Happy 2014!

It is a new year and so it is time for some new art! Or at least, time to start posting art again, since I took a rather long vacation from blogging there. Whoops! OK! New year, new post! I finished up my drawing class having gotten some great practice making master copies and original observational drawings alike. 

I really surprised myself by loving our week on drawing fabric! There are about seven different ways fabric can drape and as long as you know those seven, you can draw convincing fabric that makes sense forever. Looking at the folds in people's clothes became a fun way to pass time on the subway.

Jenny and Aaron rock some folded fabric:

Below are sketches I did of statues at the MFA. I noticed that these statues often have more complex fabric folds than your average subway rider and when I asked my teacher about it he said that the sculptors were showing off. 

We did a week on practicing perspective which, since it involves straight lines, measuring, angles, and being precise, I was not so good at.

We moved onto reflections with tiny mirrors and these super androgynous plaster heads. I really enjoyed reflections, but not as much as I enjoyed fabric. 

As it turns out, antique tools make really good subjects for still life drawings. Below is a master copy and below that is my drawing done from observation.

Drawing glass is fun and challenging because it is so shiny. We practiced by drawing antique bottles on toned paper. I was especially drawn to bottles with text.

One of the bottles below says "alma" which means "soul" in Spanish, and another bottle says "discovery." These were the actual words on the bottles, I did not embellish.

SOUL DISCOVERY.

Isn't that what we're all doing?

My teacher, who I'm certain has an endless stash of interesting objects to draw brought in plastic animals one week. After spending so much time trying to get the human form right, animal forms throw you right back off again! All the rules change and all the proportions are different. 

... And for our final day of class we drew Lord of the Rings figurines. I chose Gimli, who has a beard to be reckoned with. Not to mention several weapons. 

 

It's Time to Drink and Drive

No, I am not encouraging drunk driving, I am in the process of inking chapter 7 of Girrrl!!!. It begins with Aaron getting ready for class and proudly riding his bike single handed while enjoying a mason jar of loose-leaf tea. All but about one and a half pages are inked and when I say 'inked', I am using real ink on bristol paper this time! I am loving the variety of lines and tones I get. I look at the first few chapters I did as compared with this one and think, "Man! I am so much better at this now!" and I can't wait to continue developing this medium. It totally rocks.

My New Love Affair with Ink and a Rundown of My Life

Hello there blog readers! I don't know how many of you there are, sometimes I wonder. Anyway, this weekend I did a ridiculous amount of things in a very small amount of time.

FIRST on Friday I went aboard the USS Constitution (the oldest commissioned war ship still afloat in the world) for a harbor turn-around, most of which I spent running around taking ridiculous photos with my fellow museum learning staff and drinking more than my fair share of hot cocoa provided by America's Navy. If you are not crazy about how much of our tax dollars go to the armed forces, perhaps it will make you feel a wee bit better that some of those dollars go towards providing me complimentary hot chocolate with delicious marshmallows. Then I worked on my Day of the Dead painting and went to a shift at the theatre where I work.

NEXT on Saturday I went to the Museum School bright and early for Part I of a weekend workshop on making comic books, taught by a fantastic artist-- Raúl González whose name would score a LOT of points in Scrabble if proper names were allowed and there was more than one Z included in a standard Scrabble set. I digress. Check out his work! After the workshop, I high tailed it to a fancy hotel to work at a fancy dinner to raise money for the USS Constitution Museum. I schmoozed, met a lot of great people, and wore a ball gown! A BALL GOWN! Then I took a lot of really ridiculous photos with my fellow museum learning staff. It was a good weekend for that.

ON SUNDAY I submitted my painting to the Uforge Gallery and took the bus to the Museum school for Part II of the Comic Book Workshop and after that, back to JP I went for the annual Lantern Festival where there is apple cider, live music, and hundreds of handmade lanterns. It was beautiful and lovely and a perfect end to a weekend of running around like a crazy person.

So what I actually intended to focus on in this post was the workshop. The Workshop! It was attended by a small but mighty group of aspiring comic book artists (who had all already made quite a bit of progress of their own). It was a lot of ground to cover in a very short amount of time. Raúl guided us through the steps that comic book artists go through to lay the groundwork for putting together a story-- character designs, storyboards, measuring panels-- with a ruler! I do exactly none of those things when I go to draw Girrrl!!! so I think it was great for me to have someone explain/demonstrate them.

We got a chance to try out every step of the process starting with character sheets:

I did one of Jenny but then focussed more closely on a character that Caitlin and I have not yet introduced in the story, but she is coming and she will be awesome:

We looked at examples of styles and mediums used by a wide spectrum of established comic book artists and, again, attempted them ourselves. This was the moment, as I wrote in the title of this post, when I tried ink for the first time in the context of cartooning. It. Is. The Best. I have often wondered how the work I do on this comic related to painting and I had never been able to connect it before. I think I am more of a painter than a drawer (is that the right word for an artist who draws?). In fact, my college professors told me pretty candidly that I'm not good at drawing. Painting and drawing are actually pretty different skills, and I think I'm generally a pretty rockin' painter (room to grow, but pretty rockin' nonetheless) but perhaps my drawing just isn't strong. But this weekend I learned that I CAN PAINT COMICS. Get ready for an ink explosion, guys. It's coming. I can sense it. These were my first tries at ink:

 Oh man. I'm excited. 

Also, since I imagine you were wondering:

Girrrl!!! Chapter 6

Remember Girrrl!!!? Well, Caitlin and I do and in fact we are still making chapters, albeit at a pace that, if we were running track would allow us (as Eddie Izzard once said), "to come last in a team of eight million other runners who are all dead."

Sorry loyal fans. 

BUT here are some previews to get you excited! Expect the new chapter in a week if not sooner!

Who is this charming new chicken?

Will this screaming customer ever chill out?

...and weren't Gravy and Biscuit pirates before?

You will soon know the answers to these questions along with the exciting conclusion to part one of Girrrl!!!

Trees and Girrrl!!! and another little piece of my soul

The weather has been beautiful and I have been spending more time out on my back porch drawing trees. Here they are!

I am also working steadily on the next chapter of Girrrl!!!, I promise. Here is one panel of which I am particularly proud. I have not put the plaid in Aaron's shirt, nor have I made it pretty in photoshop, but I think you will like it all the same..

And to finish off this post, here is another swirly thing I doodled, which I likened to the shape of my soul in another post:

Girrrl!!! Chapter 4!!!

At long last, the fourth chapter of Caitlin's and my comic Girrrl!!! is UP. Our last post was in May. I would like to take a moment to explain why it took so long and also the process we go through to create a new chapter.

STEP 1
Caitlin writes the chapter, emails it to me.

STEP 2
I give her any feedback I may have, email it back.

STEP 3
She makes edits, sends it to me. (Sometimes we repeat steps 2 and 3 a few more times).

STEP 4
I sketch out the comic, photograph it, upload the photos, and email them to Caitlin.

STEP 5
Caitlin gives me feedback, sends it to me, I edit. (We repeat steps 4 and 5 a few more times).

STEP 6
I ink the comic! It takes an hour to an hour and a half per page.

STEP 7
I scan and edit the comic, add text and clean up any rough sketchy lines or mistakes I made while inking. This requires a scanner and photoshop. When I was in Ithaca, I snuck onto Ithaca College's campus (a 40 minute bus ride from my house) to use their technology, as I own neither a scanner nor photoshop. IC had a scanner in the library that I could use to scan onto my flash drive. After that, I would head to the only computer lab on campus that didn't require an IC user name and password. I would plug in my flash drive and access their photoshop program for all of my editing needs. I would store all of my files on my flash drive, take the bus 40 minutes home, upload them to my home computer, and send them to Caitlin.

STEP 8
If Caitlin has any edits to suggest, I repeat step 7. If she doesn't, she puts it on the website and people read it!!! Hooray!

SO June was spectacularly busy for me, and IC was closed for the summer. July I spent on a farm off the grid in Vermont. August I spent working and IC was still closed for the summer. When IC opened for the Fall semester, I was getting ready to go to Mexico and move to Boston. I spent September in Mexico and Guatemala. In October, I moved to Boston and all of my abundant free time went towards getting a job and finding a new source of free photoshop (sneaking into Tufts? Northeastern? The public libraries don't have it). Then I got two jobs and all of my free time went towards working two jobs.

Now it is November and I am in the throws of NaNoWriMo, BUT I managed to finish inking this bad boy. Turns out one of my housemates has a scanner, and Caitlin, brilliant woman that she is, had a rockin' good idea: download a free program that does the same things photoshop does, but it would be free and I could use it from my own computer. We did some research and discovered Chocoflop which sounds like a store brand breakfast cereal but is in fact an image editing program. It is confusing. It is temperamental. But it is mine and I don't have to take a bus 40 minutes to use it! Expect more frequent Girrrl!!! updates from now on.

Living on Borrowed Fame, and Girrrl!!!'s move to Wordpress

I check the site stats on my blog frequently because it is really exciting to me to know when people looked at my blog and how many and where they're from and all that jazz and I was psyched to see the spike in popularity of my post about self portraits.

I thought, "Woah there! I'm so excited that everyone likes my self portraits so much!" but upon closer inspection, I discovered that my blog is coming up when people search for Frida Kahlo or Pablo Picasso because I reference their self portraits in the post. I'm sorry Frida! I'm sorry Picasso! I'm apparently just jumping on your bandwagon of artistic fame. 

On the plus side, I also discovered that my blog comes up when you google, "art history and Harry Potter" and that just rocks my world.

My other bit of news is that Caitlin's and my comic, Girrrl!!! has moved to Wordpress, which looks way more slick and I think it will allow us better image quality. We have posted the first two chapters there as well as our brand new third chapter! Please check it out!! 

In chapter 3 we are introducing a few new characters, including Captain Cluck, pictured at the lower left of this sketch that isn't actually finished:

And here are my initial sketches for two of Captain Cluck's trusty minions, Gravy, and Biscuit:

Want to know more? Well I guess you better go to Girrrl!!!'s new website!

And just to give you greater incentive to go see it, I will tell you that you will also find some photos of me falling off of a chair. They are hilarious! See you at wordpress!

HARRY POTTER CERAMICS!

I have recently been re-reading all of the Harry Potter books and it has been one of the best decisions I have made in recent history. I have completely re-kindled my love of Harry Potter and the gang and was very surprised by how many details I had forgotten from many of the books. My middle school and high school self would be APPALLED at how much I had forgotten, but now the whole story is fresh in my mind and the best part is-- IT IS INSPIRING MORE CERAMICS!!! I threw two potion jars on the wheel last week: Felix Felicis and Polyjuice Potion. They aren't out of the kiln yet, but the moment they are, I will post them so fast you won't even believe it! As a side note though, I accidentally dropped the lid to Felix Felicis and it broke. I had to fix it and it is a little wonky. It was ironically unlucky for a Felix Felicis bottle (for anyone who hasn't read Harry Potter, Felix Felicis is the name of a potion that makes you lucky... and Polyjuice Potion makes you look exactly like someone else of your choosing).

I spent Tuesday afternoon at the ceramics studio with Gary Rith, my totally awesome ceramics teacher at Cornell who makes the coolest mugs and teapots and pitchers!! They are frequently beagle or elephant adorned and you can check out his website or blog to see them!! Also his blog currently has pictures of me on it. All the more reason to look at it! Anyway, on Tuesday Gary showed me how to use underglaze to draw on pottery and I practiced on some test tiles which just came out of the kiln and I am SO EXCITED ABOUT THEM!!! I drew Harry, Ron, and Hermione casting spells along with a monster, and Jenny and Aaron from Girrrl!!!

Totally magical!!

A very excited Jenny with a skeptical Aaron.

Also out of the kiln were some more things I threw on the wheel-- They all have kind of a blue/white/green pallet. I'm not sure how I feel about it.

My first lidded vessel! 

Another mini-pot. My dad requested it!

I ate ice cream out of this very bowl just last night! Love it!

Also: I have the email addresses of some important people at Cornell. If you are interested in writing to them and telling them that you don't want the ceramics studio to close, let me know and I will give you the contact info!! Don't let the studio close!!