We're just going to cover everything in glitter.

As I wrote in my previous post, I have just completed a summer class in illustration through the SMFA. It is the seventh of eight classes I need to complete my Illustration Certificate! One more to go! I wanted to share the work I did for this course. When I took Introduction to Illustration we had a new assignment every week, each one based on an actual job that a working illustrator might get. The Intermediate Illustration course I took this summer was structured in a similar way but spending more time on fewer projects. We critiqued our work every class and were expected to make edits and present considered and finished work. It was challenging and also similar to how a real illustration job would go. 

We kicked off the class with a New Yorker cover-- a magazine with a long history of illustrated cover artwork. If you get your work on a New Yorker cover, you're kind of a big deal. Often the covers are clever comments on current events, but not always! Sometimes they are just nods to New York City as a place and a culture, or nods to something seasonal. I'm not particularly well versed in politics so I decided that my cover would be a love letter to Summer in Upstate, New York. I painted Enfield Falls near Ithaca. This is a real place where you should definitely go swimming if you are ever in the area. I had fun with the green and red color palette.

The following assignment was an illustration for a short story, such as you might find in Harper's Bazaar. When you illustrate stories for children's books, you usually want to show the characters in fully realized detail, but when you illustrate for adult audiences, they usually want something less detailed that allows the reader to imagine details for themselves. Generally characters' images are only suggested or fragmented in stories for adults. 

We read a story called "Old Mrs. J" by Yoko Ogawa, which is a rather eerie story about the landlady of an apartment building whose garden starts mysteriously to produce hand-shaped carrots. I don't want to spoil the ending, but there are other strange, unsettling things that go on and a very creepy twist. I did a couple sketches of hand carrots for class.

My class's feedback was basically that I needed to make it creepier. "So creepy that you scare yourself" was the exact advice. We explored ink as a medium and I decided it would be ideal for this assignment.

I felt that my piece could be creepier still, so I looked at images from that old book, "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" whose illustrations (by Stephen Gammell) are done in ink and absolutely terrifying. They are too scary for my blog, so you should google them. But do it during the day, when it's light out, maybe with a friend so you're not alone. 

Much creepier this time around!

Our next assignment was a celebrity portrait. Illustrations like this are often used for published interviews with anyone from politicians to pop stars. My instructor, when giving us this assignment, recommended that we use sparkles. I couldn't entirely tell to what degree he was kidding but he said something along the lines of, "It's not a mandate-- I'm not saying use glittler......... but use glitter." So I knew I needed to do a portrait of someone who would make sense covered in glitter. 

Ke$ha seemed to me to be the obvious choice.

So here she is in all her sparkly glory, in a gold bathtub, drinking a beer with a wolf in sparkly sunglasses. I feel like that is something she would do, right? Plus, wolves feature prominently in the video for her song "Die Young." 

As an in-class exercise we looked at hand lettered fonts and text and logos and album covers that include interesting hand lettering. Typography is something I used to find incredibly boring, but lately I've been really into it! We did some experimenting with text. I was drinking lemon iced tea so I wrote "lemon."

Then I wrote, "Lime" in Spanish to go with it. For being an in class exercise, I'm rather pleased with them.

We put all of our text practice to good use for our final assignment, which was product labels. I have a secret love of hot sauce labels-- they usually involve quite frankly really cool art with skulls and fire and death, devils, scantily clad cartoon chili peppers... I believe hot sauce is the grocery store product with the most interesting variety of labels. I may start a collection of interesting hot sauce labels. I will look like a weirdo taking photos in the grocery store but I don't even care!

I designed a blues dancing inspired hot sauce logo using stills from youtube videos. Some dancer friends and I agreed that a blues dancing hot sauce would have to be flavored with aged peppers, molasses, and a splash of Kentucky bourbon.

My class liked the concept but gave me some ideas for editing the background colors and the text. I agreed with what they had to say and did some alternate text sketches, this time using smoke as an inspiration for the lettering.

... And then put it all together with a new and improved background! I am very pleased with the results! Now if anyone ever follows that recipe and invents this hot sauce, I have your logo!

The Neverending Story-- The Poster!

This summer, I have been taking the SMFA's Intermediate Illustration course. It was an intensive class that ended up being quite rigorous and much of my creative energy has been put towards classwork for the last six weeks or so. Thanks to interesting assignments and helpful feedback from my instructor and fellow classmates-- who were all incredibly talented-- I made a lot of work of which I am very proud and my next post will cover more of what I did for the class. As for this post, I wanted to share some exciting news!

Whenever this illustration class is offered, one of the assignments is a project in conjunction with the Harwich Junior Theatre on Cape Cod. The illustration students design posters for the show that HJT is putting on that season, then the folks at the theatre choose one of the student designs to use on their posters. It is a great collaboration that gives the students a real-world illustration assignment and gives the theatre creative artwork to promote their shows.

This season they are putting on a stage adaptation of The Neverending Story. Being a fan of the film, I was excited to get the opportunity to submit a poster design. I spent quite a bit of time painting our hero Bastian Bux as he discovers that the dusty old book he found is coming to life-- the warrior Atreyu and Falcor the luck dragon magically fly out of the book. I am happy to tell y'all that the Harwich Junior Theatre chose my design to use for their official posters!

I wanted to make a couple of notes:

I had help from my instructor with some of the photoshop elements, primarily text placement and the addition of HJT's logos in the bottom left corner. This won't be the final version. There are a couple of tweaks still to be made with the text, but I was excited to share this news and I wanted to post it right away!

Also, a note about Falcor: anyone who remembers the film probably remembers Falcor as being more like a giant flying dog, which is so iconic of the movie, but the original book The Neverending Story describes Falcor as being similar to a traditional Asian dragon with lion-like features. The play follows the book rather than the film and so I stuck closer to the book's image of Falcor.

I am really proud of my poster and honored that it was selected by the folks at HJT! I'm sure it will be a fantastic production!

And now, just for fun, I leave you with this video clip of Falcor from the 1984 film:

Enjoy!

Drawing for Illustrators: copying things

Oh dear! My last post seems to have been two months ago! A lot has changed in those two months-- I live in a new house now in Arlington and I am 25 now and I quit one of my jobs and I went to Ithaca and came back and I started a new art class. 

It is that last one I want to write more about-- my class is called Drawing for Illustrators and is the next course in the sequence towards my Illustration Certificate from the SMFA. It is a crash course in how to draw everything. We started with basic three dimensional shapes-- ping pong balls, wooden blocks and cylinders, then moved on to faces, eyes, shading, hands, and we will soon be doing fabric, the figure, and more. We spend about half of our time in the classroom studying from copy plates or still life setups and half of our time at the Museum of Fine Arts drawing from statues and paintings. 

I am surprising myself by really enjoying the copy plates because in every other art class I've ever taken, even waaaay back in middle school, I have always detested copying things. In seventh grade, a substitute art teacher gave us a packet of drawings to copy and instead of copying the drawings, I wrote her a long note about why copying things wasn't art or wasn't creative or was not worth my time, or something like that. She wrote me back a note about how no, copying things is a really useful tool as an artist and I should copy things. Her note did not convince 12-year-old me and I probably failed the assignment, but I didn't care because righteous outrage against The Man.

In eighth grade, we had an assignment to draw an oil pastel self portrait based on a photo that our teacher took in class and then for the background, we had to do a copy of a famous painting-- as though we had stuck ourselves in a painting. 13-year-old me again was outraged at being asked to copy another artist's painting (and working from a photo rather than the mirror?! All wrong!) and so to deftly avoid copying another artist's work, I chose to put my self portrait in an Ad Reinhardt painting. He was an abstract painter who painted a lot of solid black canvases, or grids of dark grey and black squares. Most of the rest of my class did Starry Night by Van Gogh. I was like, "Van Gogh is so overdone" while I filled in my grid of abstract black squares." (Now Van Gogh is one of my favorites though).

In my high school, I avoided art classes until my senior year and instead took classes at the Community School of Music and Art to build up a portfolio because I was a big art snob, basically. The studio art classes at my high school had the reputation of being a big joke that people just took to get their art credit out of the way and I did not care to be around that atmosphere (cough*art snob*cough). I did however take AP Art my senior year which included all the creative problem solving and self expression I had ever dreamed of! I was also taking a drawing class alongside it where I encountered, you guessed it: copying things. "Aaargh! Copying things!" 17-year-old me lamented, but I plugged through packets and packets of pictures of bones to copy. I got a 2 on the AP Art portfolio review. You don't have to be familiar with the AP grading system to know that 2 is a terrible score. I doubt it was related to copying things though.

In college, we mostly drew from life, but there was some copying involved. We got a book of master sketches and copied things from it every week. We did Da Vincis and Michelangelos and all those Italian guys and I didn't hate them as much as I used to, I just found them boring and I was really impatient about it. I have fond memories of 21-year-old me doing master copies from this book while watching the Colbert Report with my friends at their house during my last semester of college. 

So basically, I have never liked copying things ever, which is why I am so deeply and pleasantly surprised by this class! More than half the class consists of master copies and I really, really like it! I am finding it really kind of meditative and zen. I get so focussed and calm while I do these drawings! It is incredible! I think I have arrived at a place where I understand the lessons to be learned from copying other people's work (because you can never make it an exact copy, you are bringing your own eye and your own hand to it, you're not a machine. The practice can only help you). And Da Vinci for example, studied cadavers and understood that every shape your body makes is because of the muscles and the bones underneath and how they fit together and in fact, copying his work will make you a better figure drawer than drawing a living person because he knew what was under the surface and all of that information is in every line he put down and copying his drawings teaches you to see that way because drawing is seeing.

However, I do not think that I was wrong at earlier stages of my life. I think that developmentally, as a human and an artist, I had to go and figure out what I wanted to do before I would arrive at a place where I wanted to be learning these lessons. I guess 25-year-old me wants to learn these lessons. I needed to experiment and gather my own ideas about drawing first. The time is now right and I am speaking the same language as the copy plates. 

The darker image in all of these photos is the copy plate, 

the lighter pencil sketch is what I did.

The sketches below are Roman statues from the MFA.

Drawing the Expressive Figure (Nudity! Heads up!)

I spent this past week doing an intensive art class as part of the Illustration Certificate at the SMFA. The class was "Drawing the Expressive Figure" and it was basically eight hours of art-making every day-- 9 AM to 6 PM. It was fantastic! It got me so jazzed about creating figurative work (since I have been doing so many landscapes lately). Focussing so closely on the nude models and doing observational work also made me really loopy and zoned-out at the end of each day, which has never happened to me before, so that was cool!

We experimented with different mediums including ink, chalk pastel, permanent marker, paint, and oil pastel on a variety of different surfaces. I am just going to go ahead and post all my best stuff (If you didn't want to look at nude figures, this is your last chance to turn back):

DAY 1: We did contour drawings with permanent marker and added chalk pastel over top!

This one is huge! It is 22" x 30"

DAY 2: Ink! I loved working with ink-- I had never attempted realistic figure drawing with it and it was great to work with. We talked a lot about the power of suggestion. With ink, you can suggest a whole face with just a few marks. Also, the model's hair lent itself well to being represented in ink.

We tried some silhouettes as well:

DAY 3: More ink! Yeah! I felt really good about almost everything I did that day. I was able to get pretty detailed renderings of faces.

We then created our own textured paper by putting down thin washes of acrylic paint and then placing the figures on top:

DAY 4: We tried out oil pastels on yupo, which is a plastic paper. I don't know how they make it, but it creates an interesting surface to work into. The materials really want to slide around on the yupo.

The model brought some really great wigs and when she put this long, pink wig on, it seemed like she was really building a character and a story, which I totally love! I asked what her super power would be if she could have any power and she chose time travel and the ability to solve unsolvable math problems. I imagine those two powers would be related, she could somehow use her knowledge of math to find her way through the time/space continuum. Thus The Naked Time Traveler was born! 

This pose looked to me like she had just lost a battle of some kind and was down for the count, so is this the end for the Naked Time Traveler?!

DAY 5: Another morning of figure drawing from the model, then finishing touches and group critique.

The above figure and the head below are from the same painting and I am super proud of both of them, but unfortunately the head is super small in comparison to the body, which I am really embarrassed about. Alas!

One project that I didn't quite get the chance to finish up integrating pattern into the figure, or the figure into a pattern, so I created a pattern and then translated some of my sketches from the week on top of that pattern. Here is what I came up with:

My next steps are going to be definitely continuing to work with ink and also practicing drawing hands and feet. I didn't realize until my teacher pointed it out how much work I have left to do in terms of my hands and feet drawing skills. 

It was productive, fun, and eye opening week. I was totally immersed in drawing and my classmates were fantastic and talented! I actually wish the class had been longer. There is so much more we could have done!!

Cool Chick from History

There is a pretty great blog out there in the internet universe called Cool Chicks from History. The writer of this blog posts a different female historical figure every day and highlights that woman's badass accomplishments. It is a wealth of historical information and images that tend to get left out of your average history class. There was recently a call for illustrations of different cool chicks from history and I volunteered!

I thought I would get to choose someone from history who has inspired me (I was thinking of doing Nampeyo, who I did research on in college) but as it turned out, I was assigned someone, which ultimately I think was a great way of going about it because I got the chance to learn about someone who I was not already familiar with. The woman I was given was Jane Colden, a Botanist who lived in Upstate New York in the 1700's. I was pretty excited because I also am from Upstate NY (though not exactly the same part, she was in the Hudson Valley and I am from the Finger Lakes).

I learned pretty quickly that there are no known images of Jane Colden which made it an interesting creative challenge. I looked at portraits and picture frames from the eighteenth century for reference as well as some paintings of her family members that I was able to find.

I learned that Jane Colden was known for studying gardenias, among other plants, and using ink to transfer images of plants, so I also worked in ink and showed her making notes and sketches of a gardenia. I imagined her at a desk in her house in Upstate New York. Surrounding her portrait are more gardenias and other plants that she studied.

She faced the same sexism that was unfortunately standard at the time and was not really acknowledged for her accomplishments during her life. She discovered some previously unclassified plants whose scientific name "Coldenia" is actually referring to her father who was also a botanist, even though it was she who discovered the plants. 

I'm totally glad I know about her!