Sitting around with Bagels

You'll find below:
-Page four of the bagel comic. I decided to change a few things about how I approach the story/the drawing for the next few pages after this one so I'm no longer sure how long it will be. Planning's for squares and successful people!
-Some little watercolours I made on the paper that my parents were so kind as to mail to me all the way from the PacNW. The first couple were scanned but the others were just captured with my crappy digital camera so they are a little dark/weird.

Enjoy & Fullview xoxoxox

A couple fall remnants

While packing up my room I encountered a lot of my fall semester work. Some of it made me a little embarrassed but I found several things that I can still feel good about. Below is a random gouache figure painting on top of some transfers of a vintage sears catalog and the interior of my final for artist's books. Boop! (as always, theyre better quality when full-viewed)

Moebius Tribute

As (hopefully) many of you have heard already, my comics hero Jean Giraud, aka Moebius, died earlier this month at the age of 73. I was devastated, to put it lightly. Anyhow, I somehow was alerted to this project, which is a sort of collaborative tribute to Moebius via recreating the characters and scenes shown on a set of 89 "collector cards". I came a little late to the sign up party, but still managed to nab myself a spot.

Here is my contribution:

...and here is the original card inspiration, "Pooh"

Big Ole Watercolour & Gouache Update

I make a lot of things in this class. When one makes a lot of things very quickly, many of them don't turn out well. Some turn out okay. If the stars are aligned correctly and an elf gave you an eskimo kiss in your sleep the night before, one might turn out good. Here's some of the paintings that didn't make me want to stab my brushes in my eyes (mostly).

Christopher Walken portrait (1.5 hr)

Not so pleased with this one, but it passes. 1.5hr.

We had to show three figures, with one figure pouring "something" into containers of the other two. 1.5hr.

It's...me opening a dollhouse cupboard to find...me? I don't even know. 1.5hr.

Some embarrassing in-class paintings. Each about 30-40 minutes.

In class painting. 80 minutes.

Same deal is the one before. I wish I'd gotten a different angle, but all the other seats were taken.

A homework assignment - Five figures engaged in an activity outdoors. This is based of a picture of Maasai men prepping to bleed a cow. 1.5 hr.

"color switch" homework, where all colors in our reference image had to be altered. This one didn't scan too well.1.5 hours.

Homework assignment where we had to use colored paper and leave 30% of the surface untouched via masking fluid. 1.5 hr.

Watercolor - Not my strong point

Below you'll find the two most recent assignments from my watercolor and gouache class + one in-class painting  from today. The two homework assignments are each 100% watercolor and three hours of work, timed fairly accurately. This week in class we started trying to combing watercolor and gouache within the same painting...which turned out to be a massive disaster for me and many others in the class. I'm too ashamed to post the other three paintings I made in class, and look forward to burning them at the end of the semester with great enthusiasm.

You can't see, but he is cleaning a knife on his apron. Assassin.

Assignmetn: shiny and/or reflective objects

A small flame of hope burned in my heart - that I would be able to make paintings that don't completely suck. But then I made the painting after this one and that flame was extinguished forever.

Watercolour and Gouache - The Class

This semester, one of my three studios is Watercolour and Gouache, taught by the unforgettable Lenny Long (I had Lenny for sophomore drawing as well). It's a primarily technical class from the looks of it - which is good because I have pretty poor technical skills in both of these mediums. Actually, I have basically zero experience with normal watercolours. I've only worked with watercolour gouache / opaque watercolours in the past, and I'm finding that the real stuff is a completely different animal. So this will definitely be a big challenge for me to develop my painting skills in a direction I haven't really explored yet.

The first week was gouache only, and we did several 40-minute still lifes in class, with the requirement that they must contain an (imagined) figure. Mine were pretty terrible. Here's an example.

Oh dear.

The homework was two still lifes of three hours each. First was a self portrait with 10+ objects, second was just an assortment of textures on 10+ objects, on colored paper with 10% of the paper showing through. This also didn't go as I'd hoped. But no complete failures.

Looks like me.

I only had red paper! Agh!

And finally, we're up to today, where we began with watercolours. Lenny was missing from class today, so we all winged it in our in-class paintings. Watercolour is HARD. But I managed to make a few 1 hour paintings that didn't make me want to transfer to a liberal arts college.

"I wish I could get out of this putrid cup..."

Some days you ride the duck, some days the duck rides you...

Expect more soon! (getting kicked out of lab)

XX/XY

Below you'll find my first assignment for XX/XY - a diptych. I'd rather not say too much about the pieces, save that I'm much happier with the first one than the second. Both are opaque watercolor and ink on my favorite ridiculously heavy watercolor paper.

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...

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 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".

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

"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.