Fievel's Christmas Tail

Now that the overwhelming juggernaut known as the 'Holiday Season' has finally passed, I'm starting to get back into the swing of things. Believe it or not, my revamped website is nearing completion (a few tweaks notwithstanding), I have some projects in the pipeline that I'm working on, and I have some new stuff to share with you guys!

Every Christmas I always try to make all of my gifts...but this year, I didn't manage to accomplish as much as I intended. I was also working on a commission (more on that in another post) simultaneously with my attempts at gift-making, so naturally most of my energy was concentrated on the commission. I'm actually still tweaking some things that were meant to be a Christmas gifts because, let's face it, I'm the worst friend ever.

Luckily, I did manage to finish my sister's gift in time: an ornament of Fievel Mousekewitz from An American Tail and Fievel Goes West, some of her favorite movies from her childhood.

I made Fievel the same way I made the stuffed versions of Vesuvius and friends -- I broke him down into simplified shapes, made patterns for the pieces, then constructed him out of felt, thread, and fiberfill. Since I was making this with very little turn-around time, I was constantly editing my patterns as I was making it. For example: he originally had a large open-mouthed smile with his large teeth showing, but to save time, I opted for the simple stitched mouth line you see in the image (which I think wound up being more effective anyway).

I'll be posting the commission I was working on and some other things on here as I finish them (and once my website is up and running, I might not even need to make a post -- I think you'll hear my huge sigh of relief all the way from Florida), in the meantime...what have you guys been working on? I'm always excited to see new work, so if you have anything to share, please do!

Can't Dance like Ciara

Hay guys... just got off of Skype with our BFF Chad. We discussed many things, but primarily that we need to keep the Coollective alive! Here is my submission then... did this comic splash for fun last night. I am slowly making a move into comics. I am signed up for MOCCA fest in April with Nate Marsh. I am doing a few short stories. This page is kind of a featured spread within a story about my main character trying to find her way to happiness and popularity and having her dreams continually crushed. Please excuse the terrible quality. I'm at my ladyfriend's apartment til tomorrow so I photo'd this instead of scanning. Love you all!! XOXO

Down at Fraggle Rock!

So. In case you couldn't tell by the extremely not-subtle clue I left at the end of my last post, I've been working on something related to the old Jim Henson Company show Fraggle Rock. I found out about the contest when I revisited the Talenthouse website (the company I did the Florence + the Machine project through), and even though I promised myself I would stop doing these kind of things, I couldn't help it. I mean c'mon. Muppets. Jim Henson. I had to.

Basically, the point is to design a piece of artwork for Fraggle Rock's 30th Anniversary; if you are selected as the winner you get prize money, a tour of the Jim Henson Co., and your artwork becomes official Fraggle Rock merch. As much of a longshot as it is, good things could definitely come from it -- even if I'm not chosen as the winner. I mean, I get a cool new portfolio piece and my artwork gets seen by someone at the Jim Henson Company. No complaints here.

My basic idea was to fit as much as I could into the piece without overloading the image with information. There are three main races in Fraggle Rock, the Fraggles, the Doozers, and the Gorgs. The Fraggles and Doozers coexist together in the caves and underground tunnels of Fraggle Rock, whereas the Gorgs live above ground and proclaim themselves to be rulers of the universe. I wanted to illustrate a snapshot of a day in the life of Fraggle Rock, showcasing the symbiotic relationship of the care-free Fraggles and hard-working Doozers, as well as the Gorg's discovery of this ecosystem that has developed right under their noses.

I sketched out a couple of concepts to further realize this idea. As indicated in the top thumbnail, I was thinking of having the piece framed by a Doozer-built structure, but I thought that was drawing too much attention away from the Fraggles. I thought it would be better compositionally to have the Doozers working on a structure in the middle-ground to create a greater sense of depth to the cave.

Since the characters were layered on top of one another in my sketch to create an illusion of depth, I thought it would make it easier to draw each of them individually, and then combine them in photoshop so I could play around with position and scale much easier. I was planning on using watercolors for the piece, but I realized my watercoloring skills were pretty rusty while working on the initial washes to create the rocky texture, so I colored the figures with Prismacolor markers and colored pencils for highlights. It was also at this point that I decided to do away with the Doozer structure all together (in fear of the piece looking too clunky and crowded) and instead have a couple spare Doozers spread out throughout the image.

And...voila! After scanning it into photoshop, I created some cool-colored shadowy areas to help differentiate between the layers of the cave and fixed the eyes of the characters since they didn't come out as I wanted them to in the drawing. As always, thoughts and critiques are much appreciated. Voting ends on August 21st at 10 a.m., so if you like it and want to vote, you can do so here. It's the same as the Florence contest, you vote through Facebook or Twitter (or both if you have both).

Anyway, now that I have contest-ing out of my system (though I was almost tempted by this upcoming Pendleton Ward-judged Adventure Time t-shirt design contest THAT BRENDAN REGULINSKI SHOULD TOTALLY DO SOMETHING FOR...HINT, HINT), my website is my main focus. The end of summer is nigh, therefore I must get cracking if I want to have the update completed by then. Fingers crossed!

id love yalls advices

thoughts/?????????

Enter: THE PHOENIX!

As I mentioned in the last post, I have a few projects I've been working on both for myself and for a couple contests (not unlike the previous Florence + the Machine album cover contest, but hopefully with better results).

This is my entry for the first of the two contests I am submitting stuff for within the next few weeks. The contest is through a website called We Love Fine, and the guidelines were to create a t-shirt design using villains from Marvel Comics (there was a specified list of 100 you had to choose from). The winner gets prize money and their design is used as official Marvel merchandise.

The character I choose is Dark Phoenix, ripped straight from the pages of my favorite comic series -- X-Men. Long story short, the Phoenix is an intergalactic being that possesses the body of Jean Grey, a telekinetic telepath, turning her into an insanely unstable planet-destroying entity of near-unrivaled power.

One of my main goals was to make her look a little gaunt, creepy, and dangerous to emphasize the character's ruthless/villainous nature and play down the spine-breakingly 'sexy' poses a lot of artists like to depict her in. The Phoenix formed by Jean's fire-y hair is an attempt to show the a more direct union of the two rather than Jean being enveloped in a giant flaming bird like in the comics.

The contest voting was supposed to go live on July 6th, but then it got pushed back to the 10th, then today, and now it's been pushed back again to the 19th. I was going to post this to coincide with the start of voting...but it's moved around so much, I figured I would just post it now and let you guys know when it goes up for real. You can visit this link to view my entry on the site.

As for the next contest I'm working on, I'm just gonna tease you with this:

Endings, Beginnings, and Old Memories

On top of the freelance work I've been doing, I have been working on other side projects for the various events that have occurred over the last few months. Here are a few of 'em:

This is a gift for the daughter of an old family friend who died back in May. Since the family is fairly religious, my mom thought a cross was an appropriate commemorative gift. Of the ones she found she liked this one best, but hated the paint job (I don't have a 'before' picture, but it looked pretty poopy -- literally). My job was to repaint it to make it look like a relic and give it more 'character' to better reflect the personality of our late friend.

The daughter of the family that used to like next door graduated from high school this year, so my family's gift to her was a 'College Survival Kit'. Along with a plethora of practical items (i.e. tools and other things that come in really handy, but no one wants to give as a gift because they aren't too exciting), we included this Piggy Bank, hand-painted by yours truly, as a place to keep her laundry quarters. The pig is muddy because he needs to be washed...just like you wash dirty laundry. Eh? EH? OK, fine. All of my jokes aren't winners.

Later in July, my aunt is taking great-uncle on an honor flight to DC for surviving veterans. The program suggests that family members send in cards and letters, so my mom wanted my help in making him a card that is special and unique to him. She picked the picture (it's of him and my grandmother) and the quote, and I incorporated each into design of the card. I wanted it to look like an aged journal, and used some textures from this site to help create that effect (it's an amazing resource for textures, I highly recommend checking it out). Here's a look at the inside:

I'm gonna try and post sketches and stuff more regularly ANNND I have a few cool projects coming up soon I wanna share with you guys, so keep your eyes peeled for some new stuff. My end-of-summer goal is to have my website revamp done, so hopefully I'll have something to show on that in the near future too. 

Penguins and Lemurs and Trees, Oh My!

This is a wedding gift I made for my high school friend Krista and her new husband, Matt.  I had them fill out a questionnaire to figure out what they might want to hang on the wall of their future home.  Krista's favorite animal is a penguin and Matt's is a lemur and their wedding was on June 2nd (6/2), so there are 6 penguins and 2 lemurs.  The mountains and waterfall in the background are Yosemite National Park which is where the couple got engaged.  I also incorporated their favorite colors/ color combinations.  Can you find the hidden heart? (think FedEx arrow)