The Family Anchin

Halloo dear blog-readers.

I haven't ever posted anything about my family, but I come from a home of absurd and absurdly talented folks. I've always said that before dropping everything and going to art school, I never really thought about making art and illustration a career. That being said, when looking at the sorts of things my parents make, I can't help but feeling rather dense (in a how-could-I-not-consider-making-art sort of way). My folks are both teachers, and though they don't currently do art professionally, they are both exceptionally talented. One of these days, I'll post some actual samples of their work, not to mention my sister's work. Dina is talented, on a level that exceeds jaw-dropping.

For the moment however...

Yesterday my folks came into the city for an impromptu early dinner. We had fun with the brown paper on the table. And so I shall leave you with a few of our table doodles:

Landscape by Papa Anchin

Froggy by Mama Anchin

(My mom has been drawing this one for as long as I can remember... I have

postcards and notes dating back to the 80s with this little frog drawn on them.)

A Boy and His Chicken by Mama Anchin

A Girl and her Fish by Yours Truly

(In response to A Boy and His Chicken)

Scarecrow

Just because...

This is just a quick character sketch... I've been letting some ideas percolate for the past few weeks, and this particular character may show up in an upcoming book dummy.

Thesis?

Happy New Year dear blog readers!

It was a busy end to 2010 and a busy start to 2011. This bodes well for a productive final semester. After so many years of schooling, it's crazy to think that this is my last - LAST! - semester of school. It's both incredibly exciting and entirely terrifying.

That being said, perhaps in anticipation of an ever-nearing commencement date, I've been burning the candle at both ends, working both in the studio and at home on my thesis. For the thesis, I decided to work on not one, but three (soon to be four) picture books. I spent first semester writing, designing characters, sketching, thumbnailing, revising sketches, redrawing, rewriting, editing, and putting together three solid book dummies. All of the dummies are in pretty good shape, but even so, the revisions never end; after a four hour meeting with my advisor yesterday, I have major work to do on all of them.

Dummies are great, and I love having an excuse to do tons of sketches and the opportunity to really get to know my characters... however, it came to my attention that it is nearly the end of January, leaving me with only a couple of months to pull together all of the final art. The last three or four weeks have passed in a flurry of painting and experimenting with color.

I still haven't decided which book I'm going to work on yet, but I've really been enjoying playing with this particular character in paint. A couple of sneak peaks:

Grand Central Extended

For my drawing on location class, we had an extended project to pick a city block and do a series of nine drawings - three drawings in each of three locations on the block. I had originally chosen to draw uptown in my old neighborhood, but I had a really hard time in all of the locations and ended up despising all of the work that I did.

I had so much fun drawing at Grand Central a couple of weeks ago that I decided to go back and use it as my location. I divided up the station into three separate parts - the main terminal, the dining concourse, and the holiday market. While there, I did a bit of experimenting playing with different pens, but I'm pretty satisfied with the pieces I came out with.

Main Terminal

Dining Concourse

Holiday Market

It came from the mold...

Stop motion today was super exciting. We started to take the puppets out of our molds. They're a platinum-based silicon that we injected into our plaster molds last week. Because the silicon is so goopy, it tends to overflow the actual puppet shape and ooze into the flange (the flat bits) of the plaster mold, which ultimately results in creepy see-through style bat wigs.

So creeeeeeepy!

Grand Central Drawings

On Friday, we went to the main terminal of Grand Central station for my on location drawing class. The in-process drawings were featured on GCT's facebook page! Woot!

conte crayon:

marker

I really like...

...hot air balloons.

Drawing Class

Hope everyone out there had a good Thanksgiving.

November has sped by in a haze of sneezing and coughing. I spent about half of the month sick and the remainder in front of the computer working on actionscript for the digital version of my thesis. More about that another day...

Today, however, I wanted to post a couple of images from my drawing class. Every Friday, I have five hours of drawing, either on location around the city or in the studio with live models. It's a great class, and it's been an opportunity for loads of experimentation.

Our on location days have included trips to Governor's Island, 50 stories up in a building overlooking the World Trade Center site, the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, Gleason's Boxing Gym... it's been amazing. Here are some highlights:

My classmates looking down out over the city -

Drawing the Woolworth building -

Skyline (looking North) -

Word Trade Center site -

Drawing from the South side of the building -

After such a detailed drawing, I wanted to do something looser... quick ink drawing of my classmates and the interior of the space -

Unfinished drawing, Woolworth building -

Patrick Dougherty sculptures at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden (If you haven't seen them yet, check them out! They're amazing... he also did an installation at Smith during my first year.) -

Erin drawing

Left-handed drawing to warm up... my pen ran out of ink halfway through -

Drawings of the sculpture -

Detail page from the cactus room in the greenhouse -

Back in the studio with three models. Warming up with charcoal -

Playing around with ink (unfinished) -

Tighter pencil drawing -

The Storyteller, now in 3D!

Hey there folks!

It has been a busy fall with loads of work on my thesis, digital projects, side projects, Halloween crafting, and, oddly enough, sculpting.

I've always loved stop motion animation, and throughout high school and into college, I used to sculpt little figurines out of polymer clay. Towards the end of my sculptural dabblings, I began to add armatures, trying to figure out how to animate the characters. Alas, much of my experimentation failed with a whole bunch of broken dolls and models; baked polymer clay does not bend.

In any case, as I was browsing the course catalogue for an audit class this term, I came across a class on character design/building for stop motion animation!! Many exclamation points!!!

I signed up right away.

Thus far, the hardest part of the class was deciding which character to bring to life. After spending so much time on the Amelia Pepper comic over the summer, I ultimately decided on the Storyteller character. I decided on him rather than the Peddler because I realized that I could easily build his squat sidekick with polymer clay head/hands/legs/feet on a wire armature hidden beneath a sewn coat.

A refresher, The Storyteller and the Peddler:

Making the figures first involves sculpting the bodies onto a wire armature. (The heads are made separately because the materials differ.) Once the models are built, we're going to make plaster molds for the bodies and silicone molds for the heads and finally cast the puppets.

So I started sculpting the Storyteller with his clothes on, figuring I'd paint the clothing and sew him a coat and a hat. I stylized him a bunch, made him rather slim, and gave him some pretty big hands and feet.

Front view:

Back view:

Side view:

Shirt detail:

If you look closely, however, you'll notice that my carefully sculpted little fellow has scratches and bite marks on him. When I brought him home to work on, my kitten - by which I do mean deadly ferocious panther - decided that the Storyteller was a fun new chew toy.

He wasn't terribly mangled, but enough so that I reconsidered my original plan of painting the clothing on my character. Ultimately, I decided that actually sewing/handbuilding him clothing would make for a much more exciting figure... so I scrapped the whole thing and stripped him down to his skivvies.

Front view:

Side view:

Feet detail:

You also might be wondering why the little guy's hand has three fingers. Apparently, getting a decent amount of mobility in the hands and fingers is difficult if they're overcrowded... so for beginners, the teacher folks tell you to sculpt only three fingers and a thumb.

And finally, as I mentioned before, the head of the character gets sculpted and cast separately. Again, I added a bunch of detail because the character drawings are pretty simple and exaggerated his features - big ears, pointy chin, etc.

Front view:

Side view:

Three-quarter view:

I spent much of today finishing up, read re-doing, his head. (The original, like his body, also had some odd little toothmarks and black hairs sticking out of it.) Tomorrow, I'll be building and pouring the mold.

It moves!

Hey there loyal blog-readers,

October is speeding by, and it finally feels like autumn in NY. With Halloween less than two weeks away and the semester nearly two months over, things are getting pretty busy.

Second year at SVA is considerably different than first year. First year was very assignment oriented, with lots of little projects. This year, however, we're all hard at work on our thesis projects, which are designed to be much more self-motivated. This week we each had to give a presentation explaining our thoughts and ideas about our projects, so I have a long post about my thesis nearly ready for you. Soon to come, scouts honor.

In the meantime, however, I thought I would show you what I've been doing in the world of digital illustration. This year, we engineered a new class on the "digital book", all about how digital media can serve the book format, how books can be adapted for digital media, and how something entirely new can be created. I don't believe that we will ever lose the book as an object and a format (I hope, I hope), and as an avid reader, I do prefer holding a physical book rather than using an e-reader. That being said, new technology like the ipad, tablets, and iphones can be adapted for really exciting, interactive reading experiences, especially for kids.

In the class, we've been learning how to create interactive animations that could serve as illustrations for a digital book. Each of us chose an already existing story to play around with, and I've been working with the Wizard of Oz.

I've been playing with a scene of the scarecrow in the field and have just (huzzah!) gotten my scarecrow to swing his arms and legs. The crow perched on the scarecrow's post now flaps his wings and nods his head, and each time you click on him, another crow appears in the air. The clouds in the background are also interactive; if you click on them, they scuttle across the sky. I'm not yet sure how to post an interactive animation, so for the moment, you'll have to make do with a couple of stills. It's really exciting and suuuuper nerdy because the animation is all done with code in flash. It's a bit like learning a foreign language but with a bunch of logic and math thrown in. But, I digress... so on to the project:

Main scene:

Clicking the crow to add more crows:

Clicking the clouds to make them move: