Linoleum Cuts

So while I'm at home I've been doing some personal work and experimenting. These are just some of the linoleum prints I've been doing. I made 17 in total, the last 3 have already been given to a friend and the others I'm willing to sell for $10 each. They're signed, titled "Sad Businessmen," numbered, and printed with speedball ink on medium weight art paper. I don't imagine the first ones will be snatched up quickly as I was just learning, but some of the others are pretty nice.

Admittedly the inspiration was this image in my head of these sad businessmen on their way to work. I remember seeing Daumier's drawings of the working class, and was thinking about the 1 hour commute my dad hates but makes every day to work. And, I need to continue to develop my cartooning and simplification of figures. Simple has never been easy for me.

Recent Life Drawings

Here's a few of my most recent in-class life-drawings, I think it's a pretty significant improvement, but also sort of shows the difference between life drawing in an illustration class and life drawing with a fine arts teacher.

I've begun to only work after first putting down a ground and removing with eraser, and it's much faster and easier for me. Sometimes I feel like I'm cheating with this method, and I'd done it before but I hadn't really trusted it like I am now.

I think this was a 40 minute drawing, and my teacher had this weird set up where she gave the model a hula hoop and sat her in front of a large mirror. I don't know why life drawing teachers insist on throwing in a prop that will just confuse anyone who looks at your drawing.

Done during a day when we focused on portraiture. I believe this was a 4o minute as well. Fun fact, this model was my very first nude model my freshman year. This drawing is about half of the size of my pad of paper, so it's reasonably small. 

Another portrait,  also 40 minutes at the very end of the day. I wish I'd had more time with this.

My teacher set up the stands so that we had to focus on space between the models. Also, we had to work all day on this. I took this picture at about midday though because by then I realized the more I worked into it the more I was going to hate it and destroy the drawing. I asked to change spots in class to do another drawing with this interesting set up but my teacher was dead set on proving a point. Ohhhwell.

Bolton Hill Tea Society

At MICA I am known as Tenacious Tea of the Bolton Hill Tea Society, and as such am one of the leaders of the club. There's been little to no time for it this semester, but we have to have at least one maybe two meetings, so we're finally having a little sunday tea this next Sunday. A little impromptu, but my job for the event was to make the poster advertisement.

On a side note, I'm falling back into my old primary color scheme habit. I think I'm ok with it.

Onomatopoeia

Sketches for my onomatopoeia assignment for Dan Krall, just flats in photoshop on top of some quick sketches. I had to do mechanical noises, so I chose sort of household things, and also an ode to my crazy washer/dryer combo machine.

Monsters

My final pieces for my Illustration 1's monsters assignment. Basically we were asked to pick a monster, do a traditional illustration of them, and then a modernized version. For the modern version we were supposed to think along the lines of what lesson does the monster's story teach.

I chose Maenads. Some may recognize Maenads from True Blood, but they are displayed in greek mythology a little differently. For one they travel in packs, and did not blend into society. They were wild women who ran through the woods and were feared because they tore animals and men apart in their hedonistic and orgiastic stupor. What better represented than a group of overdone college women partiers? Also, we were to make the two images relate and have square compositions with the idea that they would go into some kind of book about monsters and their modern relevance.

2010 Sketches

Just some of my favorite spreads from my sketchbook that I started this summer, it's always such slow going in my sketchbooks.

Flight of the Conchords

Celebrity illustration for my illustration 1 course, Bret and Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords, bein robots and killin all the humans. It had to be done, so that they could have fun.

Mutter Museum Sketches

It's really about time that I posted these sketches. They were all done at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia about a month or so ago. Very quickly done at first and then finished in class. All done in graphite, I wouldn't say more than an hour or 2 spent on each drawing.

   

Top horizontal - The Mutter Museum has a gigantic case of human skulls. I could have spent all day looking at them, drawing each one. However I was with a friend, and for the sake of not spending all day in one place I had to move quickly. Most of the skulls were European in origin and most of them were criminals. In front of each skull was a card with information, and some of the skulls even had calligraphic looking writing on the forehead (look closely at the second skull from the left).

From left to right,

Such a random artifact. Just a dried up preserved arm in a glass case. I liked how corpse-y/creepy it was so I went ahead and sketched it. I liked finishing it the most though with the pattern in the back. I think I spent a whole class just quietly sketching away at that background.

This is a very quick contour drawing of the skeleton of 2 infant conjoined twins. They're joined at the ribs and the skull/face, but have separate spines, legs, and arms. I really wanted to draw this but didn't think I would have time for all the little bones so contour seemed to make sense. I'd like to take this drawing into illustrator sometime and maybe make a very simple t-shirt design out of it. Ah, the possibilities.

At the top left is a shrunken head. WITH AN AFRO. Yeah. Bottom right was a model of a woman with a horn growing out of her forehead. Cool stuff.

Basics Basics.

We were supposed to paint a still life of trash, so I took the plate I recently broke, a used teabag, and a dead portion of flower from my roommates dying flower arrangement. 

 

First oil painting in full color. I think it's fairly obvious as to what everything is, but in case you were wondering, a green mixing bowl, a clear glass, 3 tangerines, 2 box things, all put on a brown fabric setup.

First and only painting I have somewhat finished in class. Here's how my painting class goes. Hw: make a still life on your own. Class, come make a still life without ever having hopes of finishing it. The end. I started getting tricky with the teapot. Cuz I like teapotz. Then my teacher was all 'FILL IN THE REST BAW.' So then I was like 'UGH FINE BUT I'M NEVER GONNA FINISH ANYWAY AND FFFF.' yep.

 

 

I think this is one of my favorites out of all of my drawings in class. We were supposed to be focusing on the perspective of the environment but  THIS GUY HAD 2 AWESOME SWORD-THINGS. How could I ignore them?

HERE HAVE A DRAGON.

Haiti

So from left to right:

1) This is the original version when I scanned and placed them together. This is also before I understood Auto-complete. Thanks Alex, I almost wasted another day of my life editing scans together. x.x But I think it's cool for you guys to see this preliminary stage.

2) This is how the piece looks all together with some levels edits and cleaning up. Basically this is where I start from before laying on basic color. I try to keep the integrity of these lines when I digitally paint.

3) This is RIGHT before I put on the final coloring touches with fancy photoshoop trickery. ;)

And here's the final piece. :]

I guess I owe a little bit of explanation of the piece itself but I think I want to leave it somewhat vague. Here's what I will say, the guys at the bottom? Pretty much responsible for Haiti being in trouble to begin with. Oh and rebirth symbolism is rampant. Yep. That's all I'm giving you.