auld lang syne

This will be my last post for the year 2010. Overall, this was a pretty amazing year but I won't bore you with the details ^.^
I wanted to test out the gorgeous new scanner and honor the spirit of "auld lang syne" by posting the portraits I did of my sister and myself.
Each piece on the left is done with color pencil and sharpie on computer paper back in 2005.

Each piece on the right is an india ink and watercolor painting I did this year for my parents as a Christmas present.

The skinny brunette is my sister Caileigh and I'm the other one XD. I tried to incorporate a couple of our interests and our school colors now that we've both graduated.
I'm pretty proud of how these came out and of how much I've grown as an artist in the past 5 years but I still have a long way to go.

Happy New Year's! Next time I post it'll be 2011! :D

end of an era

So today was my last real final. Tomorrow I have an exam period in which we'll clean the shop but I'm not counting that. We were greeted with muffins and coffee and we displayed our last paintings. The assignment was to do a painting that will inspire the next few years of our lives. I hated mine XD but only because I wasn't able to get it to where I wanted it to be and the critique was wicked helpful. I suppose this was more productive overall and inspiring since doing the same thing that I have been doing wouldn't have taught me anything new. I'll probably post that tomorrow since today I want to mention the professor.

Frank Owen is easily one of my favorite professors at the University of Vermont. I've had him for three courses altogether, two this semester, and I have grown so much as an artist because of him. He's one of those professors who drive you crazy, his assignments are frustratingly vague and he is so demanding, but you know as you're working that you're gaining so much from every minute spent working on his class. He taught me how to build a stretcher and use acrylic paints. He also taught me about the Slant Step, of which he is the current caretaker. As a thank you and in honor of his retirement, our class is working together to make a massive collaboration for him. One day, we started talking about hoarders and little old ladies who feed their cats...post mordem, and he wanted to do a collaborative piece the size of the wall. In response to this, we are each doing a 12" x 12" painting in our own style that he can hang all together. Here is my contribution to his wall of cats.Of course, I worked in the same vein as the Body Modification series. I wanted to make it creepy cute. He seemed to like it. ^.^

Ruffnut

Few, now all I have to do is pack up all my belongings, finish three paintings and get my ceramics ready for crit. Yay! Just for that, you get more fanart. I'm going to clean this up eventually but here's what I had in mind originally.Here's an older version of Ruffnut from How to Train your Dragon. Love her!

Exams

Exam week. Too tired. Here's a Pikachu for Christmas present for friend. On coffee mug. yup.

Happy Birthday to me! :D

It's my birthday! Yay! I'm 22 now and in honor of that, I'm taking a break from studying (8 am exam tomorrow morning >.<) and posting the next page of the Little Mermaid adaptation. Not too much else to say.

Big Dig

Please bear with me over the next few days (or weeks, this is a pretty big endeavor during finals time) while I update my blog. I want to make it as professional as possible and as thorough as possible now that my career will depend on it. I've gotten a lot better about posting regularly so I might as well get it ready for potential employers and colleagues to see. Some of the links may work one day and not another or won't work at all for awhile. I'll keep posting so please don't get discouraged by the links. Thanks! ^.^
This was for my first Adv. Drawing assignment when I was on a comic drawing kick (not that I don't love making them now but I go through phases of which medium I prefer) and wanted to play with the "square and cube" assignment.

second page

Yesterday, I had the privilege of meeting Jason Lutes. He's the amazing graphic novelist responsible for Jar of Fools and Berlin: City of Stones (my favorite novel in my current Graphic Novels course). "Berlin" is the first in a series of three books that takes the "clear line" technique you may recognize from the "Tin Tin" series and shows the points of view of Germans from various social classes during the Weimar republic, the time period between the World Wars. If you would like to know more about him or creating comics in general, he is currently a faculty member at The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT.

In other news, here's the second page of the Little Mermaid adaptation. Not too much to say about it, technically, that I didn't say in the previous post. Here's the first we see of the protagonist with her grandmother and sisters. They were a lot of fun to design and individualize. Originally, I had a page for each of the sisters depicting their journeys to the surface but I had to cut them to make the story more concise. Would anyone like to see a tutorial on making a watercolor block on here? I know there are plenty out there but I need to make another block soon and I thought the viewers at home might be interested. Please let me know! ^.^

Edit: New layout! While I should have been napping to make up for lost sleep last night, I felt playing around with the blog layout was more worthwhile XD While the other one was cute, it was pretty loud and I wanted something softer that I made myself.

Timeline

It's about time I put this up. While being able to use the scanner was awesome, some compression or something happened during the saving process and all the colors got messed up. This was the best I could do to get it looking like the original. Looks like I might end up having to go to Kinko's after all. -.-
This was for a creative project in my History of Costume course about a year ago. I absolutely adored this class and this project. We had to combine costume history and our other academic interests so I set up my timeline as a sort of animation on a reflection of women's rights through history. Ancient Egypt through Greeks are both very submissive since women were given little to no rights then. In the Medieval times, women were slightly more elevated through religion because of a pious woman's relationship to the Virgin Mary, women saints, etc. Elizabeth I during the English Renaissance is the first to open her eyes and look forward to a more powerful role for women in society. The Georgian woman is turned away from progress but is looking ahead (since Humanism was gaining popularity but wasn't applied to women). The Crinoline period is what Americans consider the Frontier period as well which was a powerful time for pioneering women. In the Late Victorian era, women began to dress in styles inspired by men's clothing and it was becoming more acceptable for a woman to work. As much as I love the 50s, women definitely looked back at "the good ol' days" a little too fondly. Modern women are becoming so empowered that I had the final figure walk right off the page.
The figures are pencil, watercolor, and colored pencil and the background is metallic gold acrylic paint (stupid paige).

New stuff ftw

Sooo for my Adv. Painting course we have to do a large painting. I was going to paint a canvas dress form which, after shipping would've cost close to $100. Ouch. I mentioned this in class and this wicked cool girl mentioned she just happened to have one she was trying to find a good home for. She also really likes the style of the Body Mod series, which is what this "canvas" is going to go along with. How swell is that!? The only difficult part of this scenario is that it is an adjustable dress form in my measurement range (WANT!) but I had to keep the goal in mind. I'm currently mid-gesso on that as I type. Pics to come.

I also (finally) replaced my tablet. I had an Wacom Intuos 3 but being stored in a damp basement was the death of it (I'm an idiot, I know) so I (after over a year of being tablet-less) went out and got the Wacom Bamboo Pen. It is lower on the Wacom totem pole but all things considered, I'm wicked happy with it. I joined Sumo Paint and doodled this Fullmetal Alchemist fanart in about 30 min.

Double post, ftw!

So, I had an assignment in painting not too long ago that had to fit into at least one criteria ("beautiful", "insults the viewer", "barely visible", "monster machine", "fearful/fearsome", and a couple of other things that I forget now) and during the critique we had to guess what the painter had in mind when they were working on it. At this point I was already getting pretty frustrated with this course since my style is much more illustrative and literal (*snarl*) than what "real painters" would like (*doublesnarl* elitists). Being the ever-patient person I am, I bitterly decided to do what I wanted to paint for the assignment so if the prof. and class didn't like it, forget them. would at least have a painting I wanted. As it turns out, the prof. LOVED it and raved for 20 minutes about both pieces!! He then continued to reference the larger picture for the rest of the crit session!! :D FTW!! Needless to say, I'm pretty pleased with myself.
For this one, which is about 10" x 17.5", I wanted to do a Mucha-esque advertisement poster for mechanical limbs and organs. I'm really pleased with how it came out and I thought I handled the nudity tastefully. Our next assignment has to be a series and I decided to base my series off of this. I'll explain more about that in tomorrow's post.
For the next one I need to explain something: I only recently started swearing (Sorry, Mom, but I do) because it was really difficult to be taken seriously as an adult when I called people "dumbface" and "butthead" when I was mad. That being said, I chose to use a swear in this piece because of the assignment and because of the verbal punch it could pack. I needed this piece to be as "in your face" as possible.
This piece is HUGE! It is 30" x 42" and her head is about life-size. When you're standing in front of it, I'm proud to say, it does in fact look like the fist is coming at you. I painted this quickly and furiously, which was a nice change from the Prothese painting. The biggest thing about this that the prof said I should change was having the speech bubble recede into the space, like her body is. I almost had my series as this but I didn't think a series of these would pack the same punch as a single one (maybe different paintings like this in different locations, but not all together in the same room).
I think my personality comes across strongly in different ways in these two paintings (which I guess is why "Dumbass" unintentionally looks like a self-portrait). I hope these go over well out there.

For Bitter or for Worse

For one of our assignments, we had to copy a style of a famous comic strip artist in a story about being a freshman (sorry, first year 9.9) in college. I parodied Lynn Johnston's "For Better or Worse". I think I might send it in to our snarkier school paper, since these are very real issues at UVM.
Good News, Everyone! (you heard Farnsworth, didn't you? :D) The Burlington Kinko's DOES have a big ol' scanner so I can finally get my bigger pieces scanned (at a whoppin' $.99 each. Ouch. Worth it though). I'll be updating a lot over the next couple days. :D

Ok, so

Phew, I actually took some pictures and got a couple of pictures in raw form on my computer. If I can make this a habit then maybe this blogging thing will actually work. Eventually, I might even get a new domain and crank out a better website. Or at least update the gallery on the site I already have. If I miraculously get access to a large scanner, I'll go back and update these pictures but for now, my Olympus and shaky hands will have to do.
This piece was what the sketch in my 3rd post was for. My final piece for my Figure Drawing course had to combine two artists who draw the human form. I chose Alphonse Mucha and Loish, two artists who greatly inspire me. I used Prismacolor markers (again, you rock Jennie ^.^) on 18x24" paper. The lines for the border really are straight, I just can't keep my hands steady.

Only one final critique left!

Just as the title says: Only one more crit left before I'm done for the summer and Italy bound! I think I'll do a picture dump of Italy artwork when I get back instead of trying to use the hotel internet everyday.

I wish I could add some of these other animations I have but they don't seem to like me very much. If I can get to a mac later I might be able to get them working but in the meantime, here is another group animation. This was claymation with the very intellectual topic.

::whimper::

Arth done, corset done, animation not done. Old pic today.

finals part deux

I'm practically pulling my hair out trying to finish my finals stuff so I'ma make this short: superhero sketch. I call her Thundah Thighs XD

Finals

So I'm powering through my finals this weekend/week. I've been working on my latest animation for the past couple days and I've switched over to my corset final to give my nose a break from the fumes. Before that, I worked on my figure drawing final so the final piece is with the professor but I figured I'd show the rough sketch before hand (which I think is a little closer to the idea of what I wanted than the eventual piece but the mediums were a lot different so it's hard to tell.) This was done with mechanical pencil and Prismacolor colored pencils and It's around 10x7".