More Secrets! New Website Design!

Hello lovely people!

So following last week's super secret project, it's been back to work on the book project. I finished-ish a new spread for the book... as in the majority of the painting is done, so now I hang it on my studio wall, stare at it for a couple of days/nights/weeks and try to figure out what's wrong/what it needs until my eyes go crossed and buggy and I either smoosh some more paint on it, or with a sigh of resignation, add it to the ever-growing pile of mostly-finished spreads. I also figured out a sketch that I am semi-content with for one of the two remaining spreads. That being said, I will probably sketch another bucket full of thumbnails, throw them all out, but perhaps, perchance, just maaaaybe come up with one I like better. We shall see... so the book project is wrapping up, albeit rather slowly.

But in other news, I am giving my website a major-for-serious-redo-everything sort of overhaul. The design of my current website is severely lacking, so at the end of last term, I had come up with a new idea that I started to implement. I tried to work further on it, but eventually decided that I was just getting waaaay waaaaaaay too complicated... and in true Lisa fashion, I scrapped the whole thing, including, quite sadly the little owl lamp (see "Sneak Preview" post for the animation) and the following teacup -

and just because I love it... the owl lamp again...

Alas...

But! But! I sat at my drawing table all week and once again after scrapping sixteen and a half different ideas, did a redesign for the whole site that I think will eventually be pretty sweet. I've spent most of the week working on it.

And thus I give you... sneak preview!

Super Secret Project Follow-Up

Just wanted to post a quick follow-up to my previous post because the surprise was a seriously-super-spectacular success! Grin!

Not to mention, there is one birdy that didn't make it onto the last post... the one I kept:

Secret Projects! Shhhh!

Halloo all!

Happy sweaty-warm weather! I hope you're all enjoying the weather warming... admittedly, not my favorite thing in the world. Don't get me wrong - I do enjoy the summer months. However, I am not overly fond of being hot or sweaty or as is often the case for me, vaguely sun-burnt despite buckets and vats of SPF 70+. Regardless, summer means parks and picnics and ice-cream, so go play outside!

I've spent only a bit of time enjoying the weather. There has been a bit of apartment flux chez moi (a petit move and two lovely new roommates), and then family whatnot and a secret project of sorts have taken over these past few weeks, severely limiting both outdoor free time and time in the studio. As such, the book project is inching along, snail-style. (Though I am nearing completion on a new spread... it was too wet to finish tonight, so a couple of finishing touches tomorrow should do it.)

But back to the secret project! A certain singer in a band just moved to Greenpoint from Jersey (about time!), and I thought it appropriate to welcome him back to the five boroughs with a little bit of ridiculousness.

So I wracked my little school-tired brains and began doodling... what to do for a band dude? I let my pen wander across the page. The doodles started with guitars... and then all of a sudden the guitars had wings... and then they had beaks... and little legs... GUITARBIRDS! YES!

No eye-rolling. You know you love the ridiculousness.

So the sketch... please note the infinitely awkward upside-down guitarbirdy on the bottom... that definitely did not make the cut...

Once I had a sketch, I started in on my little birdies, using a brush pen (ink) to draw them and then adding color with light washes. At first my idea was to just hang the little birdies all over the room... BUT... if I were a little guitarbirdy, I would most certainly want something to land on. TREEEEEES! Yes! So I cut a bit off my enormous roll of drawing paper, taped it up on the wall, and started inking trees with the same brush pen I used for the birdies.

And then the super sneaky bit... I checked Band-Boy's cellphone for his roommate's phone numbers, wrote them down on the post-it... which I promptly lost. Groan. But I had email addresses! Success! One of his roommate's let me in before his scheduled move-in, and here's what happened.

This - blank wall, roll of paper trees, and a carefully concealed flock of guitarbirdies sandwiched in my copy of Will Eisner's "Comics & Sequential Art" (an excellent read, btw) - is what I had to work with:

Yes, I worked barefoot... it's summer. 'Nuf said.

Step one: Flattened and attached the first tree with a bit of painter's tape, wrapping it around the corner of the wall, and congratulated self on excellent match of white paper and white wall:

Step two: Attached the rest of the branches and stepped back to admire handiwork:

Step three: Chose and attached the first birdie:

And then the whole family:

And a friend:

Step four: Started populating left branches, checking every now and then to make sure birdies were fairly evenly balanced in number and color:

Step five: Danced around the room like a fool, excited by crafty handiwork... and took many photos:

Left:

Right:

Details and characters:

(The little banjos and the pink-red acoustic family are probably my favorites... I kept only one of the birdies - the third little acoustic guitarbirdling.)

Step six: Added little hints of the ridiculousness hidden behind the door:

Finishing touches:

Wait for it... wait for it...

And without further ado, I give you the final product...

Wee! AWESOMENESS!

So there you have it. I actually wrote this post up right after I did my super-stealthy-guitarbird-hanging-caper but had to save it so as to keep it a secret. Whew, secret project-tastic. And with that I shall leave you, dear readers. Hopefully this bit of absurdity will tide you over until I finish the next couple of spreads for my book. For more photos or perhaps your own custom wall paper, feel free to drop a line. ;)

PS You should absolutely check out the band - Diehard - because they're pretty fab. They have some shows coming up both in NY and elsewhere on the East coast during their summer tour. If you're interested, let me know. I'll probably head to at least one of the NY shows.

Diehard

Spring

Halloo everyone!

It is delightfully spring, and the weather is glorious in New York. All I want to do is run around outside. Alas, I spent most of the week cooped up inside with my ankle on ice. Twisted it dancing over the weekend. Sigh.

In any case, it meant that I got a bunch of painting done while at home. Finished a new spread for the book - the raw painting is done - but now it's hanging on my wall in the studio. I keep staring it... I think it needs something but haven't figured out what yet. I will post it as soon as I decide whether or not I'm going to touch it again. And so I'm still plugging along on paintings for the book, but this week I actually had a couple of potential jobs that took up most of my work time. Jobs! Exciting, I know. Nothing is certain, though. One was a bunch of preliminary sketches I submitted to be considered for a job (we shall see... fingers crossed!) and the other is a small illustration for a literary publication...

that ended up looking something like this:

Tasty

Because I think it counts as a work of art...

Chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting and chocolate glaze. Tell me that's not beautiful...

Book Project Part VII: Title page...?

Book Project Part VII:

Title page...?

The past few days have been rather busy. I spent them scanning and printing my spreads and pasting them into a working full-color dummy in order to get a better look at the book in its entirety. I also wanted to see how the pages flip, whether the book flows, and figure out what the book is missing. In the "still missing" category are a couple of interior spreads (I have the sketches but haven't yet painted them), but more importantly, I'm still missing much of the overall design of the book - the cover, the title page, text treatments, etc.

So I went back to the drawing board and spent a whole bunch of time alternately scribbling on bits of paper, crumpling them up and tossing them into the trash, starting new bits of sketches, retrieving the old ones from the trash in a semi-endless cycle.

Finally, I came up with something I thought might vaguely work for the interior title page...

Perhaps page 1...

Book Project Part VI: And There's More!

Book Project Part VI:

And There's More!

As I mentioned in my last post, there's more artwork to be seen! Woah! Much to the chagrin of the second year students, I took some time scanning a couple of new pieces for your enjoyment. I also wanted to see how the color would print before I did any tweaking or goofing with the saturation/color balance settings, so I actually printed out almost the entire book. I must say, there's nothing like holding "finished" (relatively speaking, of course) work in your hands. It felt really nice to actually flip the pages, and seeing the flow of images at 100% in color was an entirely different experience than looking at my little sketch dummy.

So all of that is to say that the book project is wrapping up well. Scanning and printing ate up the morning and much of the afternoon, and I spent the remainder of the day sketching the two spreads missing from the dummy and starting thumbnails for the title page, cover, and endpapers. Quite exciting!

But I shall prattle on no longer. Without further ado...

These spreads are nearly sequential. The first two images follow one another, but there's a missing spread between them and the third and fourth paintings.

That's all for now. I'm in the process of working on title page and cover designs. Process work, more sketches, and perhaps a few new paintings to come. Until then, have a lovely week!

Book Project Part V: Long Awaited Art

Book Project Part V:

Long Awaited Art

Halloo everyone. The semester is winding down, and I had a moment this week to set up shop at one of the scanners at the studio. It's amazing how much time scanning takes. As I mentioned, my images are all too big for our scanners - they're 30" across - so require at least two scans per image. Oy. Amazing how much time it takes. Likewise, amazing how it's possible to do a ton of work only to realize that you're going to have to do it all over again. Yep. The images you have here are fine for the web, but when it comes to the print quality for an actual hard copy... weeeell, leaves a bit to be desired. My fault, really. I didn't think to clean the glass on the scanners. All of the images thus feature delightful smudges, dynamic streaks, and an exciting smattering of dust and hair and dirt. Huzzah!

Doh.

In any case, the images are fine for sharing with all of you lovely people and fine for submitting as a rough draft for the end of the term. Over the summer, I'll rescan, format, print, and finally bind everything. Luckily and quite happily I do have the summer. The book show doesn't go up until September. (I'll post details as we get nearer to the show.)

In any case, I've spent tons and tons of time painting and have a bunch of new spreads to share.

Taking off into the city - towards the beginning of the book

Flying through the city - directly follows previous image

Field of GIANT cabbages - middle-ish spread

Back at home - at this point (I say "this point" because this could easily change in the next week... oy), but as I was saying, at the moment, this is the last image in the book

So there you have not some of my recent work. I have three more spreads that need some tweaking and a fourth that I finished today that I'll share as soon as I can get another long stint at the scanner... and this time, I'll remember to clean the glass.

Sneak preview

Hello my poor dear ignored readers. It has been a rather busy spring, and while I have quite a bit of new work, I haven't yet scanned and merged the images yet. By merge, I mean that my paintings are actually too big for the scanner, so part of my process involves scanning them in sections and then compositing them in the computer. It's not terribly difficult but is admittedly time consuming. This week I'm going to set up shop at one of the scanners in the studio and spend a day getting all of my images into the computer... at which point, I will of course share aaaall of the new work with you.

Until then, however, I have a small consolation prize. In addition to my enormous monster book project, I've been redesigning my website, doing more html whatnot, and starting to learn flash animation. Wooo! In doing all of that, I've been designing a site with embedded bits flash animations.

So for all of you lovely people, an itty bitty sneak peak of a flash animated painting.

Inspiration: Giselle Potter

I have mostly, if not exclusively, posted my own work on here. And though I've shown you process work, from thumbnails to finals to characters out of my actual sketchbook, I haven't actually mentioned anything about reference or the illustrators' work that I find helpful during my work process.

Last term, most of the work I was doing was lighter washes, pen and ink, watercolor - fairly translucent ways of working - while this term, as you've seen from the recently posted work, I switched things up and started using gouache in fairly thick, opaque layers. A friend at school saw the paintings up in my little studio and suggested I take a look at an illustrator who I was entirely unfamiliar with - Giselle Potter. Her books are all very different, but my friend suggested I look at one of her older books, "Wynken, Blynken and Nod".

The book is beautiful with loads of blues and greens and super sweet, quiet night scenes. I don't know if she uses acrylic or gouache for her paintings, but because I'm much more familiar with illustrators who work with watercolors and inks, it's been really exciting to look at another artist using opaque paint.

Book Project Part IV: And Another and Another and Another... Spring Break

Book Project Part IV: And Another and Another and Another... Spring Break

In which there is bronchitis and much painting...

Apologies for the belatedness of the post... Spring break was already quite some time ago, and I am thankfully bronchitis-less. I thought that I had put this up a few weeks ago, but alas I was mistaken. In any case, I spent much of March alternately painting and coughing, and despite the aforementioned bout of plague-style-illness, I got quite a bit of work done.

Thanks to Carl's bit of advice, I forged ahead on my project, decidedly not stalling on making paintings, and over the break, I actually finished two and a half spreads.

The first... I'm feeling just okay about... it may in fact not make it into the final book. (I did another two versions of my dummy this week - which I shall save for a future post - but in both versions, this particular painting didn't make the final cut. I'm glad I rendered it, but we shall see.) The second was incredibly fun to paint, and it shows. The third is the opening page of the book, and was similarly enjoyable.

Saturday Craft Fun!

Hello dear readers!

Well look at that... two posts in one day! Aren't you lucky? I usually keep my blog posts to the art school whatnot, but I decided that afternoon craft projects counted as art.

Today was marvelous, and after I finished my school related post this morning, I spent much of the day out of doors. One of my closest friends from college drove out for a visit, and we spent the first part of the day walking around Prospect Park (glooorious) and then headed back to my apartment to make Pysanka or Ukranian Easter eggs. We had made them a few times before in college, and today felt like an excellent day for that sort of crafty fun. When you actually know what you're doing, they can be amazingly beautiful; the process is batik-like where you cover up the bits you want white with wax, dye the egg the next lightest color, then cover those bits up with wax, dye the egg the next color, and so on.

Alas, Sarah has all of the in-process photos, which include such classics as Blowing All of the Nasty Goop Out of the Egg Through a Pin Hole, Ow Ow Ow or Lightheaded From Trying to Blow the Nasty Goop Out of the Egg, My Fingers are Ridiculous Colors, Fishing An Egg Out of a Cup with Chopsticks, among others. So sadly, all you have here are pictures of our finished eggs... not to mention an impromptu project to use up all of the aforementioned egg goop.

My first egg... yes that is a crack... I dropped it somewhere between the green dye and red dye stage... I finished it anyway.

Yes I tried scrubbing the dye off. Alas, my fingers are all kinds of colors... what else is new?

Side view of Egg Numero Uno

Oeuf Deux: A Study of Swirlies

Eggs!


Impressive Eggs


And finally, the pièce de résistance: Pecan Cake with Strawberries