Veggies!!

This week's assignment for my Illustration class was cook book illustrations. I experimented with scratch board paper. Perhaps next time I should use real scratch board tools and not blunt scissors, and perhaps I should give myself more time and not wing-it on the lettering, but all things considered, I'm moderately happy with these.

New Yorker Spots

The second assignment for my illustration class at the Museum School was really, really fun-- we drew series of spots, which are the little images in the middle of magazine articles such as The New Yorker. The illustrations are in black and white and don't have anything to do with anything so we could draw whatever we wanted as long as it was tiny (3" x 3" max). Most people in my class did a few illustrations on one theme but I thought the assignment was awesome so I made it my personal goal to do as many as I could in a week.

Aaaaand here they are!

I did this candle and the small person with a giant coat and house plant in class:

Then I thought, "I should do illustrations on a theme. How about fluffy animals?"

In following the theme of fluffy animals, I drew the fluffiest animal I have ever met-- one of the dogs that belonged to my host family when I spent a semester in Mexico. Her name was Tonka:

Then I thought, "Woah-- ALL of my host family's dogs had so much character. I'll draw all of them!" so here they are. The wrinkly one is Jani (pronounced like honey), then there's Tonka again, and on the bottom row the black one is Pintocha, and the one looking away is Georgie.

(These dogs were not drawn to scale. See below.)

So then one day I was sitting in Copley Square with my sketchbook and I drew a series of spots of Copley. I did the dome of Old South Church:

The door to the Boston Public Library:

A house sparrow:

And a tree:

Also here is a shopping cart that is completely random:

... and a girl hugging a star. If she were hugging a real star, she would probably burn to death, but she seems ok.

And finally, I did a series where I messed with a bunch of famous art.

This guy with no clothes has stepped in yet another icky clock puddle while walking around in Dalí's masterpiece.

Someone is invading Mona's personal bubble here:

This is my take on the beautiful tradition of nautical painting:

And finally, I gave this guy something to REALLY scream about.

The assignment for next week is cookbook illustration, so get psyched for some food I'm about to draw! 

Also, I was enrolled in a second class this semester called Introduction to Adobe Illustrator but I have decided to drop the class for many reasons, the main ones being I didn't realize that I would find Adobe Illustrator so boring and I can't think of any way to apply it to any of my artistic goals. I think Photoshop would be more up my alley. Don't get me wrong-- Illustrator seems super useful and I'm glad we have artists and designers out there who can use it and enjoy using it. However, I am not one of them. Also, there was a wait-list for people who really wanted to get into the class and I figured they would make better use of it than I would. AND the class was on Zumba night and the thought of giving up Zumba for 14 weeks so that I could sit at a computer was very sad to me. 

Tools of the Trade

Hahaha, the pun in the title had to be done. I am starting fall classes at the SMFA (known also as simply "The Museum School" as I have just discovered). I am taking Introduction to Illustration and Intro to Adobe Illustrator. The names are similar but the classes will be quite different. So, here is the work I did in my first Illustration class-- we sketched antique tools and then used tracing paper and a variety of mediums and styles to create different effects and ways of presenting the same subject matter. I chose this tool because it kind of looks like a chicken or a lizard or a fish.

For the above sketch I made it a mythical animal head mounted on some rich safari-adventurer's mantle.

 The plaque reads, "My first kill, Zebrantalope, Kenya 1927"

I was just goofing around.