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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
When you combine baking and painting pictures, the best part is is eating the results. The baked goods, not the painting.
Last spring, Dunnick gave the class an assignment to do five sequential images. I chose an origin myth of the tea plant, because any excuse to paint tea is what I do. In the myth, the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma attempted to meditate in front of a wall for nine years. He made it seven, before he fell asleep. In anger he cut off his eyelids and where he dropped them to the ground, the first tea bush/tree sprang up. My goal was to create a sequential story of five individually designed images. As well as just have plenty of fun.
"The Origin of Tea"
Tea, Watercolor, Acrylic & Pen
The summer began with the continuation of my internship for the Ringling Design Center, working everyday up until the Illustration Academy 2007. It's a life-changing gift to go to the Academy. I was particularly grateful to be in attendance for a second year, because it was more relaxed and comfortable, as opposed to the first year when I was painfully shy and intimidated.
The best assignment of the academy for me was Mark English's, in which we were limited to illustrating a conversation in a cafe scene, using only two values per object with a 20% difference between the values.
Utilizing such restrictions, I was able to complete another piece like my "breakthrough" piece from last summer.
During Doug Chayka and Jenny Kostecki's alumni week, I used pen and watercolor to illustrate Chapter Three of Pinnochio as a two page spread.
I'm in love with how the lamp turned out.
For the conceptual portrait assignment from Anita Kunz and Jon Foster, I painted a movie producer remaking quality Asian films into "American spectacles."
I scanned it in two parts because a) it's too big for the scanner and b) the still-life objects are better than the figure anyway.
For my reference, I made the props and set it up as I needed it, using Gumkid as a model. The reference was half of the fun.
After the Academy, I flew to Minnesota where I visited family and friends, attended my sister's wedding as a bridesmaid, browsed the dusty goods of the local antiques store, explored inside a huge No. 2523 steam engine locomotive built in 1916, and toured a wealthy farmer's house built in 1893. The wedding was the most exciting part of my trip, as evidenced with my sister in the photobooth.
