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!

Scarf Paintings

I am currently taking a painting class at the SMFA as part of my Illustration Certificate. The class is organized like a workshop where we come up with self directed projects and the teacher pushes us in directions we need to be pushed. In addition to helping me critique all of the T-scapes I have done so far, my teacher encouraged me to think of another series I might be interested in working on in class. On the first day she talked about how weird artists are and how sometimes we collect things and don't know why, but eventually we will figure out what to do with them. There is a reason for everything we do, even if we haven't yet discovered it.

I realized that I have a vast collection of scarves so I decided to make a painting of each one. When my teacher asked if there are stories behind each scarf, I said, "Absolutely!" and she recommended finding ways to incorporate the stories into the project, so I began writing down each story. Once I had stories drafted for each scarf, a writer friend helped me pick out the heart of each story-- just one sentence or phrase to sum up the whole-- and I painted the text. 

I am really pleased with how this project is coming along so far! Here's what I've got:

Landscapes I forgot about until just now

Like the title of this post says, I have a couple of small landscape pieces that I found while searching through work from earlier this year and I wanted to post them. The first is the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain done in water color and the second is a view from the train in central MA done in colored pencil. They both have pretty interesting clouds.

Illustration!

Wow, that month was fast. I didn't post anything! How did that happen? I have no idea, but I wanted to write about the work I have done for my illustration course at the Museum School since October. We have been doing weekly assignments based on different contexts in which you would find illustrations. We had already done cookbooks, Times Magazine spots, and portraits last time I posted. Since then we have done illustrations for a short story published in a literary journal, an opinion piece for a newspaper, an article about deforestation from an environmental publication, a book cover, and an album cover.

For the deforestation article, I collaged together different watercolor paintings I did of landscapes and cows in Indonesia, where deforestation is currently a huge problem, as all the Greenpeace canvassers in the street keep telling me when I'm trying to walk anywhere. There is some ominous smoke in the background. My class felt that it was a lovely piece of artwork, but that it was not ominous enough for the article.

Next is my illustration for a short story entitled "Charger." It is about a teenager in Kentucky trying to figure out whether he will go nowhere in life like all of his classmates and neighbors, or do something crazy and different. The scene I illustrated is when he picks up his girlfriend from her job at the mall. His truck was an important element in the story, so I made the point of view from inside the truck. My classmates pointed out that the angle of the side view mirror is wrong. This is something I was not aware of, since I don't drive. I have spent so little time in a driver's seat, that I did not notice as I was creating the image. 

I think if I were to do this piece again, I would change the girlfriend's hair a bit. In the text, her hair is described as a bird's nest piled on this girl's head, but what I drew is just poofy ridiculousness. I would also have the two figures holding hands or something, because it is actually a very affectionate moment in the story and the way I have presented them, they seem still and distant. Other than those details, I'm quite pleased!

For our opinion piece illustration, we had two options of article. The one I chose was about censorship. Apparently, many years ago a large bookstore chain was accused of selling child pornography because they carried a book of photography by Jock Sturges, who is a photographer known for his completely consensual photos of families on nude beaches. Look him up if you would like. For some reason, I think his photography of figures outside on beaches is stunning, but when the photo is taken inside a house, it squiks me out. But for opinion illustrations, my own opinion doesn't matter. The goal is to illustrate the author's opinion. I drew this:

A book with a fig leaf, the classic symbol for covering up nudity. My class thought that it looked too much like a photo album, and that it would be effective in black and white, so I did another version in pencil. You can decide which one you think is more effective:

For our book cover illustration, we again had two choices of books to illustrate. The one I chose was a self help book about how to stop a procrastination habit. I focused on the idea of balancing time and all of the things you want to do, by collaging an old-timey brass scale with images to represent different things someone might do with their time. Once again my class thought that the image was well done, but the concept needed work. They pointed out that procrastination is about avoidance more than it is about balancing work and things outside of work. That's when I made the connection that balancing work and other things has been a preoccupation of mine for a while now. I guess subconsciously I was tapping into that instead of doing the assignment.

And finally the most fun assignment we have had yet, probably because it allowed us the most freedom, was the album cover. We could choose any band or musical artist we wanted and imagine that they were coming out with a new album and we had been hired to design the cover (or if it is an artist who is no longer living, perhaps a record label wanted to put out a new compilation of their recordings). Naturally I chose The Cat Empire, my favorite band of all time. Their album covers tend to be fairly simple and the all include the band's cat eye symbol. I happen to think of them as a fun, crazy, experimental, exciting, upbeat band, so I wanted to use watercolors because of their unpredictability, while keeping the design itself relatively simple so that it would fit in well with the rest of their albums. Incidentally they are recording a new album right now! But I bet they already have cover art for it... 

Cat Empire: If you're out there reading my blog, what do you think of this album cover?

Nikki (if she were a blue alien of some kind)

This is a water color of my housemate Nikki. 

She is blue.

She has her Cat Empire shirt on.

I am very proud of her hand.

Mexico Trip Paintings Part II: Yucatan Peninsula

This post is comin' at you from Boston, MA as I am moving into my new apartment!!! Most exciting thing ever. I'll post more about my artsy adventures in Boston once I have actually had some. At the moment my main concern is groceries and getting a job and things like that.

Soooo... The second part of my trip in Mexico started in Cancún and took me to Isla Mujeres and Chichén Itzá. I met an unbelievable number of really great, interesting people from all over the world through the hostel where I stayed in Cancún. If you're going to Cancún, you should stay there too. You will meet Julio, the front desk man/breakfast chef/dance partner/ wonderful human being and probably a large number of Australians as well. I miss Cancún so much.

 

These first two paintings were done in the backyard of Quetzal Hostel. Gorgeous!!

Isla Mujeres Day 1

More Isla Mujeres paintings. 

I ended up painting under a beach front palapa bar at sunset and was on a painting frenzy.

Isla Mujeres Day 2: Tortugranja (Turtle Farm)

Punta Sur, painted at a cliffside restaurant. The waitstaff stood between me and the view and asked if it was too late to be in the painting. I drew them a couple of stick figures falling off one of the cliffs and said, "Aaah! Se cayeron!" (Aaah! They fell off!).

We all had a good laugh. 

..........Good story, Laura........

This set of paintings is from Chichén Itzá. This first one I did while I was covered in tiny bees.

Quetzalcoatl

Adorable umbrella'ed tourist group.

Ancient wall and jungle.

The giant pyramid! This is the one that has a shadow that forms the body of a snake crawling down the stairs on the fall and spring equinox. I was there exactly on the fall equinox completely by accident. Though I am sorry to report that I did not see it. maybe I wasn't there at the right time of day? 

I DID however make friends with a small boy named Marco whose parents were selling crafty tourist objects. He told me all about a camping trip he's going on and wanted me to paint a picture of him. Sometimes his Spanish was too fast for me to follow, but he was a fun kid. 

I also went to Guatemala to visit Abby for a couple days and it was spectacularly gorgeous on Lake Atitlán but I was there for such a short time that I wasn't able to do any paintings. 

And now I'm in Boston, so we'll see what happens!

Mexico Trip Paintings Part I: Cuautla

I am back in Ithaca again after a pretty incredible trip in Mexico and Guatemala. I took my watercolors and painted pretty much everywhere I went. Now I have a stack of more-or-less postcard sized paintings that altogether look like a visual journal of my trip. I think of them as little sketches that I could do more with or not. 

My first stop was Cuautla, Morelos, a town where I spend a semester in the fall of 2008 living with an incredibly sweet and generous host family, working with a local artist, and learning about Mexican history, literature, social movements, and Spanish. On this trip, I was able to visit a lot of people who were very important to me that semester as well as see some places surrounding Cuautla that I had never been to, namely Tepotzlán and Cuernavaca.

I mainly painted places rather than people. Places tend to hold still longer than people, so they were easier. Also, when you paint people they tend to want to keep the paintings, so that is also why I don't have many. I have a habit of giving away portraits. 

Without further ado, These are places I saw in Cuautla, Morelos during the first part of my trip:

Emiliano Zapata Grafitti! Viva México!

Three small children were very interested in watching me paint this:

While I was painting this one, this old guy started reciting poetry to me in Spanish:

The painting below was my personal favorite from the Cuautla set. It is the ex-convent of San Diego turned train station/art space/theatre/studio for karate lessons/make out hub for local high school students/museum. I love Mexico.