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!

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!

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:

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.