highly ineffective procrastination post.

so i'm posting this more as a means of avoiding doing other things than anything else. here's my fourth weekly narrative double-page spread, this week about a weird elephant-ish hero looking for the sun, to incorporate the word "bedouin". obscure much? this one's only so-so, as far as i am concerned. in other news, i saw andrew bird perform last night and holy god he is amazing. unbelievable. orgasmic. see him live. no life is complete without it. anyway, that's all. more stuff next week after my crits. that barely helped me procrastinate at all.

mild self- and other-proclaimed victory.

so here it is, the much-anticipated re-design of a childhood staple: mr. yuk. now apparently, mr. yuk was not as far-reaching with his influence as i thought, and i had to explain to a lot of people the whole deal: poisonous substances used to have the skull-and-crossbones image on them to ward children away from them, but then kids began to associate that symbol with pirates, and everybody loves pirates, so they'd see the symbol and think, "pirate juice!!" and drink it, but it would be drano and then they'd die. so they developed mr. yuk to be extra-unappealing and not at all pirate-y so that kids wouldn't drink deadly things thinking that they'd wake up with a peg-leg and an eyepatch. anyway, so we had to redesign him to make him both disgusting and terrifying, and extra child-unfriendly. and i know that when you think of my work, that those are *definitely* the first two things that come to mind, right? right? yeah, not so much. so in short? really hard assignment for me. also, i'm using this as my first venture into digital coloring, at long last, and umm, it's hard. and this was only two colors. i'm sure i'll get better at it as i go, but man, annoying. blah, blah, important skills, blah blah, get with the times, whatevs. okay, so enough whining because-- brian thought as far as impact and actually deterring kids from drinking death in a bottle, that mine would work best, as far as the simplicity of the graphic and the menace of his angry pointy eyeball sockets. hooray! plus, i mean, he's all gangsta and bad-ass, and what kid's not afraid of a bad-ass slimy skeleton? or something to that effect.
i'm glad there was at least a little payout on this one, because it was a really hard assignment for me, since i'm trying so hard to not be all stubborn and "well, i don't *do* gross art, so i'm just gonna not and be lame and cross my arms tight against my chest and pout."

she's shaped like a banana, get it?

another piece from last week, since a) i'm busy, and b) i'm lazy. ish. this was my "redesign an advertising character" assignment. i think a lot of us misunderstood the goal of the assignment, since we were supposed to honor the character and the product/company intention, but at the same time update the look. i took this to mean both "don't make an lsd trix bunny or a lard-ass obese ronald mcdonald" (the obvious kind of subversion) but also don't reinvent her purpose or anything, so my design left some innovation to be desired. anyway, i did miss chiquita banana, after much deliberation and the sunmaid raisin girl and cheesasaurus rex losing out to the carmen miranda wannabe. the chiquita banana chick was itching to be redone, and her previous design pre-1987 revamp was even more terrifying, as a sultry flamenco-banana with sexy-lady arms and legs. frea-ky. me and another girl both re-designed her, and we both flip-flopped her original costume colors (blue dress, yellow detailing) and gave her a hair-wrap-turban thing instead of a giant bowl on her head. with such similar designs, we were deemed "classy" (me) and "trashy" (her). awesome.

sneaky cliche.

so this is my "license plate" from last week's concepts class. i use the dramatic "air quotes" gesture when i say this because the only thing that really ties this piece to a license plate is the fact that it's a long horizontal and is state-themed. no state title, no actual license plate characters (or any space for them) were necessary. the goals were to activate the space, steer clear of cliche imagery, and depict the given state (in either a positive or negative light). my state was assigned at random, and i got georgia. "amazing," she said, her voice positively dripping with sarcasm. on the plus side, i was completely okay to sass georgia, and after pussy-footing around for a while to try and be nice-ish, i said, "ummm, fuck it" and did this. a fluffy southern belle in her big cotton dress in her sitting room with big cotton curtains and cotton blossom wallpaper needle-pointing with lovely cotton thread a sample saying "bless this dress" while sad laborers pick cotton outside her luxurious antebellum bay window. so it's super mean. and probably controversial to the non-ultra-liberal-minded art school crowd. but the palette's real nice and i inked it with my light table with nice, clear line quality, which i'm jazzed about. and the wallpaper is PEACH. get it? cuz it's georgia? an accident, i swear.

a new, more artistic kind of 'weekly'.

mmm, so i have the first three two-page spreads i have completed for my concepts class's ongoing sketchbook. and by "sketchbook", i mean like 14. the idea is that each book has a loose narrative attached to it (essentially a hero, a setting, and a goal) and each week we rotate books, completing a two-page spread each time. the following week, we receive a new book and a word to be incorporated into our finish in some manner. these will make minimal amounts of sense, since they are both out of original context and placed within context of one another, but it'll be fun anyway. ready? here we go:

the first one is a steampunk-era cross-dressing teenage boy, looking to get a bouquet of flowers for his mom. no word to incorporate this time. you can tell he's steampunk because of his snappy jacket and CONVERSES. plus, you know, the train. literalisms for everyone.

the second one is in response to 2 panels of sleeping, dreaming boy, and my word was "clerk". only a little bit of angst.

the third one's hero is "a cucumber with lovely violet eyes" looking for glasses that won't hide them, and the word was "bee".


i elected to collage the last one because, as you can see in the spine, this book is falling apart. like, none of the pages are attached to the spine or each other. it's tragic. the paper crumbles as you turn each page, and i could not even imagine what would've happened if i tried to apply paint to this surface. lives would be lost, families torn apart, little pieces of really old paper would litter my carpet and scanner bed, all sorts of bad news.

i like this project.

leave it to me to make agriculture romantic.

so this was a class exercise from character development and the first piece that i've really been happy with from that class. the class is a little intense because we have homework assignments and in-class start-to-finishes as well, so the turnaround is really quick. but i like the problem-solving aspect of stretching your style to suit the exercise, which in this case was to make two complimentary but opposing body types interacting in some way. i pulled the starting points "plaid", "overalls", and "wok" (we scramble bits of paper with suggestions on them to start the cogs a-turnin' in your brain for these assignments), and had to use two of the three. so imagine his shirt is plaid, since i never got around to inking that. farmer and milkmaid in love. precious. i really hope to get a lot out of this class, but in the meantime it is kicking my butt, but good.

so follow-through maybe not so much my thing. UNTIL NOW.

so i know i said like forever ago that i would post new work. so i finally am, and in your face anybody who concluded that this art blog thing would fizzle out after like a month. i was just a little slow on the uptake, that's all.

this is my first piece for illustration concepts one. the idea was loosely based on a menu cover, specifically illustrating the "four seasons" pizza. basically the menu was a springboard for idea generation and provider of format, and the rest was up to you. so, there are squatties dancing and frolicking joyously around a maypole, since maypoles are springy. in acrylic and ink.

points of contention include the horizon (too low, perhaps?) and the ink (too black? too much?) i have been considering the slate ink pen as a potential new friend in this regard. but i sort of like the idea of a loose painting with details tightened up in ink, or the idea of shape and line not quite matching up. perhaps this will come forward later.

also exciting and of note: website finally up and functioning and wonderful! go see it! link to the left, heart-sleevestudio.com. unless of course, you were directed here via said website, in which case, way to go, man.

last thing: i have been painfully behind in my dailies. well, not so bad, minus the fact that essentially none of august was inked. oh dear. also lacking has been my sketchbook time. i miss it oh so much. we'll see if one or both of those can't be remedied sometime soon. since i'm swimming in spare time. i'll share if i do, i promise. hopefully this can become a fairly regular thing, me and artwork-posting.