Horsies!

Now that the semester is over I can fill my sketchbook with pictures of whatever I want. And I want to draw pretty pretty horsies. I love drawing horses, their big bodies on tiny legs and their wonderful muscles. Throw on nine or so years of horse back riding and you have an obvious explanation as to why I'm a horse girl.

After A Brief Hiatus...

I have been spending the past month slaving over final projects for school and today my classes are finally over! So the first place to go is quite obviously here, to show off some of what I have been doing for the past while.

This watercolor and gouache piece was done for a competition in the illustration department at my school titled "8th Deadly Sin." I picked 'Waste' as the 8th Sin and this is the final result. Painting all the detail in the trash bags took forever but was totally worth it for the final result. The final piece is about 11 x 17 inches and will be reduced down to 2 x 3 inches to be displayed on a business-type card, which is too bad for the detail but will be nice to have.

This is a smaller part of a larger piece titled "Communication" I did at the beginning of the semester. While the rest of the piece didn't quite turn out the way I wanted, I really like the way the wolf is rendered.

Halloween Book

Recently the seniors in my department put together a book for our Halloween loving teacher. Every spread was something entirely random, illustrated by a different person, but all very Halloweeny. I got to bind the book and include my own spread inside:

 

All the pages were made from different papers with different materials.

My binding (though not my covers).

 

My pop-up spread, the ghost comes out from behind the house.

Please look at more of the book's wonderful pages after the jump...

For Those With Heart Conditions, Please Scroll Down Slowly

This a conceptual portrait I did of Ms.Piggy, trying to make her look like a real pig while still maintaining all her puppet attitude.

Watercolor and Goauche on Arches Paper

Sad City

Watercolor on Arches

A New Book!

Unfortunately with my lack of time, I can't invest in content for my books, so I have been mostly just designing outside covers. But I helped teach a small book binding class a few nights ago, so small in fact, I had time to bind together my own small book. I had forgotten how much I missed it. I have been writing down and sketching ideas for other, more fleshed out books I want to work on, so hopefully I will be able to get to that soon, but for now...

The cover is white colored pencil and ink on Canson paper.
The paper on the inside is assorted Arches watercolor paper and other drawing papers.

Self Portrait

I have started taking an acrylic painting class at my school and I have to say it's very refreshing and interesting for me. I haven't done much in acrylic since I left high school, it's been mostly watercolor for me. But acrylic is very relaxing and I must say, quite a bit easier, I'm loving the ability to paint right over my mistakes. I have a very different acrylic style than watercolor and it's fun to play around with it. And since it's a very involved studio class it's actually really nice to get up at 8 in the morning just paint. I feel like I am learning way more and having much more fun doing the actual work than sitting in a critique for 4 hours. So since it's a fairly basic class we have started with still lives and self portraits:

This is a 40 minute monochromatic self portrait.

This is the same portrait with 40 minutes of glazing over it. I look like a bruise.

Oh my, It's in a Gallery!

Sure you can barely see it in the picture and there are hundreds of other ones around it, but here's my work in the gallery!

Yeah, I had to draw a circle around it so you know where it is but there are better pictures in my last post.
Also this is not my picture, I couldn't actually attend the show, some wonderful soul who could posted them on the Facebook event page and they have my thanks. Hopefully there will be some better photos soon from my wonderful family who could attend the show for me.

Submerged

Over the summer I found a call for art in my hometown to participate in a show called 'Submerged: Third Annual Mini Works Show.' I read the requirements, the piece had to be exactly 5 x 5 inches and somehow work with the theme of Submerged. I knew creating something so small would be right up my alley, but I didn't quite know what to do with the theme. All I could think of were those big old submersibles they used to use to explore underwater, something along the lines of Bill Murray's boat in 'Life Aquatic.' So I went from there. Knowing I didn't just want to do a tiny traditional drawing, I created the piece in layers to give that feeling of depth that comes with being submerged. The final result was a small tunnel book:

I finished it 5 minutes before I left to go to Scotland and asked my dad to submit it for me, hoping I would hear back as to whether or not it got accepted while I was away. A few days ago I received an e-mail, my piece was in! Now fingers crossed someone will actually buy it...

The Sea of Tea Sketchbook

My decline in posts has been due to a two and half week trip to Scotland and London and a severe lack of internet in my apartment. So here's quite a few pages from Scotland, with more to come:

Just A Little Something

So, in order to feel productive without having to do too much I began painting these little porcelain bowls. They only cost about $1.50 at Pier 1 and the Pebeo Porcelaine paint is only $4 or $5 a container. So it's fun, cheap and creates a nice tangible piece in the end. Hypothetically it would be awesome to make tons more with other, more evolved designs and sell them. But for now, they'll just be my own personal project.

Snail Mail

Watercolor on Arches paper.

Some Sketchbook Pages

Both are crayon resists done with watercolor and some pencil.

Ever since I came home for the summer I haven't had a scanner and it makes recording my work a lot harder. These were done with a camera so they're a bit fuzzy but get the idea across.

More Projects With the Tatertots

Again I found myself with another time slot at camp where I could lead my own activity. The theme of the week was 'Super Heroes', so I tried to create a project that could encompass that idea while encouraging artistic principals. Plus, I once again only had an hour.

So we did comic books covers for the kids self-created super heroes.

First I had them start with an idea for a superhero. Most of them already had an idea in mind and if they didn't I found a nifty little (fairly PG) super hero name generator. Then they drew the superhero in pencil, allowing room somewhere on the page for the name to appear boldly. After their pencil sketch, I had them ink around the lines with a heavy Sharpie to get that classic strong black outline. The final step was adding blocks of flat color. In a perfect world we would have had far more time to sketch and could have maybe colored in gouache. But in the time frame we had we did it the color with marker and colored pencil.

Super Pug in progress.
Booger Man and The Nose in progress.

Working With the Tatertots

So the blog has been falling a little short lately as far as updates are concerned. But this is because I have been doing something just as valuable with my time. I have been focusing a little less on my art and a little more on teaching art to kids. I have been working at a camp called 'Dutchess Arts Camp' for the past few years, being a counselor for the 7 to 11 year old age range. Due to some scheduling shortages I ended up with a few extra blocks in the weeks to come up with my own project.

My challenge: Come up with a project that taught kids about some particular type or facet of art that related to the theme of the week and could be completed in about an hour.

The first week I had this opportunity the theme of the week was 'Art Around the World,' so I decided to teach the kids how to make very basic books that could be their "passports" for the week.
To make the books the kids designed back and front covers to their passports and then glued a very simple accordian structure of pages to the inside of each cover. I encouraged them to create emblems for the outside that reflected what art camp to them, though we definitely ended up with just a lot of American flags.
After the books were finished I took head shots of each camper in my group and printed them out nice and small like passport photos and them glue the pictures inside the cover.

As I final touch I handed out small pieces of paper cut like stamps and asked the kids to decorate the stamps with the activities we had done. There were Tye-Dye Day stamps, Theater stamps, Magic and Mime stamps, all of which we would glue into the passport as they completed them. This part they did during the extra time in their other classes, the "free draw" time. All the kids went to the extra effort of trying to fill up their books even though it was their time to do whatever they liked.

All in all: It was well suited for the age group (7 and 8 year olds) but it was impossible to pull of in an hour. I had to do most of the prep work for the kids and we had to make the all the extra pieces on our own free time. With an hour every day for a week this could have been one amazing project.

Porcelain Painting Final

There was a sketch tile posted for this a long time ago, and technically I finished this piece a while ago too, but I'm proud of it and would like to put it up. I painted the fish with porcelain paint on a pre-made plate.

Collections

Handmade Box, cover acorn is painted in watercolor.

Actually all the pieces in this book are painted in watercolor. But here's the book in it's box.


The book is bound in a concertina form and each page is decorated with small watercolor paintings. Some of the pages, like this one have windows in the pages made with acetate that let you see through to the next page with the image resting in between.

Submerged

Recently I had to make a little book about the trees at the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain. When I visited the Arboretum to get inspiration it was right after Boston had experienced a huge rainstorm so a lot of the fields were flooded and it looked something like this:

So I decided to make my book about how trees look in floods. Each piece was painted in watercolor and then taken into Photoshop to add original text:

Cover

First Spread (Definitely click on these to get the big image, you can't even read the text in these tiny ones)

Second Spread

Then the images were then printed and bound into a little four panel book. It's not my favorite structure (and not my best book work) but it's nice to have a fully illustrated book: