Still Alive, Just on Break

Well, my break is just ending in a couple days, but here are a few things I managed to make while not stuffing my face with home-cooked meals and staring at the computer screen...

Advanced Drawing Final

My Advanced Drawing final was supposed to be a series of paintings, made into a book, but at the end instead of a book I made a comic page...whoops. All the paintings are based off of a jumble of WWII reference images of American planes, mechanics, and factory workers. Anyway, here's what I made:

New Layout

So, you may have noticed I switched up the layout to the "dynamic" style template blogger encourages users to try out. It gives you the option to view a lot of posts at once, try it out! Just click the different format options at the top bar to mix things up. I'm not sure if I'll be keeping this format, so let me know if you have any strong positive/negative feelings about it!

Conceptor Four!

Agh! I made another page with time to spare! It's only 1:30am and I'm done with comics homework, what's going on?!  Things get a little interesting on this page. I haven't really had to paint/draw a dense forest scene ever, so the whole rainforest thing was pretty difficult to figure out. More conceptor will hopefully follow in the near future...

Also, a big thanks to Moebius and the Hoh rainforest for this page. And as previously, the maximized version is desaturated for some reason (thus the smaller preview size so you can see the real colours. sorry!)

Conceptor Page One Redo

Sorry for the duplicate posting of this. I've been having some technical problems with image quality so I needed to experiment a little and had to delete the last post to do so. For some reason, when the image reaches a certain size, it loses a lot of the color quality and appears desaturated. Ugh. This is a reworked version of the first page of conceptor, this time in watercolor.

Conceptor Page Three

The saga continues. I feel like I'm starting to get a handle on the materials a little more now, but still some spots are pretty thick with paint. For my comics final, I'm going to redo page one in the watercolors and (hopefully) add a page four if I have time.

P.S. by the way, if you want to see the REALLY BIG version of any of these images or you just can't read the text when it's so small, you gotta right click the image and "open link in new window/tab" instead of left clicking to view it in a slideshow. Besides letting you see all the tiny details, I think it also just lets you see the colours better (or maybe that's just a placebo effect). But don't trust me, try it yourself!

More Machine-People

Here's a couple more bits of my advanced drawing final project. The first one is the most recent piece (and perhaps my favourite so far), and the second is one of the earliest experiments I made for the project. You can see I deviated pretty far from my initial vision. This is mostly due to A) reading too much moebius B) switching from bristol to watercolour paper C) figuring out how my new paint set works, sort of.

Both are about 7"x8".

Shirt Design

I just finished up a shirt design for the Knowledge Bowl team of my dear alma mater, West Sound Academy. The zombie thing was their idea, I swear! I hope the team likes it and I'll be psyched to see how it prints in a couple of weeks.

On "Break"

I made it to Thanksgiving break in one piece! This calls for a celebration! Oh, wait, I have work to do, sorry. I'll push that celebration back until the winter holiday break. In the mean time I'll keep chugging away on my finals and trying to chip away at my cynicism problem.

Anyway, I've got a load of stuff to scan and upload, but even more that I just need to keep working on between now and December 16. In the mean time, here is an isolated piece from a series I'm working on for my Advanced Drawing final.

Conceptor Page Two

This week was a big switch up in comics. We had to make another page in colour, this time using Pelikan Opaque Watercolors on 300lb paper. For those that don't know, 300lb paper is REALLY THICK and also REALLY EXPENSIVE. But it is very worth it. Learning to use the opaque watercolors was a real trial for me and it took way longer than it should have. However, I'm pretty pleased with what the medium can do, so I'll continue working with the watercolors when possible.

I decided to continue the story from last week (conceptor) for two reasons: I wanted to see the contrast in materials and I just like the idea a lot. It's actually a pretty startling comparison as far as saturation and value range goes. The scan is a little too dark, but you get the idea. Below the page you'll see I've included the sketches I made to figure out the panel layout and value placement, as well as page one for contrast.

(page one)

Initial thumbnails

More finished value study thumbnail and some sketches

Forest/Home

Another work from my artist's book class. This was an altered book assignment, and this 1970s  gem on evergreens called to me from the Savers rack. The book is about remembering childhood play in my woodsy back yard, and the scents and colors and textures associated with these memories. Inside is a removable door which reveals a rosebud on a robin's egg, which is a callback to several very specific memories of building "nests" from twigs and flowers and placing them in a tree next to some rose bushes, in hopes that they would be occupied by a grateful bird in the future.

Diner Lift-the-Flap Book

Hey! Watch out! There's nudity & tiny cartoon genitals in this one!

Now that's out of the way...This book was made for my Artist's Book class in response to an assignment to do something involving a diner and secret or hidden elements to interact with such as flaps or sliding panels. Each of the four pages shows a "normal" set of people going about their business at the diner. But, what's this? A flap to lift? Below the table, they're all nude and every table has something hidden or unexpected.

New Contact Info

I'm finally making the switch to a more official sounding email and slowly shedding all the accounts associated with my old email (joshuatreelegume). If you want to contact me or give others my contact information, please use either my RISD email (mtrower at risd.edu) or my new address: m.r.trower at gmail.com.

Carry on!

Conceptor

This week in comics we had to make a page in colour, which was...intimidating to me. I looked very hard at some moebius comics and then made the comic you'll find below. I also included the sketchbook studies I made beforehand while I was planning it, for context. After class today, I made the digital version of the comic, to see what it would look like with cleaner, more solid colours. Next week is watercolour, so I'll be continuing this story into a second page.

Shifter 2.0

For this week in comics, I made some changes to the existing pages of Shifter and added an extra page on the end. It's optional as far as the story goes, but if I were to continue making pages for Shifter that's the direction they'd go in. As far as the improvements to the first four pages, most are pretty subtle but they made a big difference in the overall look. See if you can spot what changed...

"You're Making Me Feel Bad"

This week went really well for me work-wise. I don't know if I'd call it a breakthrough, but I was just unusually happy with everything I made. On the other hand, I had to sacrifice all activities besides sleeping, eating, and working to get everything done. The only time I wasted went to a couple hours at the grocery store and savers. Anyway, I made this artists's book for my advanced drawing class.

It's a little hard to explain, but it makes way more sense if you get the process so bear with me. The assignment was to do a "collaborative drawing", but since I hate collaborative projects at school, I decided to do something that minimized the amount of collaboration. I got about 20 or 30 of my friends to make me a small drawing of something that made them feel "anxious, nervous, sad, or generally bad." Once I collected all the drawings, I was struck by how petty our troubles were: getting too hot in a sweater, feeling uncomfortable when looking at the homeless, having "itchy pubes", etc. So I stained the paper and proceeded to paint on top portraits of people with real, desperate problems, like natural disasters, extreme poverty, or war. This was a weird experience for me, because I felt like I was exploiting these people by using their situations to make my own project. So between the original drawings, the contrast with the painted portraits, and the feeling of exploitation, the whole project made me feel...well...bad. The book is an encapsulation of feeling bad and the shades of meaning within the statement "I feel bad".

Now that block of text is over, here's some photos and scans of the pages.