Instead of Doing My Homework

HoHoHo; Graphite Drawing with Digital Color, 2012

Hello Friends!

This is a little holiday illustration I did this weekend for our Christmas cards this year. I had a lot of fun with it and I'm really happy with how it came out. Hope you guys like it!

Here are some process pics, if your into that sort of thing:

Drawing, Graphite on Bristol Board

 

Color Layer in Photoshop

Coloring in Corel Painter

Back to Photoshop for a little paper texture

Add some highlights and all done :)

  Thanks for stopping by!

It's a Little Seashell House, You Guys.

Spiral Cove; Digital Painting, 2012

This is a little digital painting I did for Cliff Cramp's Digital Narrative Illustration class. The assignment was an exterior environment, and he gave us a list of prompts to choose from. I chose treehouse.  It was my first piece using Corel Painter, and it was pretty fun for the most part, although I am still getting used to the software. Cliff showed us some really cool tricks using photos to lay in texture and color key. I got a little tripped up on this piece because Cliff paints so incredibly fast in his demos, I really underestimated how long it would take me. I mean, I didn't think I would be as fast as him, he will pretty much finish a painting in one class meeting, but I thought it would take me twice as long, not ten times as long.

 Anyway here are some process images you may find interesting:

Brainstorming and Sketching Ideas

Value Study, Adding Textures and Color

These are the Cliff Tricks I was telling you about. For the color one I used a sunset photo and a few close up shots of opals.

Painting and Color Adjusting

Thanks for stopping by, friends! See you soon.

Some Head Sketches

 I had a lot of fun with my homework last night for my Head and Hands class so I thought I'd share my sketches.

This "Bitchface" one was inspired by Tavi Gevinson, this sixteen year old fashion blogger who was recently interviewed by Jimmy Fallon.

Zodiac Ladies and the Wonders of Photomerge

Hello Friends!

I recently discovered the Photomerge feature in Photoshop, and I'm in love with it. Since most of my work is too big for my scanner, I was stitching my scanned images together manually. It was pretty time consuming and difficult to get the images exactly lined up, but Photomerge stitches them in about four mouse clicks and it's perfect every time. I had to scan Sagittarius in three pieces and it still came out seamless. This feature is probably obvious to a lot of people, but in case you haven't heard of it:

Go to File>Automate>Photomerge, select the files you need to stitch, click ok and watch the magic unfold before your eyes. Sometimes I am overly impressed by technology. I love you Photomerge 8D

Anyway, here are (finally) the last two ladies in my zodiac series. It felt really good to finish these. I have a lot of projects in various stages of completion and it's nice to cross one off my list.

Sagittarius; Watercolor 2012

 Some of you may recognize Sagittarius, it's my friend Kelsey again :) She was kind enough to pose for me for about half of my zodiac series and since Sagittarius is her sign, I decided to make this one look like her. Thanks Kelsey!

Virgo; Watercolor 2012

Virgo apparently time traveled here from 1991. I didn't realize just how 90s she was until I painted her hair and I was like "Oh hay, Stephanie from Full House, what are you doing here?"

 Hope you guys enjoy these! Thanks for looking!

Hot Noodles

Hot Noodles; Illustration for Dish Clips Website, Adobe Illustrator, 2012

So I recently started an internship with a start up company called Dish Clips. They are developing an app for iPhone and Android that allows users to share videos of the food they are eating at different restaurants.

It's like yelp but with video, or like youtube for food.

For my first task as Mobile Graphics Intern #2, they asked me to come up with an illustration for their website, based on their concept of "Food Porn."

Thumbnails

More Thumbs

A Sketch for an Alternate Idea

I was a bit surprised that they liked my babe-in-the-noodle-bowl sketch because I thought it would be too silly, but it was the one I wanted to finish the most so I was glad they chose it. This was a pretty fun project, I wasn't expecting to be doing so much hands on stuff at my internship so that was a pleasant surprise, and I hadn't used Illustrator in a while so it was nice to get some practice in with the pen tool. And I actually remembered to save some progress if you're into that sort of thing. Hope you enjoy it!

 Sketch for Hot Noodles

Tracing  Large Shapes with the Pen Tool

Painstakingly Tracing Each Individual Noodle for Ten Years

Adding More Details

All Done :)

Kelsey Loves Sloths

Kelsey Loves Sloths, Watercolor, 2012

Here's a little painting of one of my favorite subjects, my friend Kelsey. All you need to know about Kelsey is that she is awesome and she loves sloths. She also loves manatees and spaghetti, but that won't be on the exam. This piece was 100% Pure Fun for me, I hope you guys enjoy it!

The End

Fin, Acrylic and Colored Pencil on Paper, 2012

In an earlier post, I mentioned a collaborative project I was working on. Unfortunately we decided to put the project on hold for the time being. It was a really exciting idea, but some of us are too busy at the moment to devote the amount of time we feel is necessary to continue the project properly.

This piece is my last entry for that project, at least for the time being. It's sort of funny that we agreed on our latest theme before we ever discussed stopping the project, and that theme happened to be The End. This piece is a response to that theme, or more accurately my attempt to make what I wanted to paint somehow fit the theme. I've just finished re-watching every episode of Mad Men at an alarming rate and I had an urge to paint a pretty lady with Betty Draper hair. That show is really great. When I watch it I like to think I would be like Peggy, but I would probably be more like that dumb bitch that crashes the lawnmower.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun painting this, and I really hope you all enjoy it!

Going Places

Carolina, Graphite with Digital Color, 2012

Here's another little fashion drawing! This one is based on a really cute peplum top from Prabal Gurung's Resort 2013 collection.

Pretty Dresses

Swann, Graphite with Digital Color 2012

This illustration was inspired by Chanel's Resort 2013 collection. I've been getting interested in fashion illustration this year beginning with my zodiac series, so I thought I'd try some illustrations of recent collections to experiment with different techniques and to get more familiar with what's going on in the fashion industry.

I have always loved fashion, but my expertise in the field pretty much begins and ends with "ooooh pretty dresses!" I don't really follow the names of designers, let alone buy designer clothes...or clothes of any kind really. My wardrobe is made up of things I bought back when I had money and clothes I accidentally bought during a trip to Target for toothpaste. So I had to google the meaning of "Resort Collection", and I don't know why this collection is from the future if the runway show took place last month. But I really liked the color palette and the styling of the models for Chanel's show, especially the pastel bob wigs. Also, when I saw it I thought ooooh pretty dresses!

More Zodiac Ladies!

Hello again, fine citizens of the internet!

Things got a little crazy for me this semester and I have been too busy to post anything for a while. I had a pretty impossible amount of work to do and then everything went horribly wrong during the week leading up to finals. My car broke down, my computer got a really creepy virus (the hacker was watching me work in photoshop and sending me messages about my art and also a startling amount of porn) and then on the last day my power went out! Somehow I still emerged from the art cave victorious.

The Art Cave

So anyway, here are seven more of my zodiac illustrations. I've almost finished the set, Sagittarius and Virgo came out a little wonky so I'm going to redo those ones. Hope you enjoy them :)

Cancer, Watercolor 2012

Leo, Watercolor 2012

Libra, Watercolor 2012

Scorpio, Watercolor 2012

Capricorn, Watercolor 2012

Aquarius, Watercolor 2012

Pisces, Watercolor 2012

The Ram

Aries, Watercolor 2012

Here's another one from my zodiac set :)

The Twins

Gemini, Watercolor 2012

Here's the latest illustration in my zodiac series. Hope you enjoy it!

The Bull

Taurus, Watercolor 2012

This is the first piece in a series of illustrations for each sign of the zodiac. More coming soon. Thanks for looking!

a still life

Requisites, Graphite 2012

This is another one for Lawrence Yun's drawing class. It's about gender conventions and it's also about how much I love to render hair.

Lawrence did a demo for us on applying graphite powder, which is what I used for the table. I cut a stencil and applied layers of powder with a brush until I got it as dark as I needed it. I think it was pretty successful, it was fairly quick and probably the best way to get an even tone.

That's about all I have to say about this one. In my last post I wondered why I don't draw like this (photo-realistically) more often. Now I remember why. I takes ten thousand years, it's fucking boring and I will probably never do it again once this class is over.

a preview

 These are two pieces I did for a collaborative project I recently started with a few friends and friends of friends. We are working on a title and a few other logistics, but we should have the blog for that project up within a few weeks, at which point I will link to it here. The basic premise of the project is a conversation through artwork. So each person created a piece, dealing with the theme "identity" and then we randomly swapped pieces and created response pieces to each other's work. 

We plan to repeat the process indefinitely and just kind of see what happens, sharing the results on a blog as we go. I'm really excited about it because I love working collaboratively, it reminds me of my high school Literary Magazine (which is where I met two of the artists from this project) and it's awesome because there's a lot of variety in terms of work. There are other visual artists as well as writers so I can't wait to see where it goes.

 Literally, I can't wait. Which I guess is why I am sharing these pieces here, now. This first piece is about trying to understand how many people there are living right now. I can read the number, but it's difficult to really grasp what it represents. This is about trying to relate to that number and the what it means to be one of seven billion unique individuals.

Everyone; No One, Watercolor, Ink, 2012

This piece is a response to a poem called Counting Steps, Counting Breaths by my friends Annie Le. The poem will be on our project site and I will link to it here once it is. I know she is inspired by Buddhist teachings and Thich Naht Hahn, who is totally amazing. You should all read his book, The Miracle of Mindfulness. 

Only Peeling; Watercolor, Colored Pencil, 2012

That's all for now! Thanks for reading/looking!

perfume

Perfume; Graphite, 2012

This is a piece I just finished for Lawrence Yun's descriptive drawing class. The class is all photo-realist style rendering, which I actually really enjoy, but I don't do it unless forced to for some reason. It's kind of brainless and fun to do while watching/listening to television shows I've already seen. So this piece is brought to you buy seasons one through three of Weeds. 

The spray pattern was an experiment which wasn't terribly successful, but I spent a stupid amount of time cutting out this intricate stencil and I felt obligated to use it. Why is she spraying perfume in her face? Because it was the style at the time. Because her face stinks. Because I wanted to render her face, okay?

Special thanks to my model for this piece, my little sister Sam (who's amazing BTW, 23 years old and she's already lapped me for a bachelors degree and is kicking ass in law school. Sorry, I can't resist bragging about Sam whenever I mention her, it's like OCD or something.) As beautiful as she is, Sam could never have a career as a model, because after the first 20 frames or so, this started happening:

See you next Friday!

Oh, did I not tell you? I'll be updating my blog every Friday from now on. There. Now that I have promised the internet, I can't disappoint.

Thank You?

from my sketchbook: last week of january

Self Portrait; Ballpoint Pen

So pretend this is a riveting explanation of my reasons for neglecting to update my blog over the last few million years and a promise to myself and the internet that I will henceforth post something new every week from now until eternity.