Tales of Blood and Roses

Final version for the cover! Hooray!

I'm currently working on a project for issue #4 of a zine called Tales of Blood and Roses. It's mostly literary, and filled with a mix of sexy and supernatural poetry and prose. This is the sketch and color study phase for me. I should have the final inked version up in the next few weeks.
You can find more information about the zine here: http://www.talesofbloodandroses.com/

Dual Personality

Lines done digitally this time and digitally colored. I usually balk at doing everything digitally, but after discovering stumpy pencil I may have enjoyed myself. Assignment for Studio Portrait to display the dual personality of one person. I often feel my main dual personality is between then in Texas, to me now in Baltimore. I know, I drew my bison skull again. If you had one hanging around I bet you'd do the same.

Southwestern

This is my first lithograph, grained, drawn, and printed in about 2 weeks time. I pulled about 15 good prints of this, 6 on Somerset Newsprint and 9 on Somerset White. The assignment was to make only an edition of 5, but lithography printing goes so quickly, it's hard to make only a small edition when it's just as easy to make a ton more.

I'm really excited to do more stone lithography, it is a really intriguing and fun printing process. I feel when I'm working that I'm imitating the same actions as say Honore Daumier, and that is a very unique experience.

I really hope once I'm out of school I can get the same level of critique, because talking about these pieces often reveals more to me than I originally set out to express. For instance.. now, I am quite sure this piece is a subtle representation of my love/hate relationship with Texas... and I'm always intrigued when these things come to the surface later.

Pugz

Because my final junior illustration assignment was a "secret santa" and/or my peers wrote in ideas for my final project, I have a whole bag full of ideas written with attention paid to what I could do well or would like to do. One of these was to do 5 dog expressions, which seemed really out of nowhere at first. The more I thought about it the more it seemed like a really fun exercise. Still not sure about these colors, but I did this relatively quickly to get warmed up for next semester.

Teenage Heaven and Hell

Clearly one of the more graphic pieces I've made while at MICA, I really enjoyed doing this one. I kind of put my courtesies aside and let myself do what I wanted, because let's face it, being a teenager is not innocent and not entirely nice, and even if it is, you would call them "glory days" because they don't last very long.

This was my final for my junior illustration class, the assignment being to create 2 images in square format, one of teenage heaven, and one of teenage hell. I decided to make mine into a sort of diptych, but if it was printed in a booklet they would reflect one another. I also decided I wanted to use a color scheme that I never used.

50 Things

We were assigned to draw 50 individual organized items for a poster, and I really enjoy doing little drawings of desert plants. I would have preferred to have the time to hand-make this via printing, but Thanksgiving break cut down on my time before deadline.

However, I did spend a little time turning this into a pattern. Making patterns is actually surprisingly easy to do in photoshop, and I'm definitely going to experiment with this more in the future. Hopefully I'll get into screen-printing next semester and I can start handcrafting instead of relying on digital painting.