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.

Exoskeleton

We had a "large" painting assignment for Adv. Painting and I had always wanted to paint on a dress form. Luckily for me, Darshana (another painter) had a dress form she was trying to find a home for. This fits in with the rest of the Body Modification series and is supposed to evoke the idea of a wrought iron and (frosted) glass exoskeleton to encase organs. I abstracted the view of the organs themselves because it wouldn't be especially appealing to see kidneys and mammary glands but I did use the metal to mirror the muscles and skeleton of the body. In the front there is the ribcage, sternum, abs, etc. and in the back: spine, pelvis, and shoulder blades. I'm tempted to go back in with 3 dimensional aspects but for the assignment I kept it painted only.
I think the hardest part of this was putting the gesso on. There was this fuzzy felt, jersey fabric covering the adjustable plastic form so I had to get past that in order to get a relatively smooth surface. This was easier said than done. Each layer took forever to dry and started to crack in places. Sanding it was also a pain and I'm fairly certain I have a nice cakey layer of gesso on the inside of my lungs now ^.^;;. Oh well. Stapling the skirt on the bottom wasn't especially easy but I think it gives the overall piece a nice finished look and ties it back in to the sheath dresses from the other paintings in the series.

This was on display with the rest of my class's response to the assignment at the Colburn Gallery at Williams Hall.


In other news, the majority of construction is now done. Unfortunately, tumblr has been down for the past few days which has been a hindrance but I'm pretty pleased with my results. Please check them out! ^.^

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.

the first of many

Here it is, the first page of the Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" adaptation graphic novel I've been working on. When it's done, it'll be 20 pages long and pretty different from the original. I'm not going to give too much away yet but I have 5 pages to show after this so stay posted.
The colors are a bit muted but I don't want to edit it until I have some natural light coming in (or until I can use the REALLY nice scanners in the art building) so I get them as accurate as possible. I used ink and watercolor on a watercolor block. I also used masking fluid on this one in order to get the sun all shiny. I'm going to add text in later. Eventually, I'm going to publish this so keep a lookout for it ^.^