State of the Union-Post 1

Ok...so...I've been away for a year, and now I'm beginning Illustration 5. This is the first in a series of posts to allow me to reflect on the work I've done both in and out of Illustration class.


What media do you like working in? List them.
My favorite personal medium is photography, I guess, if it counts, but I haven't made much use of it in my class work, except for drawing reference. I've used photography for years as an extension of my eyes and memory,

to capture and hold moments in time that I'm afraid might not come up again, I guess.


I love working with Adobe Photoshop,
I gave Frida a new dress...

and have developed an appreciation for (though not as much skill as I'd like to have with) Adobe Illustrator, as well. I enjoy working with dry, hard pastels; maybe it's the control freak in me, or maybe it's just that I like getting my hands dirty---having a very tactile experience with the medium. I suppose graphite and charcoal fall into that sort of smeary, get-dirty category, too, but I'm allergic to charcoal, so that takes some of the fun out of working with it. I also like to paint...with acrylics more than watercolors...but I enjoy them both, even if my results aren't as consistent as I want them to be.


What media do you hate working in? Why?
Hate's a strong word...I'm not sure I actually hate anything, and I feel reasonably confident that if I used anything often enough, I'd probably feel more comfortable about working with it. Since I've never worked successfully in colored pencils though, I guess I'm not crazy about them, and I feel the same way about oil pastels for the same reason. I think I also tend to avoid media that are less forgiving---hard to correct where errors are concerned, and easy to make mistakes with; litho-crayon was like that, cut paper, paper craft, and ink, too, even though I really, really like the way they all look when I'm able to use them properly, I definitely dread working with them.


What media would you like to try, but haven't?
I've never done anything in oils, and I've been told I'd like them, because they dry so slowly, and I'm a slow painter. I've always thought I'd enjoy working in clay and wood.


List three non-illustration classes that have influenced you and/or your work, positively. Explain.
2D, where I leaned how to properly use an X-acto knife (despite my irrational fear of sharp objects), and about careful craftsmanship.

Life Drawing & Drawing Comp., because they gave me new skills and gave me more confidence in the skills I already had.

Classes involving digital media, because they gave me new skills and more confidence in the skills I already had.


How has the work of your peers influenced you and your work?
I think many of my peers must've begun making art in the womb.

They amaze me. The sheer numbers of incredible ideas they have, astound me. Their work generally makes me feel as though my own imagination and work are extremely limited, but at the same time, their ideas and what they produce inspire me tremendously. Their efforts make me want to be better and more innovative with my ideas and in my work.


What sort of subject matter do you like to create work about?
I don't have a lot of experience with anything much but what I've done at MCA. In class, I guess I've enjoyed creating pieces that were tied to stories, more than those based on more abstract concepts.

This is some work that I did in Surface Design that I felt strongly about, that had to do with the subject of intolerance. The idea that art can be used to protest the wrongs in the world appeals to me, though I'm not much of an activist.

Pretty Hate Dress



Work that explores my personal experiences interests me, too. This piece was part of a Design Systems assignment.



The only work I've done that seems to allow me complete freedom with my subject matter is photography (it's easy, so I can do it for fun), and those subjects are almost exclusively front and back yard flora and fauna.





I enjoy my pet commissions more than schoolwork, but I don't know if that's because I like using pastels, or because I set my own deadlines and I'm not usually rushed. It's definitely not because I'm partial to dogs, because I like them, but I'm actually more of a cat person.

(this is Anastasia, my favorite part is the chair)


I like the idea of creating work...drawing or painting...that involves clothing, especially vintage clothing, and I collect images all the time, but have never gone anywhere with the idea.

image source


I've long considered doing illustrations for children's books, but so far, I've not done anything with that idea, either. Illustrating my own writing is something I'd really like to do.


What sort of subject matter do you like to read about?
The books I read are almost always strictly for entertainment...speculative fiction or regular fiction...usually nothing that requires a huge amount of deep thinking. http://www.terrypratchettbooks.com/
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/auel/webroot/
http://www.neilgaiman.com/works/

Specific real world subjects that I read about most often are:
art,
archaeology,
paleoanthropology,
space exploration,
quantum mechanics (as much as I can understand, anyway),
string theory,
anything out of the ordinary,
strange,
or unusual,
and cooking.


What kind of music do you like? Why?
I'm mostly a song person, rather than a band person or a specific type of music person. Much of the time, it depends on how the song sounds...what emotions the music evokes, not necessarily what the words say. I'm usually one of those people who thinks that life should come with a soundtrack, though when I'm feeling bad, physically, I often can't stand to listen to anything, because it seems to overload my wonky brain.

My musical tastes are varied, though to the shock and dismay of many people I know, I'm not a fan of most jazz or blues. What I listen to depends on what I'm doing, how I'm feeling, physically, and/or what mood I'm in. Sometimes I have to have classical for homework, sometimes it has to be 80's hair bands, sometimes New Age-y stuff. If I'm having problems with homework, loud and angry is good, if things are going well, something quiet is great; if it's early on in the creation process, loud is best, when I'm close to finished with whatever I'm working on, quieter is nice. If I'm cleaning house, or doing something really physical, I definitely need some kind of rock or metal.

Slash image source

My regular song list includes:

Black Eyed Peas, Rasputina, Jefferson Airplane, The Mamas and the Papas, Ozzy Osbourne, Linkin Park, Cameo, Jason Derulo, Disturbed, GunsNRoses, Prince, Offspring, Metisse, Suzanne Vega, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Placebo, Warren Zevon, Simon & Garfunkel, Crash Test Dummies, Saliva, Fleetwood Mac, Korn, Lady Gaga, The Beatles, the soundtrack to Rock Horror Picture Show, world music with African drums, or a Middle Eastern, or Bollywood sound, and other seemingly random choices.

My favorite homework music is the soundtrack from Conan the Barbarian. It's on a cassette tape...I've just about worn it out.

My favorite piece of classical music is Barber's Adagio for Strings; it makes me cry. My second favorite classical piece is Borodin's Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor; the first time I ever heard it was when I was a little kid, in the soundtrack of a cheesy 50's movie, called Fire Maidens From Outer Space, and I never forgot it.


What non-art related interests/hobbies/skills do you have?
I grow things...


I read quite a bit,

I'm a good cook

(shrimp with mango sauce)

I can sew,

I'm an avid escapist movie-goer and television watcher,

I write a little,
I used to sing,

and I can find four-leaf clovers without really having to look for them.



What is something you like that no one else does?
Figs


spiders,


and Masterpiece Theater.


If you had to run one of the world's museums, what 3 works of original art would you like to own?
Nefertiti's bust

image source 1 image source 2

Millais' Ophelia

Image source

Klimt's Danae

image source

Bernini's The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa


image source

Cosmicomics Illustration

I was to do one color illustration for the cover, and one black and white inside illustration for Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. We were to choose 2 different stories for our illustrations—my choices were The Form of Space for my cover, and The Dinosaurs for my inside illustration. We were to do these illustrations in the medium(s) of the artist we researched (mine was Anne Yvonne Gilbert).



My inside illustration is done in silhouette in India ink on 3 ply bristol board.









The Dinosaurs is a story about a dinosaur who may be the very last one. This world has been without dinosaurs for so long that they've been almost forgotten. They're only known in the current time as monsters in stories the inhabitants (who seem to have evolved to be only part dinosaur) use to scare each other. No one knows what a real dinosaur looks like, and when the dinosaur comes upon some of the new inhabitants, they accept him into their community without knowing what he is. This illustration shows the dinosaur meeting the son he fathered with one of the new inhabitants.



My cover illustration  from The Form of Space was done in acrylics on Crescent heavy Illustration board. It was then scanned into Adobe Illustrator and the text was added. Pre-critique, the text was black, there was no text box, and the text was not justified.














The Form of Space centers on the thoughts of a man, who, along with another man and a woman, is falling, endlessly, separately, and without any physical contact....or is he?

I rely heavily upon reference material in almost all of my drawings...drawing out of my head is not my biggest strength...

Papercraft

 Paper craft carnage.....


Paper craft...it sounds so simple, and yet.....

Apparently I don't have the kind of mind that can look at one of these designs either flat or assembled, and visualize them the other way around. As Charlie Brown would say....AUGH!!!!!!! I thought if I put a few together, maybe took them back apart, tried to combine some pieces, that I'd figure it out. So far, not so much. I had a vision in my mind that's apparently beyond the limits of my expertise at this point, so I'm back to the drawing board.......


 

OK...so....hours and days later, I sort of got the hang of it, after admitting to myself that I wasn't going to be able to build something curved with my current skills. We were allowed to use pieces of other people's blank patterns, so Octomom is made from pieces of 2 different templates, though I changed the proportions, completely. The Octobabies were made from pieces of 2 blank templates, significantly reduced. I used some paper craft artwork for clothing references, and used Octomom photos for facial references. The Octobabies faces were made by taking Octomom's eyes and mouth & shrinking them down; the mouth was altered and new eyebrows & nose were added. All this was done in Adobe Illustrator, and printed out on HP matte presentation paper. There are a few craftsmanship issues, and I've made a few adjustments to the template since I made this model, but overall, I'm happy with the outcome.

CD and Flyer

I was supposed to get some people together who may or may not be musicians, and create a CD cover and band flyer from collaged images of them, or images pertaining to the message of the band. My people are usually in a band, sometimes as a duo, sometimes not. For the purpose of this project, they're a duo.

These first two pieces are details of choices I played with for the front CD cover. I eventually used the composition in the meadow for the final piece, because the background and color contrast were less distracting in it. The figure and meadow photos were not taken by me, but were used with permission.











I took the background photo for this one. I liked it, but the tree shapes and high contrast just didn't fit with my vision for the cover.





This is the front CD cover without text. Primary area photo with musician, taken by me.











This is the back CD cover without text. Primary area photo by me.

 These pieces are post-critique, but do not have the required text that was included on the critiqued versions. I'm making some corrections from critique suggestions, and will probably be posting those pieces, including the flyer, with the required text. The CD front was created in Adobe Photoshop from 8 different photographs. The CD back was created in Adobe Photoshop from 5 different photographs. No musicians were harmed in this process, but I think one of them got pretty bored.

Memphis in May Chile T-shirt Design

The goal was to prepare a T-shirt design for the Buckman Lab BBQ team. The winning design was printed on T-shirts worn during their participation in Memphis in May's BBQ competition. This was not it, but I had a good time making it.

Drawing #1 is a combination of 2 drawings that were previously presented to Buckman for critique. This combined drawing contains elements from the other 2 pieces (that were specifically singled out by Buckman representatives). It's a graphite drawing on tracing paper, & it was scanned into Photoshop, to edit the composition and size of some of the elements.

Final image, drawn and colored in Adobe Illustrator. The primary images are pigs doing a happy, traditional Chilean Cueca handkerchief dance on the river bluff, with a BBQ grill, the Memphis-Arkansas bridge, and a boat speeding down the Mississippi, to complete the composition. Happy dancing pigs, grilled corn, and a boat ride...what's not to like?

Artist Research

Each semester, we choose, research, and make a presentation on an illustrator whose work we're interested in. This semester, it was required that the illustrator be living, and agreeable to doing an interview with us. My current illustrator of choice is
Anne Yvonne Gilbert, a talented & versatile artist, who has considerable range in her medium, subject matter and style—and she was super nice regarding the interview.

http://www.yvonnegilbert.com/index.html

http://www.advunderground.com/interviews/2007/gilbert0107.php

Celebrity Piece

The idea was to do a portrait or caricature of a celebrity in the context of one of their current, or soon-to-be released films. So...I chose Adrien Brody as my celebrity (because he has a great nose), and the film is called Splice.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1017460/

The plot: Model-pretty geneticists, famous for splicing animal genes together, decide to throw human DNA into the mix, and end up creating a human/animal chimera—things eventually go awry.

It could be a crap film, or not. Guillermo Del Toro is producing; Vincenzo Natali is directing—it could go either way. I have to say, the initial creature images I saw were pretty darned cool.

I'm attempting to convey his conflict, her appealing otherness, and the DNA connection by showing Adrien in the foreground, looking concerned, worried, hopeful, whatever, with creature girl descending the DNA staircase in the background

The painting was created using acrylics on Crescent illustration board. (It began as watercolors on Crescent illustration board, until I found that I couldn't use watercolors successfully on that surface....I need to start making notes about boards and paper.) My post-critique efforts included a considerable amount of darkening of the values in the background, and I changed creature girl's skin color from a cool purple to a warmer pink. In the foreground, I darkened the hair and some shadows, and added some cooler color contrast. I think the composition with the large foreground figure works well, I like the contrast of the warm foreground and cooler background colors, and I believe the values are, for the most part, appropriate. This is a post-critique image (forgot to shoot a "before image), though I still have a couple of additional changes to make—some tweaking of values in a few places. I'm not as satisfied with creature girl as I'd like to be. I never got her body shape or position quite right, and her face is not as developed as I'd originally envisioned it—I don't believe I even came close to doing justice to the reference images, because in the references, she was a seriously great-looking creature girl. I'm wondering if the meaning of the staircase is obvious enough. The foreground portrait works for me; I initially had a couple of problem areas on the side of the face and the hair, but I think they're all worked out now. I believe it looks like him....and I'm happy with his nose.