i wish i could fly too.

so this was a rapid-fire, priority-zero, slap-dash piece, i won't even lie. i did it in twelve minutes at like 1am, sliding in to beat the clock and finish up before rounds on halloween duty. awesome. it's about a bird-child of some sort, seeking a smooth white rock, and my word was "bathe". he wears a red t-shirt also. whatever. i sort of like the process of doing these, sloppy acrylic and brush ink to tighten it up... even if this is not necessarily a shining example of the merits of this technique. god knows i prefer it to the fucking pen tool in photoshop for digital color. blegh.

i have yet to scan the massive map. almost, then change of plans. perhaps, then more immediately pressing concerns present themselves. there's been a lot of that lately. bear with me.

it's "malcolm in the middle" meets "x-men evolution".

so i know it's been quite some time since i've shown my face in this joint, for which i express my most sincere apologies. it just so happens that fall break, in conjunction with a couple longer-term assignments has stretched out the availability of final products for me to put on display for your viewing pleasure.

i have here my last on-going sketchbook contribution, a cover design for this book on octopi. my word to include was cyclone, as exhibited by the scared octopus running away from a water-tornado of some kind.

in other news, i am attempting to scan my bad-ass (translation: really really big) illustration map from last week's concepts class. once i do that, it will be uploaded, but a few things have come up and pushed that to the back-burner for now. also keep your eyes peeled for the first of my character design for my tv show pitch, "the not-so-secret diaries of luke merriweather". it's about high school and nerds and magical powers and angst and video diaries. you can barely contain your excitement, i can just tell.

the sears side.

the final for my roller girl poster came out pretty okay, i think. i am slightly full of rage about how i managed to mis-proportion her shoulders as i did, but other than that, i am pretty pleased with this one. it went over well enough in crit, as a welcome change to the zombie-fighting, blood-spewing, spine-smashing alternatives that littered the wall. it made me feel sort of lame, to be all, "awww, whimsy and childhood and preciousness abound!" but whatever, i am not the one you call when you want blood and gore. it was a pretty successful venture in digital work, but i've concluded that minus the time constraint, i would have preferred to do this piece traditionally.

i discovered, while working on the previous post's piece, that my inking is much stronger when i loosen up and care less, like on, for instance, these continuing narrative sketchbooks we've been doing. if you compare the inking of my initial roller girl character designs to that book and to this final, the differences are startling, with, sadly enough, the ultimately unimportant book spread taking the throne as most successful, with this final clipping at its heels, and the sad, sad rollergirl from last week barely limping across the finish line. i tried to approach this one with the same vigor and momentum as the sketchbooks. my plan is to try and revisit my "default technique" of acrylic and brush ink to see if i can't better control my hand with ink. i'd also still like to better expand the language of my characterization to include more stretched out (read: normally proportioned) figures in the context of the squatty folk, so, tall people can actually be tall instead of just marginally less squatty than their present company. i'm working on it.

also (sorry to be so text-laden today), i am not a slacker and have been working on my "everything happens for a reason" map in concepts which is why i have nothing to show this week for that class, since the final's not due until after fall break, which is really just a four-day weekend. it's going to likely be large, like 22x30, so we'll see if i can manage to scan the beastly finish to upload on here. also, i will maybe--and this is a really big maybe--be posting my screenprint final for fibers and my writing samples for creative non-fiction on here soon. ish. maybe. we'll see. i love love love my non-fiction class. right now i'm writing about harriet the spy. amazing.

i spent too much time on this and not enough time on the dishes. meaning none was spent on the latter.

here's my latest contribution to the sketchbook swapping exercise in concepts. the previous page showed a drowning kitty swimming after a bat? and my word to incorporate was "belt". so we have old man finding soggy kitty while looking for belt to hold up saggy pants. he's got coke bottle glasses and super-squinty eyes, to better emphasize his lack of sights and explain how, while looking for his belt amongst the swamp he apparently de-belted in earlier that day, he might stumble upon a drowning cat instead. i always hated that whole, "grab 'em by the scruff of the neck" thing, even though it supposedly doesn't hurt. it seems to me like the feline version of a half-nelson, how can that possibly be a "sure, no problem, dangle me in the air for an indeterminate amount of time as my skin gets all smeared out of place and pulls my limbs in funny directions" sort of experience? whatever. i am really loving this ongoing assignment, which i'm pretty sure i said already. point is yesterday was supposed to be "crank out the hero book assignment and sketch and ink my rollergirl final" day, and instead it was "muse and dawdle over an excessively involved hero book then not so much finish the rollergirl sketch" day. what's prioritizing?

arthur was supposed to be an aardvark too? bullshit.

i forgot we did these animal mascot sketches for the zoo this week too. we were assigned aardvarks, anteaters, or sloths, and had to make them appealing and one (in my case, the bottom one) had to fit the side of a bus. imagine wheels beneath his belly and tail. cute, simple. brian said he liked that is wasn't a straightforward cartoon anthropomorphic animal like a lot of the others. way to go me? i also learned that things look cuter, more innocent, and way less creepy with no mouth. who would've guessed?

i am not a sexy vampire robot from outer space.

so this week in character development marked the first half of a two-week assignment involving roller girls. we had a model, julia, who was actually a roller girl in the charm city roller derby, come in last week. the first part of the assignment was to characterize her in a resting and an action pose, to be used in a larger , fully rendered poster design (due next week). we had to keep it grounded as the specific roller girl who modeled for us (her derby name? "essie ecks". get it, get it?) , and communicate the essence of her. i was trying some things with total simplification of shape, line, and palette (since i'm usually such a fan of detail and
clutter), as well as digital coloring. also, i decided she was going to be ready to hit you in the face with a folding chair, and i planned to move forward with a final poster design of the badass roller girl in a rink of tiny little girls skating around joyously (hence the pink).

my crit proved to be a little frustrating when, taken out of context, my characterization of essie appears boring and starightforward, expecially compared to other student work that featured "essie the slutty amazonian goddess" , "essie as tank girl", or a sweet "essie the communist". simple looks like crap pinned next to the hyper-detail-oriented. anyway, so i was getting sort of frustrated at the notion that every character design in that class had to be insane and ridiculous (see above, re: title), because i really hoped to be able to use that class to inform my work (which is not at all flashy armor and explosions) and render subtle differences in body type and facial expression as a means of differentiation. of course you can tell that a brute is a brute when he is four times the height of the other characters and he has four arms whose biceps are as big around as the other characters' waists. i wanted to learn to communicate those differences without screaming them at the top of my lungs. and i also didn't want to abandon the goals i had or the work i wanted to be making to make a less successful version of what everyone else was doing, because i was catering to what i thought brian wanted to see. so i explained to him that i thought i would die a slow, painful, character development-related death if i did such a thing, and he was really understanding, and when i spoke to him toward the end of class about my sketches, he seemed jazzed about my final poster concept, even if it didn't feature zombie warriors riding giant porpoises that breathe green smoke. this week's legitimately mediocre work notwithstanding, i hope that i can prove i don't suck during the course of the rest of this class, and also not accept defeat and draw the fantasies of twelve year-old boys.
*NOTE: all superlative character ideas were actually, seriously, discussed during crit yesterday.

because cover bands are just tacky.

when rebecca told us we would be doing actual concert posters for the 8x10 club here in baltimore, i was stoked. kaki king performed there last year, and in my head i was playing out grandiose fantasies of rendering some amazing illustration for an up and coming band that would be loyal to their fledgling artist and when they hit it big, use my work for t-shirts and album art and i would be brilliantly famous and well-paid. and then, we got our bands. dreams shattered, i got "weekapaug orchestra", a (now wait for it...) phish tribute band. i emphasize tribute because i was sharply corrected when i referred to them as a cover band. so to jam band hell i was banished. it was okay, ultimately, i went in a tongue-and-cheek-y direction and made the lovely poster you see here. it was my first real venture into digital coloring, and in print the orange came out a little yellower than it is here which bummed me out a bit, but overall it was a pretty okay experiment, me and photoshop's pen tool are now bffs. it went over well enough in crit, minus any orange-related trauma.

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.