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/

Zombie Postcards

                                    

So I made 32 of these as a set of postcards to send out to publishers or art directors. I've got a list I've been compiling and after I find out how I want to package them envelope-wise (I'm thinking a black sleek paper of some sort, hand made envelopes) I'm going to send them out and see what happens. The top image is the final print, the bottom left is how it was designed on the computer, the middle is an example of a few prints I made on rough brown sketch paper (which I kind of like more in some ways) and then the last is the back of the card. Measures approximately 8"x4 1/2".

King of Trash

"If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!"

-John Waters

Twin Peaks

My first screen print ever. 4 layers, 11x14, edition of 12. 

Baby Boomer

You know what everyone should go out and do? Go out and find a pen pal, because they are fabulous and give you something tangible and meaningful to look forward to every 2 weeks or so. I received a letter from my pen pal with a bunch of photos of one child's life from the 50's that he bought at a salvation army for whatever reason. I kind of got a sense of this kid with a very serious face and large ears. He was clearly raised in a very religious environment (which I immediately related to) and had pretty loving parents (also relatable), but there was something kind of sinister about the photographs. It was probably just due to underexposure but it definitely got my mind going. I don't generally make comics but I have been reading a lot of classic graphic black and white comics and graphic novels as of late... I think I'd like to do more of this, but I could never do it professionally.

Lithographs

This was my final, a 2 layer lithograph in black and red, half sheet size. I used nib with tushe on ball grain plate, and while some of this worked out really really well, some clearly did not. I still like the image a lot. I ended up trading one print with another student, and also getting this included in an apocalypse themed zine.

This was my second lithograph, done with pen nib and tusche as well as a no.5 crayon on stone. At first I thought this came out too dark, but the more I look at it the more I admire the dark grey of the skin and how leathery it came out. 

Spinning Yarn

Mock book cover for my junior illustration final. It has taken everything in myself to not add anything to this but I wanted to challenge myself to make something more simple.

Recent life drawing for Portrait Illustration. Done with ink wash and nib.

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.

Womb/Grave

A couple of intaglio plates. I made these for a junior illustration project, and edited them to work more toward my concept, but now that I look at them in their original condition I like them more this way. Simple. 

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.

Product Placement

Another illustration for my lifestyles class based around integrating products for an ad illustration. I definitely thought about doing jewelry or some other clothing ad, but found I was generally bored with any ideas I had surrounding these objects. I found a DJ magazine full of hip cool stuff, and used a pair of Original Fake heaphones (originalfake.net), and a high-tech sound mixer called the DN-MC6000 (www.DENONDJ.EU). This was meant to be a horizontal spread, but my class generally agreed that it looked way better turned vertically. I could mess around with the colors in this for weeks if I was allowed the time.

I'm Not Sick But I'm Not Well

Cd Booklet design for Junior Illustration. The cd sleeve part is at the top of the drips of the cover. The belly band would protect it from falling out. I mainly wanted to create a design that was as much something you would want to hang on your wall as well as something to document the track list, and I tried to draw in a stream of consciousness style so that you could continue around the whole thing in a fluid way. When I listen to music, especially these songs, I can see so many images, many of them not syncing up perfectly, but somehow working together. I also prefer to draw this way, rather than cutting up images drawn or found separately. The prints are on white arches cover, and the belly band is chartham.

The title of my mix CD is “I’m Not Sick But I’m Not Well.”

Track list is as follows-

All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down - Elliott Smith (covering Hank Williams, Jr.)

Saturnine - Polaris

Harsh Realm - Widowspeak

Broken Horse - Freelance Whales

Flagpole Sitta - Harvey Danger

Quick Fashion Illustration

45 minutes from idea to final. 

Clothes from Betsy Johnson RTW Fall 2011 and Emanuel Ungaro RTW Fall 2009.

(based on the shape of a heart)

Midnight in Paris - Final

Underpainting in violet, then glazes of watercolor on top. Then brough into photoshop and generally screwed around with until the colors were more of what I wanted from the study I did.