Typewriter Operator

This is Humphrey. He's journeyed up north to write a book on snow for everyone back home. Right now he's writing a chapter on the pleasures of coffee after coming in from the cold.

He is made of sculpey. There's some paper in there, and some fabric too.

Yes.

A brief story about a carrot

Quite moving, I know.

Until Gwen

An illustration for the story "Until Gwen" by Dennis Lehane. If I could find anywhere that seemed legitimate where I could link the story I would, I really recommend digging it up, it's pretty neat. Pretty dark, but neat.

I did this one with cut paper markers and a little bit of photoshop.

Sometime soon I should finally get around to scanning my sketchbook and photographing my paintings for figure painting, that should be a couple pretty lengthy posts...

2001: Playstation 3

I think I'm finally getting this whole dimensional illustration thing under control, and I'm having a grand old time with it. The prompt this time around was to do an illustration about a product, advertisement of sorts.

If I keep this up I'm going to have quite a collection of little figures...

Frankenstein

So in keeping with my last post, here's my next swipe at sculptural illustration. Given my past failures I did my best to learn from my mistakes, this time around I sculpted all of it, so if I decided to change angles it'd work, and I made everything underneath the clothes out of wire, so I could re-pose if necessary. I think it worked this time, definitely better than it has in the past at least... we'll see what Joe Thiel has to say about that though...

Doctor Frankenstein making a shopping list.

I have some videos of the process I might post later, I think they're pretty neat. That and I might be posting revisions, I'm still not completely comfortable with the whole thing.

Tying up loose ends...

Right then, so here we have the last assignment of my sophomore Illustration class. The assignment was to do an editorial piece about phosphate mining. We were assigned a lot of reading on the topic and then set loose. Honestly there were a lot of things that I could have made an image about, but in the end I settled on phosphogypsum ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphogypsum ) and all that.

I had such a good time doing the 3d stuff for my last assignment that I figured I'd give it another go, and there's the result. A step up but definitely still learning. This time I didn't use as much sculpey, it's mostly cell phone pieces, a broken RF switch, paper mache and wire.

Also, the lighting set up I made was pretty ridiculous, so I figured I would share that too. That's outside in my backyard by the way.

And on a final note, I put together a website (as an assignment for my graphic design class) and I think it turned out pretty neat. Some of the stuff on there is just placeholder (see bio + portrait of the artist), it's not really complete in the sense that it's something I would send to someone I wanted to show myself off to, but I'm happy with the tricks and whatnot I learned doing it (translation: Thanks for showing me around Carina).

That website is here

That's all for now. One more assignment by 4:00 tomorrow and a test. The marathon is almost over.

Experiments

So, for the sake of exploration I've been bringing sculpey to figure class and trying my hand at sculpting from life... frankly it's giving me a lot of trouble (getting any sort of likeness... ugh) but it's a grand old time I've gotta say. Here are the first two stabs at it, probably somewhere around 1.5 to 2 hours of work a piece.

Attempt I:

Attempt II:

So they both sort of look like the same face, and I never got around to giving them hair or ears, but hey, I got a little faster the second time and figured quite a bit out (hah... figure...). Anyway, forward ho and all that business.

we'll see where all this sculpting takes me

Right down to the bone...

So, illustration assignment, right? Ok. Well this time around it was to do a poster for a play... we got a list, we picked our plays and went to work. So when I got to thinking about what I could do, I got to thinking that Chris Sickels is pretty cool... and... well... yeah, so I sculpted my figure, built my set, hung cotton ball clouds and toy airplanes from the ceiling in my room and this is what happened:

The play was, by the way, called Souvenir. It's about Florence Foster Jenkins (a real person...) who was a tremendously bad opera singer, and famous for it.

It didn't turn out exactly how I wanted it to, and there were a lot of things that suffered from the time available, but all in all it was a lot learned that I can apply to the next time I try something like this (which I'm thinking I might...).

Oh, and because it's awesome, here's some process:

my favorite part is when I eat the sandwich...

by the way, if you don't know Chris Sickels, go here and cry sweet tears of joy

if you thought that was cool, check out Paulo Ventura ... if you can get your hands on it, his book War Souvenir is pretty mindblowing.

We'll see what the future brings...

More Illustration...

One last thing from my illustration class last semester. We had to do an album cover based on two songs by an artist. This was based off of Ali Farka Touré, the two songs she gave us (for him at least) were Inchana Massina and Hawa Dolo. I wanted to go for something earthy and "reaching" and this is what I wound up with. It's cut paper painted with watercolor and seperated with foam core. There are some guitar stings in there too.