work in. I applied the new brand system to these books, as well as standard promotional items such as my business card, letterhead, and postcards. From the display side of things, I pulled everything together in the presentation with an "office" theme.

For the professional artist, their portfolio is the equivalent of a resume. I designed my portfolios to be not only functional showcases for my work, but to also directly reflect my style and aesthetics. A portfolio typically contains ten to fifteen pieces of the artist’s best work. A freelance artist will constantly update their portfolio with current work, so my portfolios are designed to allow me to remove and add pages so that I may update them when necessary.



My primary portfolio is a softbound book. It contains a broad showcase of my artwork executed in a variety of artistic media and styles.





My monochromatic portfolio is a hardbound book. It contains editorial illustrations that are intended to be reproduced in black and white publications, opposite the excerpts of articles that inspired them.





My gallery portfolio is also hardbound, but designed differently. It contains the paintings and etchings that I will promote to private gallery owners.







My secondary portfolio is a hardbound folder. It contains images displayed on separate pieces of matte board.







My mailer portfolio is softbound, and fits into a plastic envelope. It contains select postcards of my work that I can mail as a mini-portfolio. The postcard fit into glued tabs, so they can be removed and changed.





In addition to these books, I have my business cards, postcards, letterhead, greeting cards, and I am re-designing my website and blog. I'm pretty sure I've got everything covered, unless anyone has any suggestions, please.

Printmaking and a painting

My grandfather makes small metal vehicles and other objects, cars, tractors, trains, bulldozers, excavators, et cetera. Last summer, my grandfather and grandmother asked me if I wanted any of the creations, and I came away with the Model T and the little windmill that became the subject of my first woodblock print.



This deep copper plate etching was in the acid for about five hours. I used China marker and lithocrayon to explore different etched textures in addition to using the asphaltum.



My antique Arvin radio only gets AM stations, takes four C-size batteries to power it, and the grill reminds me of fish scales. Linocuts are not for me, but I do want to try making my own stamps.



Tearing up the surface of a copper plate with a mezzotint rocker over and over is painful work for my right arm, but the results are exciting. The texture is gritty and adjusting the values is much easier to accomplish than with aquatinting. Mezzotint wins hands-down against modern aquatints.





Almost two years ago ago, the price of gas was $2.95 for Regular Unleaded. It was high at the time, and now I wish it was that price, especially with the long road trips that I'll be making in two months.