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)

The Well

NUMBA 3! I'm not sure how I feel about this one compositionally. How is the fish position? General critiques welcomed and encouraged.

"The boy placed himself by the margin of the well, and often saw a golden fish or a golden snake show itself therein, and took care that nothing fell in. As he was thus sitting, his finger hurt him so violently that he involuntarily put it in the water. He drew it quickly out again, but saw that it was quite gilded, and whatsoever pains he took to wash the gold off again, all was to no purpose."

So I've been working on this idea which is to create narrative patterns. I have discovered that I think life is a series of ebbs and flows, an S pattern of ups and downs, and people and environments and circumstance have their stellar ability to repeat themselves to a damn near predictable fashion. This is a first of many. What do you guys think? I'm curious about the style as well as its effectiveness as both a pattern (aesthetically) and as an illustrative narrative concept. XOXO!!

Chi-wowzers! A Puppy Post!

I've been meaning to make a new post, but since I've been working on some fairly time-consuming projects (branding for my friend's Esty site + trying to wrangle Dreamweaver into submission so I can finally finish the epic and overly-complicated redo of my own website) I don't really have any new 'work' work to show just yet. I have been doodling a lot lately though, so I thought I'd share some of them from time to time (providing they turn out well).

Two weekends ago, I went to Jacksonville to visit a friend and get web advice. I figured I probably wouldn't be able to come back up for her birthday next month, I made her a 'Happy (Almost) Birthday' cake and stuck this in it as a decoration since she and her boyfriend have 2 chihuahuas. It's prismacolor markers and Uni-Ball pen on a standard office note card. Surprisingly, note cards take markers pretty well with little/no color bleed. The more you know, right?

DONE!

ha HA! SUCCESS!! Here it is, I'm rather very happy with this one. Any final crits? I had only one specific question. My original drawing has Jon in the left side of the composition. I provided a fliped version, better? Thanks guys!

Sketch 2

Here is sketch numba two. Took me too long to sit down and do it, but here ya go. I want to move away from the super render of the first piece and gear this series more stylized and animation like. (like the entirety of all my other stuff.) Thoughts please!

Adventures In Freelancing -- Part II

As I mentioned before, Steve is a pretty consistent source of clientele. This time, one of his roommates needed a website for a web series he is making entitled Arklay. It tells of the events leading up to a big zombie outbreak and the conspiracy behind its origin.

For the website, he wanted something very basic, and without any heavy navigation. The idea is that there are five key phrases, each with an accompanying video. There isn't any indicator of what phrases the videos are linked from, so the viewer has to search for the link amongst the cluster of crazed writing. As of right know there is only one video up (spoiler alert: you can watch it by clicking the not-so-subtle bloody words), and I'll be updating the site with the others as they are completed. You can visit the website by clicking here.

Fun fact: the bird in the Twitter icon on the bottom of the main page is undead (it has x-ed out eyes), but it ended up being so small you can't tell. What can I say, superfluous details are my bread and butter.

CLose to finish!

Hey guys, just looking for final crits on this piece. Maybe resolution on the puddle or background trees? Maybe more dark vignetting in the foreground? Thoughts please! And thanks to Elyse I now have a very detailed schedule to finish this series and accountability, yay teamwork!

 

Super Post III -- Christmas in March

I was consolidating/deleting some files on my desktop when I found a folder containing a bunch of images I meant to post to the blog a while back. Since they are all gifts I made to give to people for Christmas, I decided to make it into another big fat super post!

It's become a yearly tradition for my mom to brew some variety of alcohol to give as gifts during the holidays. This year, she wanted the bottle to look a little more 'professional', so I designed a wine label using an updated version of the one I did for Vargo's class. For those of you who are wondering, 'Trois Amis' is French for 'Three Friends'. At least that's what my mom said. I have a limited knowledge of French (a.k.a. none whatsoever).

To further develop the sewing skills I discovered last year, I decided I wanted to try my hand at making hand-sewn ornaments. The moose was for my mom (she's crazy about moose) and the owl was for my good friend. Funny story: the design of the owl is actually based off of one of the designs I created for my application for the internship at Carter's. The difference is that this time, the recipient actually liked it.

Before my sister moved to California, she adopted a kitten from a litter one of her neighbors abandoned. For her gift, I decided to make something she could give to Florence (her kitten), so I made a handmade catnip-filled dead animal toy. My original idea was to make a set -- a bird, a fish, and a mouse -- but I ran out of time. Maybe next year!

When trying to figure out a gift for another one of my friends, I remembered how taken she was with Lizard Wizard, one of the abandoned toys in the Toy Story short that proceeded The Muppets. What's significant about this drawing is that I used markers over top of my rough pencil sketch, and then added stronger values with colored pencil. I didn't do any ink outlining -- which you all know I am so prone to do. You can scrape your jaws off the floor now.

In addition to moose, my mom has always been an avid collector of nutcrackers. So every Christmas, my sister and I make a custom nutcracker to add to her collection. This year, we decided to do a matched pair -- a tamborine player and a trumpet player that were supposed to be Salvation Army workers...but we lost the Salvation Army scarf and badge accessories, so we decided to made them into a police band. My sister knit mini-scarves for them to replace the ones we lost.

...And that's what kept me busy during the holidays. I'm currently working on some more projects now, so expect some updates in the near future!

Sketch 1!

Alright friends, sketch achieved. This is supposed to represent my basic values and color, and solid composition. Any last min crits on the above before I jump into painting? I'm trying oils! *gasp* wish me luck!  

Adventures in Freelancing -- Part I

As I have mentioned before, I have been picking up some freelancing jobs here and there. Some of my contacts are local, but they are mostly people from L.A. because Steve is awesome and throws my name out to anyone who needs design work. One of his friends wanted me to design an identity for his massage therapy business, Modern Massage; this included making a logo, business cards, a letterhead and a website.

This is my immaculately trimmed thumbnail. Oh yeah, and his business card design (these are roughs I printed out on my computer and cut out myself, so the actual cards probably look better). Jade stone massage is one of the specialties at Modern Massage, so I only thought it would be appropriate to reflect that in the business card design.

This is the home page for his website, which you can visit by clicking here. Everything was designed to be simplistic and user-friendly as well as being consistent with the color scheme of the business card and letterhead. My favorite part: on the contact page, I made a facebook link button out of the same texture as the logo. I'm really proud of that for some reason. Don't judge me.

And finally, since my website was pretty janky-looking, I made a little 'Under Contruction' page to replace it. I mean, my website looked like it was made out of construction paper and masking tape, so I didn't want people to think it was a fluke that Modern Massage's came out looking pretty decent. It's not much, but you can click here to see it full size.

I have some other freelance projects I'm working on, but my main goal is to get my full website up and functioning withing the next few weeks. I'll let you know how that goes.

a penguin, a yeti and an eskimo...

Okay, so here's the deal.  I'm opening an Etsy shop!  My launch date is set for March 8th and my life has been basically "eat, sleep, work" trying to get things up and running.  I plan on selling prints of my illustrations and fine art as well as notecards, handmade journals/sketchbooks (with my artwork on the cover or as endpapers), and needle felted characters from my illustrations.  I purchased a high quality epson printer to make my prints and have been feverishly whipping up several new sets of illustrations.  I'm working on an "animal alphabet" meant for children's rooms (a is for armadillo, b is for beluga whale, c is for cuckoo bird, d is for dormouse, e is for echidna, etc.).  I'm also working on a series of four illustrations centering around the adventures of Polo the penguin and Teddy the yeti who's 3-D needle felted wool counterparts are pictured below.  Polo wears blue and green striped socks and Teddy wears a red hat.  

Teddy the yeti has toes!

I've also been working on new pieces for my illustration portfolio.  I've decided to focus my attention on book covers and children's books and am updating my portfolio with that in mind.  I've also updated my my process.  I'm still going for the same style/"look", but am doing more digitally, which speeds things up and makes my work cleaner and easier to manipulate.  I do all my ink work by hand, then scan it in and color the image by digitally collaging watercolor fields and patterns that I have painted and scanned separately.  Below is a piece that I completed recently (though I still have to go in and tweak a few things) that I like to call "Tangled Eskimo".  

I am super excited about all these new plans and projects!  I feel more motivated than I have since we graduated and the feeling hasn't gone away yet, even after about a month of non-stop work.  Hopefully it keeps up!

As always, I appreciate your thoughts and opinions.  I also want to apologize for being out of touch and not checking Facebook or this blog regularly... I'm afraid I've been a little single-minded of late, focusing on the things mentioned above to the exclusion of most everything else.  I was completely unaware of the newer blog posts until Chad informed me that I was missing things and should get my butt in gear!

An Owl, a Hamster, a Fish, and the World's Cutest Vacuum

Yesterday when I was cleaning my room, I came across my Game Boy cartridge for Kirby's Dreamland 2. While looking at it and recalling the hours I spent playing it over the years, I couldn't help but think that the Kirby series has a very children's book-y aesthetic in terms of tone and characters. Naturally, my next thought was, "Hey, why don't I make a children's book-styled Kirby piece?!", so I made some rough sketches...

I would being doing the final in watercolor because I realized I haven't touched any medium aside from ink and markers since graduating. I don't have a particular favorite of the three, so any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Part of me thinks that they are each different enough that I could make them into a series...if I find the time. I am still working on some commission work, so these would just be a side-project for now.

Update on the Secret 7"/Florence + the Machine project: I am 99% sure I am not a part of the finalists. Since it is supposed to be a "secret", the winners are e-mailed individually as opposed to be announced on their website, and I haven't received an e-mail. I'm not bummed out at all; once I make the last few finishing touches, my entry will make a pretty rad portfolio piece. Oh, hey there silver lining.

Starting Somthing New

As I think I've told all of you individually, I'm embarking on a project to revitalize my portfolio and give being an illustrator and honest go. To that end I've dedicated two nights a week as no excuses art nights and put on indefinite hold all the little never finished personal projects that muddy my art time. All but one that is clearly defined and achievable through incremental goals. 6 portfolio pieces in 6 months. All based on the Bros. Grimm story Iron John PDF.  All the same dimensions and medium (medium yet to be determined).  I'm doing all the preliminary work together so hopefully all of them are finished right after the other and achieve a level of harmony. January yielded thumbnails. 

Image one is the discovery of Iron John in a dried pond in a forest. I'm leaning bottom right with the figure crouching low holding a dog skull (he kills a dog).
 

Next is the Prince protagonist confronting a captured Iron John in a cage in his father's courtyard. Theme here is imposing wildness over the naive prince. Oh, and i think i never want to show the prince's face if I can get away with it. Fave here is lower left.

Here the prince who now live with Iron John in the forest has been tasked with guarding a magic well which guilds whatever touches its waters. Left is birds eye view of prince reaching in, a la Christina's World. Right is looking up at the wavy silhouette of the prince from in the well through the surface of the water. His finger may be piercing the water. Yeah, leaning this one.

These are #4 and 5. 4, on the left, is the prince in armor and with an army, both given to him by Iron John, marching to the gallant defense of his adopted kingdom. Right is five with the prince in new iron john armor fleeing palace guards, after winning a tournament and refusing to unmask. Admittedly i liked these two and didnt do other variations, but let me know.

I have #6 thumbed, but am at present w/o a scanner so that will come with the next update. I really am looking forward to your crits and input on this friends. Motivational phone call all around!

b.

Only If For a Night

Whilst casually perusing these fair interwebs about a few weeks ago, I stumbled across a design contest. The gist of the contest is as follows:

Design artwork based on a single off the album of one of the following artists/bands: Ben Howard, Bombay Bicycle Club, DJ Shadow, The Cure, Noah and the Whale, CSS, and Florence + the Machine. The designs chosen by the band, or voted amongst the 5 highest by the general public, will be printed on an 7" album sleeve, displayed in a record shop in London, and sold...with all of the proceeds going to the Teenage Cancer Trust. There's no monetary compensation for the designers, just exposure and the feeling that you've helped an awesome cause.

The second I saw the words 'create artwork' and 'Florence + the Machine', I was sold. The fact that is was for a charity that helps teenage cancer patients only sweetened the deal. Florence's song "Only If For a Night" is the single they selected as the basis for the design.

One of the most appealing factors of Florence Welch's music is that it has such an elegant and ethereal feel to it. As lame as it sounds, one of the best representations of the visual imagery I get from her music is the design of Lady Galadriel and her city of Lothlorien from the Lord of the Rings movies. To me, the mixture of unearthly mysticism and the heavily Art Nouveau-inspired sensibilities -- in both dress and architecture -- are an apt summation of the image and sound Florence exudes. When creating my design, I knew that these were things that I definitely wanted to work into my piece.

The sketch in the upper left-hand corner was the first idea I came up with: a central image of Florence in front of delicately patterned framework -- some manner of portal between real life and the dreamy milieu of her music. The thumbnail included the phases of the moon going around the center circle, but I left those out of the final piece due to time constraints. I also changed the color scheme and pose of Florence for the finished piece in order to match the more somber and reverent tone of the song.

The head on the right is a failed attempt at my second idea: doing a straight portrait. I didn't really consult my reference image while rendering, so whatever likeness the base drawing had to Florence was lost. This influenced my decision to make it a more stylized likeness, that way I could spend less time on worrying how 100% accurate it was and spend more time on the drawing as a whole.

Anyway, this is the finished piece. I do wish I had a little more time (since I was working on it up till 20 minutes before it was due), but I am pretty happy with how it turned out. Voting on the artwork doesn't end until noon to 1ish on January 26th (this Thursday!), so if you haven't voted and want to, then click right here. As Christina discovered, if you have a Facebook and a Twitter, you can vote using both a.k.a. vote twice because you love me. :D