Monday, July 2, 2007

a gridded sketchbook is apparently a girl-illustrator's best friend.

so tragically enough, i am still scannerless, though i am back in baltimore. at this point though, there would not be a lot of work contributing to the completion of my website since i am knee-deep in high school students for pre-college. it's really fantastic, but exhausting, and essentially all-encompassing as far as time is concerned. so while i have a nice neat pile of new work to show off, i can't do it quite yet. patience.

one thing i have been doing an acceptable job of amidst pre-college has been my daily illustrations. with the exception of a couple days being void and the last few weeks remaining un-inked, i have successfully done a month or so of *truly* daily illustrations. i count this as quite the accomplishment, especially considering how crazy things have been, i want to establish the habit before i get swept up in the pulse of another year at mica.

it's funny to me to see how the function of the illustrations have changed. initially, they served as a means of proving my ability to spout witticisms and sort of visually david sedaris my way through a narrative, albeit a fairly safe and distanced one. there was a time that they were more of a catalog of the actual events comprising my daily life, as though i could go through the days and literally reconstruct the motions i experienced on a given date. now they have become more reflective, focusing on building metaphors (or falling back on good old literalisms) to express the places i've been emotionally rather than physically. it's also strange to realize that the things i grapple with through this exercise: basic compositional decisions, symbol, angle, and even in writing the succinct captions that accompany the illustrations, have become almost subconscious, and have flooded into my other work as an underlying structure through which all my work is filtered. it's like a preliminary sieve to separate the crap from the stuff with potential. plus i really like doing it.

sorry there's only rambling and no lovelies to share, but it really will be soon, i'm totally not kidding.