Digital Whatnot

Hello everyone out in interwebs land! I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving weekend!

I'm back today with an update of the digital work that I've been working on lately.

Three weeks ago, we abandoned Photoshop and moved onto Adobe Illustrator, playing around with drawing digitally, and now I have a couple of projects to show you. All of our recent assignments were and are pretty open. The first and second were the same: do two Illustrator drawings of two different objects - one man-made, one organic, and both smaller than a bread box. Because I knew next to nothing about Illustrator, I tried two different ways of drawing, the first just drawing with the mouse and the second using heaps of gradients to create volumes.

Ta da!

Not so still life #1: Fish in a Bottle!

Not so still life #2: Ladybug and Teacup

And now for something a bit different. For class this Tuesday, our homework assignment was similarly open: an 8x8 image, but not just objects this time... a full composition with the theme, New York.

I actually had too many ideas for this project. I love my city! I thought about all of my favorite corners of New York - Orchard Street and the Lower East Side; so much Brooklyn; the Upper West with the Hungarian Pastry Shop, Saint John the Divine, and the white peacock and the amazing, creepy sculpture in the sculpture garden; Lincoln Center; Bryant Park in the winter; Central Park in the fall; the market at Union Square; even the absurdity that is Times Square... the list goes on and on. I may eventually take all of my ideas for this project and render them (probably in ink or paint rather than digitally), but ultimately I went with my first idea. I had recently taken a long walk downtown on the Lower East Side and wandered past the Slipper Room. New York has been home to burlesque performers and performances since the mid-19th century, and it was burlesque - not vaudeville - that allowed amateur performers to break into show business. When most of these performers reached the vaudeville stage, they were already pros. I shan't get too cerebral... Regardless, the Slipper Room is an exciting space and burlesque an interesting and amazing kind of performance, so I decided to go with my initial idea for the project.

NY Burlesque