Autumn...

...is my favorite.

Autumn!

It feels like autumn in New York! It's sunny and bright and so very FALL!

Evolution of a Character

Howdy folks. Hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season.

Break has been lovely thus far. I haven't done a ton of art of late - some quick sketches here and there and the usual journal doodles; most of my attention of late has been turned towards writing and reassuring (in person) all of the folks I neglected all semester long that I am indeed alive and well. Fab!

In any case, I was looking in the aforementioned journal and realized I haven't posted any of my sketches. So I thought I'd take a brief little trip into my journal and share some whatnot.

During the fall term, one of our projects for Marshall involved creating a promotional piece to send to publishers and art directors. He showed us a lot of great examples from previous students... all super creative... so I started wracking my brains. Whenever I start thinking about such things, I inevitably go back to my journal for some new visual brainstorming or to get ideas from old work.

And this character (who I had been doodling a bunch at the time) stood out...

I've been doodling this marionette for a while now and have spent a bunch of time trying to figure out what her story is... but let's trace her back to her roots, shall we? She actually started out in my very early crap-o sketches as a kid dressed up for Halloween.

Which I used as the basis for my fall themed digital project in October...

And for whatever reason, I was still doodling her a month later... and I added some strings...

And the lines became more refined in this doodle...

And this one...

So after I found my little marionette as inspiration, I spent the next day and a half doodling five pages of sketches.

And I put them together on a loooong, single sheet of paper that I figured I would roll up and send out. Imagine the two halves stuck together continuously:

I will eventually use this for a promo piece, but probably for a publisher/art director who focuses on books for an older audience or perhaps even to graphic novel folks. We shall see. For the moment, though, as most of you know, I want to focus on the kids' book market, so my final promo actually ended up being a mini five-page fold-out book with some of the illustrations from Buying Lenin.

Seasons of Carl: The Last Project

Happy Winter Break everyone! (Likewise merry holiday season and happy nearly new year!)

While I am admittedly ready for a break, now that we're on holiday, I'm more than a little sad that my first semester of art school is over. The lightening-like speed with which it whoooshed by is mind-boggling. It was a crazy amazing roller-coaster ride of a school term...

And now it is done.

But I shan't dwell any further... adventures lie ahead... but before we move on, let's look at the last project of the term.

Carl's last assignment was to create a four-panel folding screen using Vivaldi's Four Seasons as inspiration. We were assigned our base material - a black board - but were otherwise free to use any method(s) of working. We also assigned a format - to divide each panel horizontally. The bottom half was to be a figurative piece using an object to represent the season. The top half was to be a non-objective (more abstract) representation using color and texture to show the season. Some of the project ideas included different bugs to represent the season (butterfly for spring, bees for summer, etc), trees throughout the seasons, animals, action figures, food, a year of Michelle Obama... we had quite a variety.

I was at a loss for a while. For a few weeks, I just played with materials trying to decide how I wanted to work and what I wanted to work on. Finally, I decided to go with my initial idea - to render a character dancing and represent the season by her movement. Spring would be walking, summer would move into something more animated - jumping or spinning, fall would be quieting down again perhaps yawning, and in the winter panel she would be asleep. Eventually I decided not just to draw four different characters, but do a progression that would span the entire width of the screen.

First I drew out my characters on tracing paper, so I could later overlap them and line them up as I went along. Then I transferred them to the board. Part of the initial progression sketch looked like this:

This shows midsummer moving through fall into winter.

Then I started to paint my composition. I did a whole bunch of tests using different materials for about two or three weeks just trying new things. You can see one of my test panels up top.

Filling more in:

Until I had all of my girls rendered:

Then I started to think about my non-objective element. I wanted it to have a similar feel to the bottom but still have a lot of energy and compliment the quiet. I decided to render each season the same way but change the colors to show the seasonal change. After another week of tests, I hauled out my paints and borrowed a toothbrush from a friend. (Yes I said toothbrush...) And just look at what a toothbrush can do:

I rendered the whole thing before cutting it up... admittedly a terrifying task. And when I finally put it together, it looked something like this:

Spring:

Summer:

Fall:

Winter:

And because it ended up as a three dimensional object, I decided the back needed something...

Detail:

November...?

Happy belated Halloween everyone! So after a rather packed Halloween weekend - two costumes, three parties, many cool peeps - today's major activity was ruling a November calendar into my journal. I took a look at the date when I sat down to write and nearly fell off my chair.

It's November.

It's November?

When did that happen?!

As many of you are aware, I look forward to the autumn months and everything that they bring with them... crisp crackly air, red and gold leaves, scarves and hats, apples, hot cups of tea/cider/chai to warm your hands, Halloween, and pumpkin EVERYTHING... However, without fail, September and October always whoosh by buried under a pile of pencil shavings and crumpled paper. And that inevitable morning arrives... you wake up to find wet leaves stuck to the bottom of your shoes, your bedroom floor covered in peacock feathers, and the metal mixing bowl in the kitchen filled with almond joys (because really, what six year old ever picks an almond joy over a reeses peanut butter cup?). You know which morning I'm talking about. It's that one - when after you pull the peacock feather off the bottom of your foot, you hobble to the kitchen for a cup of something highly caffeinated, glance at the calendar page on the refrigerator, and suddenly realize that it's November 1st. Then your stomach drops into your feet.

As soon as November 1st hits, Santa shows up everywhere from Macy's and the shelves at Duane Reade to the street corners all along 5th avenue. Sigh... I do hate how the year gets rushed by. But alas, I digress...

November 1st is the harbinger of autumn's end, and every year I find myself desperately clinging to all vestiges of autumn-ness. This year, in particular, I've barely registered that it's autumn. During the week, the only time I really spend outside enjoying the lovely crisp fall air is dancing down 4th avenue between 14th street and Prospect avenue when I leave Brooklyn and then between 23rd and 21st when I arrive in Chelsea. On the way home, it is nearly always fairly close to midnight, and I stumble blindly to the subway without taking much notice of what borough I'm in, let alone the weather. That being said, these past few weeks, lot of what I've been working on lately has been feeling fairly autumnal.

The autumnally themed project I'm sharing with you here was for my digital class. We've been doing a lot of work with photoshop - learning about coloring, separating the line-work, masking, and loads of other shmancy things I've never done before. (I figured I'd throw in the coloring project as a bonus. The theme of the assignment was breakfast and was my first attempt at coloring an image in photoshop.)

But back to autumn. This particular assignment's "lesson" was about incorporating textures into an image, so I used a whole bunch of scanned leaves and some other random whatnot in the background bits. This is just one version of it... jury's still out on which version is best. I've been playing a bunch with working colored line on a dark background, and I love the way the colors work here. Though should hell freeze over and I find myself with a spare moment again, I would like to come back to this and play with it further just to see how it would look fully colored.


And on that particulr note - my copious amount of free time - I'm off to bed... there's a full day of work at the studio ahead of me, not to mention a lovely six minute skip down 4th avenue to the subway.