Book Project Part III: Advice and Paint

Book Project Part III: Advice and Paint

In which I follow some excellent advice, and though the book's story remains unfinished, full color arrives...

Happy gorgeous and marvelous Saturday everyone! If you are not currently outside, I heartily suggest you postpone reading this silly post and get yourself out of doors. The weather is amazing and deserves appropriate celebration and sun-soaked revelry. As soon as I finish this, I intend to spend the rest of my day definitively out. But let's get to it, shall we?

In the week following the disastrous upside-down-world-flipping meeting, I had a critique class with Marshall and Carl. After I'd hung all of my new dummy spreads on the wall, Marshall told the rest of the class about my meeting with our creative writing teacher, and he said (and of course I am paraphrasing...), "This is something that will happen to all of you. Someone will say something about your work that will turn you on your head. It's inevitable; it happens to everyone. What remains to be seen is how long it keeps you turned around. Is it a week? A month? A year? Your entire career...?" It is an excellent point... how long do you let self-doubt and questioning keep you from doing what you love?

And Carl's comment perfectly complemented Marshall's words. He told us not to let being unsure keep us from making art. Even though I may still be a little up in the air about the direction of the story itself, there are certain pages that I'm already sure I want in the book. Carl's advice was to render them... go paint! Do what makes you happy!

And so I did...

And in doing so made two images that I'm pretty excited about.

Thus dear readers, I shall leave you. Go do what makes you happy and squeeze every bit of awesome out of your Saturday.

Book Project Part I: The Saga Begins Anew

Book Project Part I:

The Saga Begins Anew

In which lions become rabbits and things get off the ground... and by things, I mean rabbits...

Long awaited, I know, but here we are... finally, FINALLY a post about the second semester book project. As I've mentioned in earlier posts, Viktor is no longer with us this term. We do, however, have a new book project. This semester, Marshall and Carl have joined forces to create one incredible team... I feel as though they should have superhero names or a daring duo sort of title. (Note, I am taking suggestions, so feel free to write in with your best picks.) ... alas, digressing... Marshall and Carl have teamed up to run our book project workshop.

The project is essentially a mini-thesis. In past years, the dynamic duo (not official title) have given a general theme or over-arching subject for the project. This year, however, the project was left wiiiiiiide open. At the end of first semester, Marshall and Carl left us essentially with: We trust you. Imagine what you will. Now, go forth and make art.

When we arrived back at school in January, we had to have a proposal ready to go... which I did. For this project, I had two ideas, both revolving around New York City. The first was a book of short stories with illustrations in all different styles and mediums and all different characters and styles of narration; the main character in the book, however, would have been the city itself. The second idea, just the kernel of an idea really, was for a wordless picture book about a wild night-time romp around the city but which ultimately lacked a central conflict. Over break, I wrestled with my ideas, wrote A TON, but ultimately decided to do the picture book despite the missing conflict.

And so I drew and I drew and I drew and then guess what? Yes! I drew some more. I spentmuch of the beginning of the project sketching thumbnails and putting together a book dummy (essentially a mock-up of the entire book). A traditional picture book is 32 pages, so I used that as my framework and kept drawing.

This round of sketches went through major revisions... and of the sketches I'm sharing with you today - believe it or not - only one of them made the final cut in its original form.

In the next bunch, you can see the progression of sketches... sometimes I do some very general outlines and flesh it out later.

So there you have it... the first of many posts about the second semester book project... stay tuned for further adventures in which I tell you more about my actual idea and how the story has changed entirely and even - GASP - how I was told to scrap the whole project and start over. Stay tuned dear readers! There are more sketches, black rag board, tons of paint, and color ahead!

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.

An Apple a Day

Happy Saturday my dear readers!

I hope that it is drier where you are. Brooklyn today was and still is a cold, wet mess... but the perfect sort of day for staying inside, drinking buckets of tea, and making art. I ask you, what could be better?

So while taking a break from today's projects - further work for Viktor... I'll share soon, I promise - I realized that it's been entirely too long since I last posted.

A couple of weeks ago, we switched gears in Marshall's class and started talking about representing an entire article with a single image and turned our attention towards op-ed illustration. Marshall gave us each a copy of an actual NY Times' opinion piece and asked us to bring in sketches for the following week. AND the great thing about this project was that Marshall told us he would take all of our sketches and final illustrations and send them to the op-ed art director at the Times. GRIN!

So the big question: how to distill an entire article in a single 4 x 6 image? It's not easy. I've never made conceptual, metaphor-based or symbol-based images, so it was a really interesting project and process. It's a little like working out a puzzle, and it took me a fair amount of time... but with decent results. Marshall liked the concepts I put up and suggested I render more than one.

For your educational benefit:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/opinion/02engel.html

And finally, my take:

Three Panel Project

Marshall's class has been all kinds of awesome. We've really been examining the art of storytelling from all different angles. After the puppy project, we worked on a combined oral-visual project. Each student was required to stand up in front of the class and tell a story (a true one) and make an image that would illustrate the story. I told my class the story of the Great Manhattan Couch Adventure of '08... and true to my very first Nonsense post, this is one of those not-so-great pieces that I promised.


When I first finished the illustration, I was fairly pleased with the image and characters. The crit for this was really rough, and looking at it after two and a half months of school... in short... oy! Of the not-so-great sort... So moving on...

After the oral-visual storytelling project, Marshall challenged us to tell a simple story in three panels with no text, no words, and no explanations.

I wracked my brains for an idea, trying to think of stories from my life, stories friends have told me, historical events, anything really... I sat with the assignment for a few days before even putting pencil to paper to do sketches. Finally after a bit of a bad-feeling-blue sort of day, I finally came up with this:

I know, rather sad...

I wasn't entirely satisfied with the idea, nor with the art itself. At this point (week 6 or 7) I was trying out different ways of working and rendering final pieces and attempting to mix ink lines and paint. Again, not totally satisfied with the art, so I kept working. (Making more work for myself, as you will see over and over again, has become a bit of a recurring theme...)

After I finished that first set of three panels, I sat down at my drawing table to think and found a small unfinished doodle that I had been meaning to finish. Rather than give myself a headache, I sat down to play with the doodle and do some work solely for myself. When I had finished painting over my doodle, I realized that I had a character who was begging for a story.

So I gave her one:

Puppies!

Thus far, you've heard a bit about three of my six classes and my most recent classwork... tonight I thought I'd switch gears and post one of the early pre-blog projects.

My 12 hour Marathon Wednesdays begin with a two hours course with Marshall Arisman, the director of my program. I believe the class is just listed as "Critique class" on our schedules, but it could equally be summarized simply as "Storytelling". Throughout the semester we have been exploring the relationship between images and stories.

We started the semester with a visual project on frame of reference and narrative. The assignment was to make a dog (2-dimensional) out of cardboard or foam core and then take the dog out and photograph it (Amelie style... if you haven't seen the movie, stop reading, go to the video-store or iTunes or your netflix cue and rent/download/order IMMEDIATELY... but alas I digress...) Because I seem to enjoy making loads of extra work for myself, I made not one but multiple dogs, puppies, in fact...


and then we went out for a walk...



There were pit stops along the way.


And I had a few errands to run...


...and...



but we also made time for fun.



And made a new friend in the process.


Actually we made a bunch of new friends...




...and last but certainly not least...