Hokay, here we go again

pparently some people actually look at this, (and by "some people" I mean close friends and family, but whatever) and they keep telling me to update it, so here we go again. Hopefully at some point I will figure out how to make a website and this will just be a link on a larger website where there will also be my full portfolio and a store and such.

I took a couple of classes at NIU this past semester (Illustration I and Watercolor I) which were a good, though in some ways a somewhat painful, learning experience. They were painful mostly because I had to start at 8 am, which, unless you are a morning person, is pretty much horrible, especially since in studio classes you generally have to actually DO things as opposed to sitting mindlessly in a lecture. I also learned how to do full value ink drawings, which, while I'm glad I know how to do it and will probably use parts of the technique in other work, am looking forward to (hopefully) never having to do again. The intense tight line work is not at all my style, which seems to be leaning more and more to water media at the moment. I learned a good deal about watercolor and the things it is capable of doing this semester. It was a little strange because I was in a class with a bunch of students who, while only two years younger than me, made me feel quite old, simply because there is a pretty big difference between a sophomore in college and a senior. It also seemed that I was pretty much alone in really wanting to learn how to use watercolor and in loving the medium. It felt like a lot of people were taking the class because they had to, which, while understandable, was a bit strange after having only taken upper level classes with people who were taking what they wanted to take for the past couple of years.

Though I did about 10 paintings this last semester, there were really only two that I felt brought me forward, only two that really did anything differently from what I'd done before. In the first one, which was done earlier, I was doing a reworking of of a painting from when I was doing My God. This is the orignal from around a year earlier:



Here is the new version, done around two months ago:



In the second one, I used a lot more color and there is more of an awareness of texture. I don't think this is the final version of this work, but one thing I appreciate about watercolor is the fact that all I have to do is staple a wet piece of paper to a board and I'm good to go. If I want to do multiple versions of an idea I can much more easily because, unlike oil, I don't have to worry about making a canvas stretcher, stretching canvas, and gessoing before finally getting started. It's much more pliable in this way.

The second piece was much more personal. Both of my grandparents on my mother's side passed this last year, so I wanted to paint a portrait of them for posterity and for my mother. It had also been awhile since I'd done a portrait, so I guess I also wanted to see if I was still capable, as once I mostly did figure study. I looked through some old photo albums and found a picture that my mother took maybe ten years ago when we were all on Martha's Vineyard together staying at my Aunt's house. While somewhat unconventional, I chose this photograph because it was a time I remembered distinctly, it was a time we were all together, and it feels joyful. It also has figures interacting, but not in an obvious sort of fashion. It doesn't feel pose-y, like many of the other photographs I looked at:



I then tried to mesh tight painting (which I am much better at then tight line drawing) with an abstract color background. I think this painting is a big step forward for me, and I am going to be very interested in working with figures more in the future. I had forgotten how much I enjoy portraiture.



So that's all for now. I will be uploading my adventures in illustration I at some point fairly shortly as well.

More Adventures in Layout

We're going somewhere. Some more initial layout:




I'm thinking of using this for the final page:



I'm actually really getting into this. The computer allows the process to go a lot more quickly and I can work on it pretty much anywhere if I have the right files and images uploaded.

On another note, another childhood love I've been getting back into aside from Tintin is Ranma 1/2. I hadn't read the comics in a few years, so I forgot how completely ridiculous and fun it is. The basic premise is that Ranma is a teenage male martial artist whose accidentally gets knocked into a cursed spring while training in China. The spring has a tragic history of a woman drowning it in some 1000 years ago and now anyone who falls in turns into a girl when splashed by cold water. Hot water reverts them to their original form. So Ranma turns into a buxom red head every time he's hit with cold water. There are all sorts of springs, and throughout the series new characters who have fallen into springs of drowned cats, pigs, ducks, and yetis riding oxen while holding an eel in one hand and a crane in the other, pop up.


So anyway Ranma and his father go to live with his father's old friend Soun Tendo. The father's decide that Ranma will be engaged to Akane, Soun's youngest daughter. Both Ranma and Akane are vehemently against this and what follows are a bunch of action packed (mostly) silly stories. I'm one of those weird people who laughs out loud if I'm reading something funny, and I laugh a lot during Ranma. You can, if you so desire, read it all online for free here: The New Ranma 1/2 Project. It also has a lot of T&A. I'm not sure if it's normal to seem topless teenage girls running around all over the place in Japan, but this was apparently a series aimed at children. Anyway, if you're not offended by black and white line drawings of boobs, it's fun.

Layout

So I'm laying stuff out on the computer and I'm not terrifically over the top happy with anything yet. I think I need to do some more stuff by hand to scan in or something. It just feels kind of amateurish at the moment, although I do think the cover is pretty close. I've been working on that a lot and only just started on the pages, so I think it's a matter of just continuing to mess around with it. It's a process and given time constraints, the computer is really the best finalizing tool because I can undo with a click. I think I'm learning, too. The other plus is I can present several of them in crit and get feedback and then simply fix it on the computer. So perhaps in this experimental phase, this is best.

I got some more vintage photos that I ordered online from New Jersey this weekend. Some of them just give me the heebie jeebies! I'm pretty sure that some of the babies are dead in the photographs. It wouldn't be surprising as taking a photo of the recently deceased was a pretty common thing 90 or so years ago. It's pretty weird looking at all of these photos of random people from the the beginning of the 20th century knowing that they are either very old or very dead now. The photos all reek of another era. It's a strange atmosphere. Some stuff I've done with new ones:


Paul said the lower one looks like a vampire, which I am not going to argue with. I actually think it looks a little like Batboy:



Hee!

COFFEE

Hey, you know whats kind of fun? Screwing around with an antique photo by putting gouache on it and then scanning it into photo shop and screwing around with it some more there.

I'm actually enjoying myself and I'm not super stressed. About this project. At the moment. I do actually have about five more pages to write for a short story tonight plus two free verse poems, so that's nice.

I give you . . . Sheep Girl!



Her power is her phenomenal sense of fashion. She is rocking that giant velvet hair bow.

The Sheep Child

So for my final project of the semester I'm going to get a book done. So I can do this without having to worry about the writing aspect of it (I am having a lot of trouble feeling that any of my writing is in a state to be published at this point and setting it in stone is only going to stress me out) I am going to illustrate a wonderful and pretty famous poem by James Dickey called The Sheep Child. I've also decided that due to time constraints, lack of resources, and a lack of technical skill on my part, to do the illustrations, scan them into the computer, pair them with the text and mess around with them in photoshop or illustrator or whatever, and get the thing published on lulu. I am sick of not being able to mess up and learn because I don't have the resources here or the time with resources. If I mess up on the computer, it's no biggie. Just get rid of that layer. I, of course, am going to continue hand making books in order to get better and more technical, but I simply don't have time for a crummy badly bound hand made book. I want something crisp and clean this time round.

So anyway. I got a bunch of antique photos of children and babies from the early 20th century at one of the local used bookstores. I'm going into them with goauche, though I've only messed with one so far. I scanned it in and then selected the oval. Then I just added a bunch of layers and text in photoshop and came up with the first draft for the cover. I don't know. I'm going to let it mull and show it to some of my friends in graphic design to see what they say.



I can't wait for this semester to be over.

Me & My New Bestie

Gouache. You cheeky bastard. You had me fooled a few years ago. I thought you were annoying, stupid, impossible to work with. I will blame this partially on the lack of gouache technical direction I got from my design teacher. I tried to treat you like any other paint, but you weren't like that. You were your own animal. Why didn't anyone tell me?

I became reacquainted with gouache through the work of Kara Walker:

Untitled, 1996

They Say Water Represents the Subconscious in Dreams from the series American Primitives, 2001

Middle Passages, 2004

It's opaque and much more textural than watercolor. As I veer further and further away from literal translation of imagery (i.e. photorealism) and start to experiment with collageing and photo techniques, I think that discovering how to use gouache will be very useful. First, I already know it can be used to make very nice and graphic text that also looks slightly distressed:

This is the cover of a book I've been working on for my (now finished, whoo 8 week classes!) Japanese paper making course. I traced the type from my computer and then filled it in with white gouache. This is a look I really respond to because it's hand done but it looks really graphic and doesn't venture into Holly Hobby the way hand written text (especially text hand written by me) tends to.

I also like how it can be used kind of like white charcoal--and opaque white line on a darker paper.
This is a very simple collage on page one of the book--> the girl was a line drawing done on a darker grey paper that I cut out and glued onto the eggshell white of the page. The text on the pager was once again traced from the computer, but this time I lined it out in watercolor. All of the shadows and atmosphere color has been created by watercolor. Once again, I like the line this hovering between graphic and hand done.
I don't feel that this page spread is quite as successful as the last one, but this book was really more experimental so I'm not overly concerned. One thing I learned was to always make sure you have really sharp Exacto knives if you're going to insist on doing a detailed cut out. That was not fun. Actually, just steer clear of Exacto knives and get a surgical scalpel. They have a much more ergonomic design and are MUCH sharper. I mean, they're meant to cut through layers and layers of skin with great precision, so they can probably handle some 120 lb cold press paper. You can pick them up at Talas Online. I recommend going with handle #6 and blade #25.

Anyway, I prefer this spread:
I guess only wish I'd worked a little more of the gold into the other side. It looks a little violet heavy there.

There is more, but I'm effing exhausted. I'll post the rest tomorrow.

Also, everyone's favorite stuffed bear, Paddington, made it onto the google search page for his birthday!

This was a while ago (Oct. 13) but still, happy birthday, Paddington!

Finally, this comic made me laugh because I just turned in a (very bad) chapbook for my advanced poetry class a week or so ago:
A la pictures for sad children.

New Method

So I was figuring out the text on the pages that I had done in InDesign the night before crit. It was really REALLY frustrating because it didn't look great. At all. And in order to split the text up in a way that doesn't completely ruin the painting, I would have to do weird stuff with it and reading it became labyrinthine and confusing. People in crit agreed when I showed them the final printed off version. So I've made a decision. The text is no longer going onto the pages.

These paintings are different than anything I've done before. They are huge, but full of negative space. Because I was thinking that they would end with text on them, I decided to focus on a single central subject. They are also incredibly layered so I feel there is a lot of depth (visually, not subject matter-ily) to them. I couldn't stand to ruin this SPARSENESS that was creating such an atmosphere. I mean, the POINT of the paintings was to create an atmosphere to go along with the text. So, here is my new game plan:

I have extra white pages at the beginning and end because I was planning on doing twice as many huge painting pages. I even have extras on top of them because I was planning on having collages at the beginning and end as well as a title page, etc. SO. I am going to use these extra pages and fill them with the text. I'm not sure how I'm going to put the text on the page yet. Maybe screen printing still, maybe the old version of etching. Maybe Van Dyke prints. Letterpress would be the coolest but LORD I don't feel like dying at such a young age. The idea of setting all that type physically repels me. Plus my school has apparently decided that art students can't have access to the facility that has all the alternative process dark rooms and letter presses and etching presses this semester even though it's SITTING RIGHT THERE WITH ALL THE MATERIALS IN IT. Ugh. Seriously, how effing ridiculous that we HAVE resources and I can't use them.

Anyway. I'm still doing the collages of violent religious imagery--in particular of Joan of Arc and Jeebus--but there will be text on those pages as well. I will integrate the collages in with the text. Then the story will be split in the middle by the watercolor paintings I have done, which will have screen printed onto them just a sentence of the text that I find particularly powerful. I think I will begin the book with a watercolor painting that just takes up parts of a double spread, but has room on the bottom and top for text as well so the middle isn't strange and sudden and so you start to feel that sparse landscape atmosphere at the beginning.

Whew! Lawd, so much work to do, so many decisions to make! Hopefully I'll have this somewhat figured out by the end of next week. Now here is the painting I just finished recently:



In other news, The Office was awesome. Hurray for the return of fall television! Also, a post on my collage inspiration, Kara Walker, is pending, but there are SO many images that it will have to wait until this weekend. If I'm not puking all over the place, that is. I think I have caught something horrid.

HELLO LADIES ARE YOU CREEPED OUT YET?

Pages 9-10. Hurray! Also, it is Friday, so that is exciting. And now pages 9-10 with the potential text as done in In Design with my new favorite font, Adobe Jensen Pro. It's cool enough to look like it's sans serif, but it's totally serif:

This text is by NO means set in stone. I was just playing around and getting ideas. I'm going to pass all my text by the graphic design prof here who is evidently a type nazi before anything gets printed on my precious precious paintings.

My friends, having internet in the studio is a blessing and curse. While I can now research images and such with ease, I also can spend too much time looking at things that are amusing but distracting and watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on magical, magical Hulu. But I do find some pretty ridiculous/awesome things. For example, I'm pretty sure this is the only way Wuthering Heights will ever be interesting to me:



There is also this educational comic on the Japanese language and culture. You know you love it, ladies.

Via Yes But No But Yes. There is a glorious list of ancient ridiculous comics going on over there.

Finally there is a fine specimen of manhood seeking out a very specific wife on Yahoo. His "Quick Disqualification List" of 19 bullets includes "You have to go to the bathroom more than once during a four hour date where we first have dinner at a restaurant then see a movie." He then goes on to create a "Quick Qualification List" of 12 bullets:

Besides those things that can be ascertained from the "Quick Disqualification List" above, the following is a list of things I seek in my future wife.

1. My preferred height for my wife is between 5'4" (162 cm) to 5'8" (172 cm). However, if you are very thin, shorter is fine, and taller is fine if you are slim.
   
   
2. Though most men like large breasts, I don't. The larger the breasts, the more I'm turned off romantically. Bra size 32 B is my preferred, but any size up to 36 C, depends on your height, is good. Any larger than that will depend on the rest of you. I've seen women with 36 Ds that are fine. But if you are in the 40 Ds and above, forget it, a total turn off for me romantically.
   
   
3. Weight wise, for the following heights, the indicated weights, give or take 10 pounds, are generally best, the less weight the better. However, depending on your build, an acceptable weight may be quite different. For example, I have heavy bones, in high school, I was 20 pounds over what the charts said I should be, but there was no fat on me whatsoever. I've known girls that were very slim but weighed 10 pounds more than the average girl her height and build. Whatever your weight is, you must be somewhere between thin/slim to a lean athletic (meaning, not much fat). To help you better understand, in American sizes, if you are a dress size bigger than 8 or in plus sizes, it would be highly unlikely that I would be interested.
   
   
   1. 5'0" - 90 lbs or less
   2. 5'4" - 120 lbs or less
   3. 5'8" - 140 lbs or less
   
   
4. You are under thirty years old. My preferred range is between 24 and 29 for such girls have generally finished their formal education and have a good idea of what they want for themselves in life. However, I will consider younger and older. If you over 29, you will have to be pretty and slim.
   
   
5. You have no children, will not have children and do not want children. I have already raised four wonderful children and do not wish to raise anymore.
   
   
6. Sorry, but when it comes to turning me on, light chocolate to white skin color is needed. However, there are exceptions for darker skin, but they have to be very beautiful.
   
   
7. As my wife, you will have no desire for a career of your own, since as my wife your career will be working side by side with me starting and running our own businesses (Yes, I’ve started and ran my own successful businesses in the past). Only my future wife and me will know the details of the businesses until they are started. All you will know now is that they will be financial in nature, they will help others financially.
   
   
8. You are a hard worker. My wife to be and I will work hard together, play hard, rest well, and enjoy the fruits of our labor. Our work will have us traveling all around America. The fruits of our labor will enable us to travel around the world if we choose.
   
   
9. You are content in humble circumstances. My future wife and I will live humbly at first and as our businesses grow and flourish, so will our lifestyle. Therefore, if you are looking for an easy life of play and leisure then I am not the one for you. This eliminates virtually all girls of well to do parents for such girls are used to getting everything they want and have an expectation of instant gratification. My joy will come from watching my wife’s enthusiasm and excitement of growing businesses that provides the financial freedoms to do the things she so desires to do.
   
   
10. You must be able to get yourself, at your own expense, to anywhere in America.

ETC.

Then comes a wordy tome that has paragraph titles like: "An obedient wife is NOT the same thing as a slave!", "Do NOT fall in love with me until I say so!", "When a Wife Becomes a Whore" and "Multiple Wives". Unsurprisingly, he has been searching for several years.

And lo, I leave you with a glorious abomination of God that could only be a Dürer:

All Aboard the Gettin' Things Done Express. Next Stop: 1/3-DonesVille

Bwahahaha! Okay, I'm currently pumped on a three espresso shot caramel machiato. Perhaps this was a questionable decision seeing as I have a packed day tomorrow and class starting at 9 am, but whatever. I'm getting things DONE.

First? Pages 7-8! !kaPOW!


The next two pages are already taped down and on their way to getting done. They should be finished by tomorrow AT THE LATEST.

!sha-ZAM! mock up for pages 9-10, pages I've already started painting.

11-12 are already figured out, so 13-14 will be my goal tomorrow. Gettin' stuff done is pretty fulfilling. Also for some reason there is a girl in my narrative writing class whose name is Precious Angel. I don't know if her parents named her that or if she decided on her own that that was her name, but I don't know which is worse.

Hey look! I'm alive.

Back into semester now. The trip to England made me not want to be in school anymore. And then I came back and I was and that sucked. Especially because I missed a whole week and everything was going on and I had to catch up. After a fairly stressful week, I'm back into it and I even have a prospective finish date for My God: December 1. I plan on having all of the big pages finished by October 5, which gives me 3 weeks to paint 8 pages out of 12. Also, I plan on having no social life. Fortunately, after a dry summer imagery has been coming really easily and I already have another 3 pages mapped out and 1 about halfway done.

Mock up for pages 7-8.

Pages 7-8 being transferred onto big pages.

Mock up for pages 9-10. This will probably change a bit when it hits the big pages, there is something lacking. I think I may have applied the water colors too thickly over the entire thing. It will be a slower, more thinly layered process when I get to the big pages for it.

In other news, Tina Fey and Amy Poeler rock.

Also, so does Jon Stewart.

Pages

Whoops! I totally forgot that I took a photo of pages 5-6 when I first did them weeks ago.

I guess I've been MIA for a bit now. What can I say? Summer = late drunken nights, fifteen hours of work a week, and a lot of sitting around doing nothing other than watching every episode of Peep Show on youtube. I am working on some stuff, but very s l o w l y. I've got a couple of mock up pages in the works that I'm a little unsure of, but I guess we'll see.

Watched Pride & Prejudice (the Joe Wright 2005 version. Others were too stuffy for me. Hell, the book is too stuffy for me.) again (15th time? Who the hell knows.) this weekend with Maddi and Steph. I found these comics done by the hilarious Kate Beaton that address Jane Austen's societal impact:




Oh Mr. Darcy!

P.S. His first name is Fitzwilliam. How sexy is that?

Vast Continued

Okay, so when I said pages 3-4 were almost done I was totally lying. I went in the next morning and it was totally wrong. For one, I realized that her head looked like it was blowing off when in fact she was supposed to look like she was just floating peacefully, albeit dead. I also went in and made her body smaller because I felt the scale would be more effective. This was all spurred on by critical but kind words from by studio mates. Thanks guys! It looks so much better now.

The mock up pages the image is based on:



The (hopefully) final version, except for the text. I still have to decide how I'm going to adhere the text and whether or not I want to work into the vellum and text a little or if I want a border or what. I'll see what people say at crit, I guess.





Sleep

Vast

"It wasn’t ever going to stop raining because Day-oos was angry and she was going to drown but what better way to go? She saw it clearly. Her little body floating upside down in a vast green sea. It was too late to make a raft, too late to apologize or pray. But she was naked as the day she was born and was slippery with Day-oos’ wet earth."

Pages 3-4 are basically finished. Perhaps a few more final touches, but it looks like if I work pretty hardcore for the next week, I can get two pages done a day.




Finally, how I do the text:

First, I format it on the computer. It took me a while, but I finally decided on Adobe Jensen Pro for my font. Then, I upload the files (which I do in Photoshop, which I know is a more annoying way, but it's the way I know and it works so leave it) into the school's lasercutter Illustrator template. The laser cutter etches the text into the plexiglass. It looks like this, only less blurry:



Then I smear some Charbonnel Etching Ink (it's oil based, unlike screen printing ink which is water based) over the entire thing until its all in the letters. I wipe it clean so only the letters have ink on them:



Then I place the plate on the etching press, which looks similar to this:



Then I take the vellum, which all this time has been soaking in water (for at least half an hour) and smooth it over the plate. I smooth the felt on the press over the plate and the vellum and then roll. Once I've rolled over the plate once, I remove the felt and peel off the vellum, which now looks like this:



Yes, it's a hell of a process, but I think it's totally worth it. The text is slightly embossed, it's a little more inky than it would have been if I had simply printed, and it smells like ink, which I just love. There's nothing like getting high off your art. I also love the smeared, rubbed quality that is in some places on the text where I didn't rub the ink away quite enough. One of the ideas behind the execution of this book is tactile. Everything except for the etching is done by hand.

Ugh. First day of final crits is tomorrow. A week and a half left of school.

OMG! OMFG!!

Real book pages, people! I am on a roll, folks. First off, my plexiglass laser etched text on vellum worked out REALLY well. I was so nervous, but it came out fracking beautiful. My main goal before the end of the semester is to get the rest of the text cut and inked. Anyway, I've gotten pages 1-2 done and have taped down and done the first layer on pages 3-4. I plan on having pages 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 9-10, 11-12, and 21-22 done for final crit. Yes, it's a lot but my crit isn't until a week from Wednesday so I've got time. Plus the water color paintings really don't take that long because I already know what I'm doing mostly. If I can get all of the rest of the text cut out next week then I can ink them next Saturday, too. Plus then I'll have half my pages done, which will be pretty cool. Anyway, here's pages 1-2. For the love of all that is holy, please click on the images to see bigger versions. They are painfully small on the screen if you don't.

The original mock up pages on 8 1/2 x 11 inch computer paper:



The full pages with text on 22 x 30 inch Arches 140 lb watercolor paper:



Individual pages:





Phew! Bon soir. A bientôt.