Kerosene, Sunshine, Kate

Digital Doorway: brainstorming...

2011-01-20T17:13:00.003-07:00

So I'm not dead, first off. It's been over a year since my last post to this blog, but it's been a very busy year!

The doors and windows went well. I completed several windows and one door, but they're difficult to photograph. Hopefully I'll manage that eventually.

I am continuing to work with windows and doors as my "thing" these days, as I've found I really love their aesthetic and the opportunity they provide me to break down the chasm between digital and traditional media.

This semester (yes, I'm still doing the college grind), I've got a digital arts class in which I have the freedom to design and execute whatever I want in terms of an art piece. This class is apparently going to have a show/exhibition sometime in May, location TBA, so I want to make sure what I do is show-worthy.

My current plan is this...I want to set up a rear-projection behind a door against a wall. The door would have no window in it, but when someone opens the door, an image would be projected against the wall behind the doorway. Every time the door shuts, the image will change, so that when it opens again it will be different than the last time it was open. I would use as many "scenes" as I could, at least seven, but preferably at least ten. The more, the better.

Basically, what I've figured out so far is that I'll need to construct a space to back the door, or a false wall. I'll need to pick a windowless door (plenty of those on craigslist) and frame it into the backing projection box or wall. The projector and rear-projection screen would set up behind it, and a sensor will feed into a Max/MSP patch that activates a change in images for the projector.

Obviously, this will take a lot of work, but I am pretty sure I can figure it out. I'm good at making things do what I want.

A means of encouraging people to open and shut the door repeatedly? Hmm... Well, I think I can use woodburning to encourage them to open the door. It's how to get them to open and shut it repeatedly that's the trick.

More on this—including sketches—later.

The In-Joke Songs: "Riss Knows What I Mean"

2009-12-02T18:48:00.003-07:00

You know what I'm saying
You know what I mean
You know the in-joke I'm about to sing

Roll it with an R
Drawl it with a y'all
Go deep or go high
Go anywhere at all
If it sounds good, I'll squirm
If it sounds bad, it hurts
I'm not into the high pitch
I'll take bass for dessert

It gets under my ribs
It gets under my skin
It gets me all riled up
It gets me unhinged

I don't care what it looks like
As long as it sounds
Like sex on the eardrum
Riss knows what this song's about

Stingers 'n commenting service...

2009-10-21T13:42:00.004-06:00

Here's a quick screenshot of some of the wasps I've been making for the window project (there are a bunch more and this was saved yesterday before I drew even more of them).

Also, I'm mostly just making this post to test a comment service from Intense Debate. So feel free to comment and help me test, guys.

Back to my busy snow-covered day...

Artist Envy: ...Chris Coleman

2009-10-19T09:34:00.003-06:00

A gorgeous digital animation Matt showed us a little while ago. I am so keen for the sound design. So very well executed.

The Magnitude of the Continental Divides from Chris Coleman.

I believe this piece was created through After Effects and took something like two years. Check out some of Coleman's other work at DigitalColeman.com

Windows Project: "Stingers and Nettles" (wip 1)

2009-10-18T15:57:00.023-06:00

Well, as the battle of the windows continues, my battle plan has changed a bit. Rather than working my windows to line them up to create a single surreal scene, I've opted to juxtapose things within each window instead, usually two subjects but one window might have three.

I've also settled on working with lazertran transfer papers, which work pretty well for my purposes... But that's the final step. Let me walk you through the process I've been using so far. It's been a learn-as-I-go ordeal, and there have certainly been mistakes and I've started over once already.

First off I pick which window I want to use for it, measure the size of the panes, and do a digital mock-up of the window's pane
frames... For this window I chose to use one that is 28" tall and 26.5" wide including the outside frame, with panes approximately 7.25" wide and 11.5" tall. The one to the left (it's upside down in the photo). It has a handle lever on top (the one you use to push half of a window up or pull it closed again).

Then I come up with a digital sketch plan. I spend a lot of time looking at photos of potential subjects by using the google images search, flickr, and deviantart, as well as reading up on things at wikipedia and specialty sites. My digital sketches are rough and messy and careless. Getting hung up on these is pointless, as they're only a jumping off point, so why bother?

Next is drawing the lineart for the traditional part of the drawing onto tracing paper. I cut the tracing paper to the size of the window panes and then use graphite transfer to rub my sketch layout's key lines onto the tracing paper for a guide. Then I use a .005 micron pen to draw over those guides and add details. This is my lineart.

In this case, I only drew out the jelly, which occupies 4 of the window panes, because I wanted to work with the other element (the wasps) digitally.

To double-check that things are the way I want, I repeatedly place the drawn tracing paper against the window panes throughout this entire process, right through to the end!

(Beware of audio - feel free to mute! I like to sing to myself and I'm not shy, tend to cuss a bit, and am occasionally chatting with friends who were watching the live broadcast. Also, there are a couple parts where I was rearranging my workspace; feel free to skip around.)

After I've got my lineart done, I start on color. For the jelly (a Pacific sea nettle, by the way), I used nupastel (aka chalk/dry pastel), carbothello pastel pencils (also chalk/dry pastel), and prismacolor colored pencils. Also important to this process are blending stumps and a variety of erasers. Kneaded, artgum, and stick erasers were all invaluable. It is fortunately quite easy to erase chalk pastel and prismacolor off of tracing paper as long as it hasn't been blended into the paper too well. I work one "pane" at a time and then line them up to make sure they're looking alright. I also often switch from having white paper to having black paper behind the tracing paper in order to better see where my color is going.

It's also important to keep track of what colors I used for what parts, as I am partially colorblind. My form of colorblindness is called tritanomalous, because I cannot distinguish yellows very well at all (sometimes they are simply WHITE to me) and struggle somewhat with purples, oranges, and some blues, but can see green just fine for the most part. Anyway...this is why I keep my colors organized and labeled and sometimes write down notes on what colors I used where.

Once I've finished the traditional drawing part of the process, I first put the tracing paper in the panes again just to check that it's looking okay in terms of composition...

Now I can scan the tracing paper into Photoshop at about 300 dpi. I prefer to do this from a Mac computer, as color fidelity is better, but will settle for using my little Windows laptop when I must. When I've scanned things in, I position the "panes" into a digital mock-up of the window frame.

Then it's time for the digital drawing part! I first sketch rough ideas of where I want the wasps to be... In this case, they're supposed to be coming out of the jelly's bell and flying toward the upper right corner of the window.

In Photoshop, with a small pixel black brush, I drew out lineart for a few wasps and then would reposition, rotate, or slightly redraw them as needed as I placed them on the window mock-up. I do a mock-up of the colors I want to use on the yellow jackets/wasps because, like I said, my colorblindness means I need to keep track of my color use at all times. I am very familiar with the position of colors on the digital color palette so that I can estimate which colors are in which places and use this to help me pick colors as I go.

I use soft airbrushes with low opacity and flow to "paint" the yellow jackets on layers beneath their lineart. The first yellow jacket was the slowest; after that the process sped up... Once I finish all these, the next step in the process is painting in shadows to assist the wasps integration with the jelly and its tentacles and oral arms and bell/body.

Once all the drawing is done, the final step is transferring my images to the glass of the windows. Another post regarding this part of the process will come later!

Ladyparts and the apple...

2009-09-28T18:17:00.003-06:00

While I was working on my windows outdoors today, a ladybug landed on my glasses. I think she fell off the deck staircase that I was standing under. Usually they'll fly away again pretty quickly if you start trying to handle them much, but this one seems to have some sort of problem with her wings because the couple of times she's tried she just ended up falling over. (I'm referring to her as a female because she's fairly large compared to the other ladybugs I've seen around lately, and the females are - to my knowledge - usually the larger of the sexes in the species.)

Well, she ended up staying on my hand for 30 minutes... So I did an impromptu photoshoot with her in the kitchen, as it was fair practice in macro photography with a fast moving subject (not that the macro feature of my digital camera is very good but I didn't have time to go dig out my Canon).

After I'd put her back on my hand, I decided to see how long she'd stay. Well, 1 hour turned into 2 hours, even while I was using my hands to work on projects, and so I finally moved her off of my hand. Currently (it's been over 3 hours now and counting), she's resting on the velveteen bag my little digicam is usually in, next to my laptop. She moves around every once in a while, preens constantly, does these funny little aerobics steps...but she's sticking around.

I've taken to calling her "Ladyparts." Because I have a silly/12-year-old-boy sense of humor? Perhaps!

This may, in part, be because my room is about 59 degrees Fahrenheit in temperature and the chill makes insects sluggish. What can I say? I like it cold.

I sort of have this urge now to keep ladybugs as pets. Outdoors, they can live for up to 2 years! But in a container, even with aphids and pollen and moisture sources, they would probably only live a couple weeks tops. This makes me sad...

Meanwhile, I will likely post some more stuff at KeroseneCamera soon. And for the sake of clarification, the young lady featured in the background of the photo in this post is my youngest sister.

O Jersey Swede!

2009-09-28T10:24:00.000-06:00

Right, so. I haven't made any posts for a while. Because I'm a loser and have been letting myself get overwhelmed and sick, which tends to make taking the time to actually make a post quite unappealing!

So I thought I'd dump some pointless doodlery I've made in the last few months. Um, right.

My buddy Kat Bongard's character Danne/Dan. He's a Swedish dude from New Jersey. We did the back-and-forth-description thing where I drew him and she told me what to tweak over and over until we had what Danne looks like. ...the colors look decent on my laptop PC, but not on the Mac I'm at right now. Figures.

Okay, my attention span is entirely too distracted today. Moving on!

Play your cards pretty...

2009-09-11T11:52:00.004-06:00

Here are another couple PE sketch assignments from the summer. This time, both are digital drawings/airbrush doodles and both are Davina Falcão's characters. The chick is Lusiada (obviously) and the fellow is Aspis.

I sort of want to tweak Aspis some more at some point, but I'm very happy with the way Lusiada came out. I was aiming for a sort of...trading card look, if that makes sense.

Davina was happy enough with Lusiada's "card" that she has said she'd like to commission more in that style when I open for commissions again. Woo!

Horned people posin'...

2009-09-10T08:00:00.000-06:00

More PE sketch assignments from this summer. Here are a pair of Unavisi (invite-only character race designed by Brianne Goetz). Davina Falcão's fella Atthis in graphite and pen and Amy Clark's Yew with a juvenile gryphon sketched in Photoshop.

Ladybug jelly!

2009-09-09T08:00:00.000-06:00

Alrighty...here's a quickie animation done for my Drawing 4 class this semester. I plan on making this one longer in my free time over the next couple weeks. Currently it's only about 77 frames long and has no sound.

And to the left are the ladybugs I originally drew in my sketchbook at the start of this little project. I think it should be fairly obvious which one was used in the actual animation...

"Timmy Has Left the Nest"

2009-09-08T12:24:00.010-06:00

Way back in November of '08, several people around the world participated as voice actors in the sequel to "The Birds Are Honest," a ridiculous little video/animation I made involving bird skeletons. Both videos were separate assignments for the video art class I was taking at the time and, unfortunately, I ran out of time to finish the sequel in the way it was planned in the storyboards the actors used as script. I think all of the voice actors have since seen the video that came of it anyway, but somehow I never got around to posting it here. Oops? In any case, here it is!

(Note: if the video doesn't work for you, try
back in an hour. Dunno why it does that.)

Credits:
Timmy --- voiced by Kat Bongard
Wagner --- voiced by Maureen Babb
La Rouge --- voiced by "Grumpy" Bongard
Crunching leaves sounds --- The Free Sound Project user: HerbertBoland
Nocturnal nature sounds --- The Free Sound Project user: laurent
Gong sound (before manipulation) --- The Free Sound Project user: Incarnadine
Bird and fox skeletons --- courtesy of Denver Museum of Nature & Science (photographed by Kate N.Y., me)

(By the way, since a few people now have been confused by this, Timmy is voiced by Kat Bongard, not me! I'm Kate, she's Kat. She's e-less! I did no voice acting because my microphone was simply never clear enough. Bah humbug...)

Bonus material!
A couple of outtakes tracks. This is what happens when you give Bongards permission to use microphones and funny voices, apparently!

"Bongard Stylings" Outtakes (1:34):

The Baguettes Outtakes (0:21):

...I still plan on finishing it out a bit more at some point. You guys should jab me in the eyeball if I forget again!

A vingança da Davina...

2009-09-05T19:47:00.003-06:00

I was craving a burrito terribly earlier, but told myself that unless I happened to have enough pennies lying around to pay for it entirely that way, I couldn't have it. Alas, I fell a couple hundred pennies short of the goal. Oh well. But then, as I had mentioned the craving to my buddies at one point, my friend Davina in Portugal -- whose own food craving I once rewarded with a sketch of cookies -- saw fit to take her revenge. And thus, she gave me a burrito...

...damn you, Davina! Damn you and your Portuguese burrito!

I love my friends.

Note: title is Portuguese for "the revenge of Davina."

Artist Envy: ...Gregory Euclide

2009-09-05T08:45:00.002-06:00

My recent interest in Josh Keyes led me to Gregory Euclide thanks to the David B. Smith Gallery. Euclide confronts the limiting falsehoods of a flat picture plane and the expectations of sculptural dimension with an exploration of how our bodies truly experience nature and environment. With titles as poetic and expressive as the works themselves, his mixed media landscapes swirl and envelop, permitting the viewer a glimpse into what our senses may be, well, sensing in the intangible space between experience and the perception that our cultural connotations and biases package life into.

Semi-chromatic ladies...

2009-09-04T15:41:00.007-06:00

More of my sketchbook PE assignments from this summer...

Del Borovic's character Tain

Black ink pen, red nupastel

Mandy O'Brien's character Amile
2B and 4B graphite pencil, various colors of nupastel

Artist Envy: ...Josh Keyes

2009-09-02T11:30:00.002-06:00

Currently in love with the post-apocalyptic reclamation reality-suspended paintings of Josh Keyes. I read an interview from Hi-Fructose yesterday but was so busy drooling over the gorgeous imagery that few of the words really sunk in. I do remember, however, that he mentioned something I very much enjoy and find refreshing in terms of post-apocalyptic imagery: there is an element of hope inherent in the paintings.

Go check him out! JoshKeyes.net

Links for the netties...

2009-09-02T10:42:00.001-06:00

Jenkins wanted a list of links that I thought would be helpful for you guys while you're mucking about with building your websites. The number one resource I can recommend, however, is to muck around! Just keep pushing buttons and trying code to experiment with what it does. Second best resource? A book. Just look at the web development section in any bookstore or library. Third best? Look at the "source" of any website you like. Just go to View and look at "page source" or "view source" (depending on if you're mac or windows).

Other than that, here are some places to go...
http://www.w3.org/
http://www.w3schools.com/
http://www.alistapart.com/
http://www.csszengarden.com/
http://www.cssplay.co.uk/
http://www.oswd.org/
http://webdeveloperplus.com/css/25-incredibly-useful-css-tricks-you-should-know/
http://arbent.net/blog/40-outstanding-css-techniques-and-tutorials
http://centricle.com/ref/css/filters/
http://www.drpeterjones.com/colorcalc/

If I think of more, I'll add them here throughout the semester. Hope they help ya out.

Broody dudey...

2009-09-02T08:52:00.001-06:00

Another thing from PE assignments this summer, Amy Clark's Conan. Broodin' boyo. More PhotoshopCS3, soft brushes and mucking with color.

Pirates! Arr!

2009-08-31T20:43:00.002-06:00

I woke up today with a horrendous migraine. At first, I decided I could walk it off and started getting ready for school anyway. Biiiig mistake. After scraping myself up off the bathroom floor, I downed a few extra-strength excedrin and went back to bed, curtains drawn. I felt like crap pretty much until noon. I'm sort of annoyed because there was Stuff To Be Done today both in my Web Art class and at the tutoring gigs I do (had to call my tutorees and let them know I'd be a no-show).

Anyway, in light of that failure on my part, I figured I should post some of the art I did over the summer for the Private Exchange. The exchange(s) these were for were a "sketch" level so I didn't really get too involved with clean lineart or developing color or even using a print-quality dpi. Um. Sooo...let's start with a couple of pirates! Swashbuckling ahoy!

Daerik (left) and Jessie (right) are characters belonging to Amy Clark, aka phoenix_element. Drawn digitally in Photoshop CS3.

The battle of the windows...

2009-08-27T15:07:00.002-06:00

I'm working on a thematic series this semester for my Drawing 4 class and because I've long had a fascination with old-fashioned wood-framed windows, decided I would try to work with them for a sort of...installation-y piece.

Back in Drawing 2, I worked with a broken up collection of jellyfish in chalk pastel. Since then I've really had a thing for disconnected imagery, especially when it comes to natural forms. I've also really become absorbed with a love for the unexpectedly beautiful in nature, especially where there are double connotations...times when we look at things that we think of as both "bad" in some way and yet "pleasing" in another. Jellyfish are some of the most deadly creatures in the world and yet so elegant, graceful, delicate and ethereally lovely. Insects annoy the heck out of people, disgust and frighten them, and yet we still consider ladybugs "cute," butterflies and moths "pretty," and think fondly of summer when a dragonfly buzzes past. We think of dead grass as a problem and unwanted, and yet we relish the sight of fields of dried plains grass bending and rustling with the wind.

And more than that, I wanted to screw with reality. My style has so often been called "pseudo-realism" by others that I have started to embrace that idea. The idea that what I'm drawing is both "real" and "not." So my idea is to place images on the glass panes of vintage windows -- jellyfish on one window, flying insects on another, dried plains grass on another -- and then line them up so that if a viewer were to look through all those windows at once, there would be a bizarre suspension of reality, of what SHOULD be seen through a window. Jellyfish in the sky with insects over plains grass? More than a bit bewildering, don't you think? But I also want a viewer to be able to think about how what they're looking through affects what they're looking at.

Yesterday I drove out to Wheat Ridge after classes and acquired some windows from a couple people I found via Craigslist (thanks to Nathan and to Sarah) and even a big old door! I might use the door as an additional artwork if I have time, or it may end up being an independent project at a later date. The drive home with all this stuff piled up in my minivan was...interesting. I had to have one hand on the door, which reached all the way to the back of the van and right up between the front seats, at all times to prevent it falling this way and that coming around corners, especially since it was holding up the big white window as well.

Some of the windows (and the door) still have hinges and other things such as latches or handles intact, so of course I am excited and want to work with those as well. Some of the wood is very weathered and even splintering, paint chipped, left to the elements for so long, and the glass is often pretty dingy. My weekend is going to involve a lot of cleaning and sanding and other such things to get the windows to a more presentable state, one that doesn't involve me picking splinters out of my hands every time I touch them and that makes it easier to get images on the glass.

Getting the images on the glass has proven to be the most challenging aspect of this project. I do not want to have to use paint, since a) this is for a drawing course, and b) I'm not very good with paint or other such liquid-y mediums. I have a variety of ideas for ways to accomplish the conquest of the glass, whether by drawing directly on it or via acrylic transfers, heat transfers, xylene transfers, or lazertran paper transfers. I'm reluctant to use lazertran just because I've never actually seen the stuff in action... Anyway, guess we'll see what happens!

Meanwhile, a couple of big daddy-long-legs spiders played stowaway with the stuff and are now loose in my van somewhere -- I'll have to take the shopvac to the van later to deal with all the paint flakes and spiderwebs and pine needles and other debris left behind when I hauled them out of the car and down to the backyard last night. All in all, an adventure.

Net.Art, Web Art, $$$, and what is this shit?

2009-08-24T10:44:00.001-06:00

There's often this wariness toward digital art regarding "but how do I make money off of it?" For those who use digital art as a platform for painting or producing the same visual imagery which would be created via other media -- charcoal, pastel, acrylic, the same ol' same ol' -- this wariness is mostly resolved. Their work has value so long as they find a means of marketing it.

But what of net art? That is, the artwork which is inherently sited on the internet, the world wide web with all its instant and constant and mostly uninhibited accessibility. How does one place value, a concept of exclusivity, on something which is (usually) all-inclusive?

For net artists, this was long a question answered with doom because, while the medium was welcomed and embraced by artist and public well enough...

"...from a financial perspective, this art form was a failure."

So says Wolf Lieser, who briefly owned a London digital art gallery that had to close when most of the work exhibited never sold. Such was often the plight of others, of course, but luckily for net artists it is a given that humans like to pay for shit and art likes to reinvent and lift itself to more importance than it is perhaps perceived as initially worth.

Thus, net art conquers! It is actually being paid for. This is the subject at hand in this Wall Street Journal article, discussing a few examples and avenues of net art and who is paying for it -- including major museums.

Take that, O Wary Public. Art, even when you doubt it to be such, will have your head! ...or at least your wallet.

And then there is web art. Like net art, it is a form of art which is viewed with some hesitation, but it is out there (bewaaaare). Web art is a form of art which utilizes the concept of networking and networking systems. Humans, in case you haven't noticed, tend to like to network. We constantly seek connection in some degree. Even a hermit has a network: the system by which he maintains his reclusivity via maintaining a self-sustaining life and livelihood. It's inescapable. Anyway. This means that your cell phone can participate in web art, your music collection, your email and texting and gossip in high school.

There are a lot of myths about net art, web art, internet as art. Got an assumption, any assumption, about these? Take a gander at Jon Ippolito's essay on those myths and assumptions and dispel a few! Because, as the tired saying says, "blah blah blah something about asses."

Okay, now that I've sounded pretentious for a while, here are some links to web/net/stuff art that we have been viewing in my class today. I do not necessarily enjoy or laud these, but I'm sharing them. Be afraid, be very afraid?

Grammatron

My Boyfriend Came Back From the War

Heavy Industries

GOOGLE WILL EAT ITSELF

The Infamous 1997 Black Hole Net.Art of Ben Benjamin Commonly Known as Superbad

And there was one other, but guess what? No.

In case you're one of my "regular" readers and haven't figured out yet what this post is, it's basically what comes about when a teacher says all authoritarian, "I COMMAND THEE, MAKE BLOG POST ABOUT THESE PARTICULAR THINGS." And I say "well, fuck."

When 10-year-olds make children's books...

2009-08-22T22:22:00.002-06:00

When I was around 10 years old, my youngest sister was still "my" little girl. I took care of her and she depended on me. She would have been around 4 years old then and still prone to running through the yard stark naked. Ah, the freedom of youth! Heh.

In any case, among the many things I did for my baby sister back then was telling her stories to get her to fall asleep. One day, instead of telling her a story, I made her a storybook. On lined notebook paper, using a cruddy black office pen, I doodled out a short children's story called "What Are Monsters Afraid Of?"

She kept it in her sock drawer, right beside her bed, and it got a lot of wear and tear over the years from readings and rereadings and the occasion in which someone would show it to someone else to say "look what Kate made when she was 10 for Chloe." The storybook, if you can call crumpled notebook paper held together with pieces of yarn that, even survived the family's relocation from Texas to Colorado when I was around 15 or so and then another couple years until...

When I was in high school, I'd say maybe 16 or 17, my rather dinky little art class was asked to make books for a project. I immediately thought of "What Are Monsters Afraid Of?" and went rummaging through boxes until I found it, curled up and smeared in spots from water damage. Rather than bring my more matured storytelling or design skills to the table and remake the story, I chose to simply copy the drawings and designs and wording that my 10-year-old self hadoriginally created. Only, instead of cruddy office pen on lined notebook paper with yarn for binding, this time it was drawn in Photoshop, printed, and bound neatly in a cheap little presentation booklet.

Sadly, I think much of the charm of the original was lost in this remake, but nevertheless thought I'd share what my 17-year-old self copied off of my 10-year-old self.

So without further ado, meet my monsters. I am especially fond of the coverpage monster, who in my head has always been "socked aardvark" even though he in no way resembles an aardvark. I cannot explain my own logic.

The monsters, in order of appearance, are called (in my head, at least)...
The Socked Aardvark
Ground-dwelling Batsnake
The Green Slimer
Flying Googleye...
...and the Bedcrabs, which in my mind travel in groups of three or five.

Also featured in this story is Superbear, a filler character I often used in the stories I told my baby sister. Superbear never really got his own story, poor little guy.

Also, when I was redrawing this, I had a brief encounter with Creepy Bouncy Sun, whose smile is unnerving and whom nobody trusts. I highly suspect that he may in fact be a pedophile. Naturally, you can see why CBSun was replaced with the pleasant sun who occupies the cover page instead.

"Post-attempt"

2009-07-29T18:05:00.000-06:00

Sometimes I'm poetic. This one is personal.

Title: Post-attempt

Subject: the feeling of years of learning to live again after suicide attempt(s)...

Media: personal photo and digital manipulation/painting and handwritten poem...

Aboidoodles crosspost...

2009-06-17T10:00:00.002-06:00

Crossposted with Aboidoodles (another art/project blog of mine and my buddy Tam's that gets images this one doesn't, bwahahaha). Head over there to learn more!

2009-06-16T22:19:00.001-06:00

~~Oops, I think I broke my header image. My bad. >_>~~

EDIT: Oh sure, and then it starts working again. Geez.

Naked in Red-Blue-Yellow

2009-06-16T19:46:00.000-06:00

A lifedrawing sketch from back on May 7th for Drawing 3. The guy, a man in maybe his 60s or 70s, had a very interesting figure with an oddly proportioned back and abdomen. I very much enjoy drawing backs. I think they're one of the top three most beautiful human features aesthetically.

Anyway. I like doing lifedrawing this way. I used a scrap of bright yellow canson mi-teintes pastel paper and covered it with a layer of blue oil pastel, then smeared it with orange and red and brown oil pastels, dotted it, generally made a mess. Then used an exacto knife to scratch out the figure, occasionally smearing what I'd scratched off back into the piece. Went back over it with red oil pastel for the "border" and "ground" and then a dark blue oil pastel for dark shadowed areas. I left it very textural instead of smooshing the pastel down, so some parts are raised. A lot of that dimension got lost when I scanned it. And at some point apparently one of his feet got smooshed out... Oh well!

Still, I had fun.

Lemon drops revisited step 1...

2009-06-16T00:30:00.000-06:00

I totally just realized -- out of the blue for no apparent reason -- what it was about this image that made me nuts. Look! See the shadows? There are shadows cast by the lemon drops, but not by licker dude! This is totally not cool. lol No wonder I couldn't stand looking at it and it made me uncomfortable. I can't believe nobody pointed it out during critique way back then! Actually, I have a lot of ideas for how to vastly improve it, but it would require starting over from scratch...

--Move his face closer to the lemon drops so that it interrupts the field of them, his tongue is almost touching one, perhaps hair is pushed up against some.
--Bend his tongue more. It looks like a cow's right now.
--Have him cast a shadow.
--The mango-colored shit-tastic hoodie has to go. Perhaps a plain t-shirt instead, dark colors.
--Do the "troubles" as if they were embossed in the lemon drops instead of as black transfers.

...probably need to just do this in digital. lol

Now that I know what's missing I can envision how it would look if I fixed it all. I will have to do it later though (see: eventually) because tomorrow I have a theory examohgodohgod.

Ahem.

All bottled up...

2009-06-10T10:00:00.002-06:00

Ummm...just a digital speedpainty sketchy thing done to the prompt of "transparent sphere."

I know, I'm a weirdo. Woo!

My art is trying to kill me (FINAL version)...

2009-06-09T15:10:00.000-06:00

I'm a lame-o! lol I got so stressed out during finals that I completely failed to update this blog. Then summer obligations and courses began and I got distracted. Of course, Aboidoodles has been getting some posting lately, but nevertheless, I owe my own blog a little attention, don't I?

Well, here's a photograph of the final version of the project I did for my Drawing 3 final.

Unfortunately, I have only a silly digital camera and am not a great photographer, so this photo really doesn't show much of the dimension or color quality that the actual piece does in life. Those are actual paintbrushes and pencils in there. The underdrawing is done in chalk pastel (aka "soft" pastel), sometimes with wet paintbrushes to texture it or move it around. The red and blue madness is acrylic with gel medium, applied via palette knife. I also utilized a couple of hairdryers, a fan, and the bright morning sun to get the paint to dry fast enough to take it to class. Yeehaw!

Regardless, I'm satisfied with it, even if it is not the way I originally envisioned. There was actually a version prior to this which was pretty much finished and fantastic and just the way I'd envisioned... But I dropped a bottle of turpentine on it, and it got totaled. I redid the whole thing, as you see here, the night and morning a few hours before final critique. I went to critique sleepless and very much of the opinion that I no longer gave a shit what others thought. I was exhausted. lol

I got an A for the course.

My art is trying to kill me...

2009-05-07T03:07:00.003-06:00

I have been struggling with ideas for my final project for my Drawing III class for a couple weeks now. Tonight, finally, in a panic stage of going over the fallback ideas (re-using one of my sketches from last semester into something more finished quality, for example) I finally realized something: my panic and feeling of being at war with my own art is the idea.

So here's a very rapid, unfinished, vague and possibly unintelligible digital sketch I did real quick to help me make sure the idea was there in my head and not an illusion, and to keep me from forgetting because I'm about to conk out from exhaustion again.

I am thinking that the blue-gray section at the top won't actually be canvas. I'll cut it off so that the arms leave the image, much like I did the jellyfish back in the day. The bottom of the image would have other art tools/instruments/supplies sticking up like menacing spikes of artistic DOOM/death. Like one of those pits full of spikes. What're they called? Oh! A trou de loup, aka "tiger pit."

I am thinking chalk pastel on a mostly white background, something textural. Hm. I'll have to swing by Guiry's on Friday, molest the supplies and see what I can get a feel for.

More on this as the week/weekend progresses. Wish me luck!

The symbolism of tire swings...

2009-05-03T15:24:00.000-06:00

Just a quick digital thumbnail sketch of an idea that popped into my head this morning for a piece. I hope I can get time to work on it...

"San Francisco Belle" WIP...

2009-04-30T15:18:00.001-06:00

I'm working on a mixed-media project right now for a class. We were told to do a black and white traditional media drawing of "family." I chose to draw Tam, since often my friends have served me better as family than my own flesh and blood, and Tam is my best friend, my partner-in-crime.

So I started out with a quick charcoal sketch of Tam...

And then I scanned it into Photoshop and began painting underneath it, building up layers bit by bit...

I used photographs I took while visiting Tam in San Francisco (where she lives) back in 2007 to collage with my digital paintings, then painted more on top of them. Then I printed the whole thing out on an epson printer on campus. It's about 30 inches long, 17" tall.

Now comes the fun part. I've begun (nowhere near finished) using found materials, acrylic paint, and carbothello pastel pencils to add in and onto the piece. To me, Tam is someone I associate with warm colors -- reds, oranges -- and deep water -- dark blues. When I think of her, I think of Asia, of Chinatown, of all things San Francisco. I think of her favorite quote about being like water, of eastern dragon motifs, and of big oak trees. She sure has a thing for trees. I'm trying to incorporate these elements into this. I'm still looking for a way to work water into it.

I was going to use some of my seaglass, the blue ones, but decided it looked too cluttered and that the little buddha should be enough for a 3D element for now. I've added in little red maple leaves I've been saving forever, and used an oak leaf I had pressed and dried last year as a sort of stamp for white acrylic. The paper holds material and moisture well, but only if I'm careful. At one point I accidentally smashed my hand into it over Tam's cheek while it was still wet, and the paper rubbed off. Rather than panic or try to cover it up, I've decided to go with it and have been roughing up the paper here and there until I can get it to incorporate...

It's still got a ways to go. I want to make sure carries along. I need to find some more maple leaves (I think I know where to get 'em). I was going to go looking some fake cherry blossoms or the like (it's too late in the season for real ones) and use those like a stamp the way I did the oak leaf, but I think I won't now. And I'm having some problems with the right side curling so as I type this it's being pressed down by a bunch of phone books...

Anyway. Lots left to do, but I like how it's coming.

Riss was harassing me about our posting deal...

2009-04-07T23:43:00.001-06:00

I have an ongoing deal to encourage Marissa Pittman to post more art in her blog. For every post she makes, I must make a post as well (either here or in Aboidoodles or my fotolog). Lately she has TOTALLY been taking advantage of this bargain to harass me to post more.

OH YEAH? WELL TAKE THIS RISS. Two posts! One for Aboidoodles, one for here! And this one is lame! What now, woman? BOOYAH.

Colored pencil doodlery in my sketchbook. Colored pencil scans like shit.

Fringe: Ability

2009-04-05T18:41:00.000-06:00

Done as a homework exercise for a class. The assignment was to watch 30 minutes of television and to draw what we watched as we watched it. I watched an hour-long show instead (if you count commercials).

Pilot G-2 07 black ink pen, yellow and blue nupastels, 9x12 recycled sketchbook paper wheeeeee...

Commish Wip: "Watching Over You"

2009-03-29T13:55:00.000-06:00

I don't know what it is about coloring this one that is just MURDERING me. Ugh. I have no idea what it is at all, but it's like pulling teeth to finish it.

If you give Davina a cookie...

2009-03-29T13:29:00.000-06:00

My buddy Davina abruptly informed me that "I need a cookie...with chocolate..." Since I'm teaching myself how to be more painterly with Photoshop, and needed a warmup for a commission I was working on anyway, I gave her that cookie with chocolate.

...sketchy deliciousness? Gosh, I'm so boring.

"Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions"

2009-03-18T19:51:00.000-06:00

Sensitive dependence on initial conditions is a component of chaos theory which is more popularly referred to as "the butterfly effect." The butterfly effect has absolutely nothing to do with Ashton Kutcher unless Ashton Kutcher is getting eaten by a tornado.

Robert Redford's character in the movie Havana popularized the use of a hurricane with the butterfly theory when saying, "And a butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean."

However that was in 1990, and the butterfly became the popular representative of sensitive dependence on initial conditions way back in 1972 when the leading theoretician on the butterfly effect, Edward Lorenz, wasn't easily reached to provide a title for a talk he was about to give to the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Philip Merilees, a meteorologist acting as the session convenor for the meeting, came up with a title in his stead: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas

Thereafter, the poetic butterfly replaced its predecessor, a seagull, as the seemingly miniscule instigator of a pattern of events that might eventually be related to a massive, impressive catastrophe such as a tornado.

I, meanwhile, just illustrated it with colored pencil on 15x15 inches of bristol. Yeehaw! The scan looks like crap compared to the piece in person, plus I've made some minor adjustments along the bottom sections since the scan was made. I'll have to scan it again later.

Commish WIP: "Watching Over You"

2009-03-11T19:06:00.000-06:00

Something I'm working on that is stupidly overdue.

I have developed a new way of coloring that I'm much happier with, and you can sort of see it in action here. However, keep in mind that the colors seen here may drastically change before this is done (I'm going to adjust both skintones a lot, for example).

Right up my alley, or at least 'til I turn back down...

2009-02-16T00:07:00.000-07:00

Man, making that deal of "a post for a post" to encourage Riss sure is comin' back to bite me in the ass! lol

Ah well. So! Speedpainting that I got bored and abandoned a while back. Oopsie! Ref'd from random photograph found online (god knows where)...

Three for the show! (Death, Presidents, and Sap.)

2009-02-14T18:44:00.001-07:00

A page from my sketchbook in chalk pastel and charcoal, done on a homework prompt of "draw something you think is dead."

A page from my sketchbook of brainstorming I was doing for a piece involving Abraham Lincoln (whose 200th birthday anniversary is this year, wacky). ...also, I drew Abe Lincoln on a Chipotle burrito's foil wrap with sharpies, and later tore it off and pasted it in the sketchbook. I'm a doofus, but I have fun.

And some sap drawn for a friend (and partially for myself) involving her character Seville and my character Sugar Maple. They are Unavisi, which is a race and a project designed by our mutual good friend Brianne for her friends to participate in by invitation only.

Drooly wallpaper...

2009-02-07T22:26:00.000-07:00

The hyena here is my buddy Shawna's changeling Chisulo in his animal form. The three-tailed fox is my kitsune Lark in her animal form. They are thieves and friends, and generally are an entertaining pair, that's for sure.

Because making Shawna laugh is always fun (and because she deemed "that is. so. cute." about the sketch), I made a 1260x800 wallpaper just for her, after cleaning it up just a little and messing with Chisulo's head angle a bit.

"Do not DARE drool on me..."

2009-02-07T04:02:00.000-07:00

Lalalalala, oh whatever could Kate be up to. >_>

Wow, that is ultra scribbly and probably completely illegible. Heh.

Illuminating skin...

2009-02-05T15:53:00.000-07:00

To encourage a friend to draw daily and utilize her blog more, I made a deal that for every post she made, I would make one too. Well, the last few days have gone bonkers-like, so I am going to count this one post as being for the two she has made thus far!

The art group I am a member of, Private Exchange, has one exercise in which people can follow prompts for speed paintings/sketches. In need of a warm-up before commission work, I looked to see what the latest prompt was the other day: cloudscape.

Though there's not much in the way of clouds here, I like the result anyway.

Approximately 20 minutes in Photoshop.

Here is a WIP from a large charcoal piece I did on Monday. I'm afraid I don't have a photo of the finished product at the moment, but I thought I'd show this anyway. This piece has special personal significance to me.

Strathmore 300 series bristol board, soft vine charcoal, and General's charcoal 2B, 4B, 6B. Also, a tiny touch of acrylic and india ink for the ember and its reflection in her eye.

The entire thing is about 17.1"x28". I'll have to remember to post the finished product and its story later.

Improving me: (#1) Movement!

2009-01-31T16:09:00.001-07:00

Crossposted from Aboidoodles: I have a lot of weaknesses as an artist. One of them is that I don't do movement much. Action. People (or things) in motion!

So I confronted that by having Dre, in my head, stealing something or breaking in somewhere or perhaps just getting up to general mischief, and ending up having to run around and jump over things to escape people very intent on SHOOTING HER. ...naturally she thinks this is fun as all get out.

So here's a sketch of Dreor showing her athletic, trouble-loving side.

What would you scientifically name a fairy?

2009-01-25T20:21:00.000-07:00

I know, I know. Fairies. You're making that "seriously, Kate?" face right now, I can just feeeeeeeel it.

But nevertheless, back in the day, I had a pet chameleon and a large reptarium set up for him. That is, a terrarium of sorts designed for reptiles which cannot be kept in glass cages due to temperature and humidity concerns. During that time, I got the idea in my head of drawing a vivarium of some sort...for fairies.

In my head, the image involves a sign, such as you'd see in a zoo or other exhibit, naming the species contained in the vivarium and describing them a little. And within it would be active little folk, flying or tumbling or just lounging about. Whatever. I imagine at least five individuals within the vivarium.

I might want to include a human, observing.

Anyway, I'd completely forgotten the project for the last few years. Today, while cleaning up my files for a minute, I found it again and was amused. I thought I'd share here the old sketches... One is of a vivarium, but I think I was just practicing.

I was apparently studying the posture of divers for an idea of the agile flight poses of the fairies. Good idea, self. Maybe this is worth revisiting at some point.

Want more Katedoodlery?

2009-01-23T12:25:00.000-07:00

Juuust reminding people that I often post art over at Aboidoodles that I do not post here. Be sure to check there for more goodies!

Well alright then.

2009-01-04T03:36:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I just draw crap that makes no sense. Except maybe to me.

And maybe to you.

Bad cookies. Get it? Bwahahahaha.

Make a mess, you'll feel better.

2008-12-25T18:58:00.001-07:00

I am spending my holidays in San Francisco with my best friend. She's taking a nap right now, so I am boiling grenades (cans of eagle brand to turn them into caramel for pie) and making a quick post. Here's a couple messy pages from one of my sketchbooks this past semester.

Sharpie and watercolor drawing over a distressed gel medium transfer of a map torn out of a RTD light rail pamphlet. Ultra simple, but I like it!

White acrylic paint and black sharpie over watercolor over distressed gel medium transfer of a photograph I took of a couple of hooligans (and other random passengers who happened to be present) on the light rail shortly before calling security on them for hawking stolen electronics. Loooong story. I had fun though!

Come on, get faster...

2008-12-06T03:16:00.001-07:00

I have been stuck in bed a lot the last couple days, and have done a looooot of homework. For a couple hours though, when I'd accomplished a lot and needed a break to keep from going hysterical, I decided to do character drawing exercises instead. I really want to get faster with my drawing of recognizable characters. In my opinion, I'm still way too slow. Part of the process, I think, has been cutting back on my realism. I love my pseudo-realism style, but it just takes too long. So finding a happy place between that style and a more cartoony one is probably the only way I can get faster AND not hate my own art. Heh.

Anyway.

Angie, from Aboideau
Cade, from Aboideau
Nutmeg, from Unavisi
Rue, from Aboideau
Kabur, from Unavisi

To see more Aboideau, check out the Aboidoodles blog! It and the characters therein belong to myself and to my partner-in-crime Tamara W.

To see more Unavisi, go to deviantART and do a search. The Unavisi are an invite-only creative project/race designed and belonging to Brianne Goetz. I was lucky to get an invite as a friend.

Fotologgit.

2008-12-02T09:59:00.000-07:00

This is just to note that I started a fotolog of sorts, because I carry my camera around constantly in case I come across good reference or have to photograph a criminal in the act. ...>_> Yes, I've done that.

Er, anyway, I'll try to post regularly there, since really I take a few photos a day it seems, and often video. I won't post EVERYTHING I photograph, but nevertheless, some sharing!

http://kerosenecamera.blogspot.com

Okay, my little voice acting buddies!

2008-11-29T16:35:00.001-07:00

I know I said I would get these up earlier in the week, but life is crazy like that.

Anyway, if you still want to participate, here are the storyboards. Just record any part you feel up to, or record all of them in different voices or such as you like. Make sure you leave pauses between lines for each shot, because that makes it easier for me to edit. Try to keep background noise to a minimum and avoid clicking and tapping of the mic by waiting a second or two after you hit record to start talking, and then waiting a second or two after you finish before hitting stop.

When you're done, save it as a .wav or .mp3 and email it to me, or send it to me on IM. The sooner the better, but preferably today, tomorrow, or Monday. Also, include what name you'd like to be credited as in the end! Oookay...

Also, improvisation and goofery is welcome, as long as you don't stray TOO far from the concept. Suggestions and ideas are not something I'll shoot down either!

Voice actors wanted!

2008-11-19T15:15:00.001-07:00

Anybody (who knows me from LJ or PE) want to participate in another WTF-video project this coming weekend? I need a couple voice actors, especially ones who don't mind being dorks. All you need is a clear microphone and recording program such as Skype or Audacity so you can save it as .mp3 or .wav

Don't be shy!

Vampires and foxes!

2008-11-18T04:30:00.001-07:00

The Denver Zoo has a great bat exhibit, which includes a small colony of vampire bats, which I think are utterly adorable little things. Much like hunchbacked, bizarre looking puppies, they can hop-bounce about, walk on their little thumbs, and even GALLOP.

That's right. Gallop. Fast.

The Birds Are Honest

2008-11-05T00:23:00.000-07:00

Oh yeah, baby. I went there.

I haven't had time to do a credit reel yet, so...
Foresty nature sounds --- The Free Sound Project user: dobroide
Cricket sounds --- The Free Sound Project user: monterey2000
Bird skeletons --- courtesy of Denver Museum of Nature & Science (photographed by Kate N.Y., me)
Harry --- Emma Hagan, aka Friend In Montana
Harriet --- Kat Bongard, aka Friend In New Zealand
Archibald --- "Grumpy," aka Friend In New Zealand's Dad

Kate doesn't sleep? Bird brain.

2008-11-04T01:40:00.003-07:00

What happens when I'm not getting enough sleep?

My brain turns out weird shit while I'm trying to do my homework, that's what!

The Barn: Idiom #1 (wip 3)

2008-11-03T21:00:00.000-07:00

I had a few minutes to work on stuff in this. In Premiere. TAKE THAT, FINAL CUT. Neener neener! Anyway, now with sound effects, woo!

With thanks to users from The Free Sound Project:
Foresty nature sounds --- dobroide
Creaky door sound --- HerbertBoland
Silly scream sound --- Lithe-Fider
Flapping paper sound --- cfork

I still need to push it another 8 or so seconds, and come up with three more 30 second clips, and yeah. Um. 'kay. (Um, excuse my lousy editing, I'm basically having to teach myself here and it's all new to me.)

The Barn: Idiom #1 (WIP 2)

2008-11-03T01:06:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm out of time... I'll maybe revisit this later. It's about 17 seconds too short, has no sound, and is missing half the narrative I would include if I had the time for it. There were also going to be an additional three clips with variations on the theme. But ohhhhh well. Death (aka going to sleep now).

And in case you were wondering about that squirrel...

The Barn: Idiom #1 (WIP)

2008-11-02T01:47:00.000-06:00

One of my classes this semester is video art. Unfortunately, this is also known as "the class with unrealistic financial expectations." That is to say, we are expected to shell out over $1000 for this class right at the start. And that's if we already own some of the hardware/equipment we need, and a Macintosh computer... Because I don't have money, or a Macintosh, or time to use the campus computers when it's over an hour just to GET to the campus...I have to make due with drawing animations for the current project rather than using video.

Here's a tiny 4 second snippet of the project I'm working on... Doing this much took me about six hours. I really need to go to bed, so I can work on it again tomorrow. Ugh.

Buggity bug bug...

2008-10-30T22:20:00.000-06:00

Here's a couple little sketchbook chunks from back when I went to the Museum of Nature & Science and played with dead bugs!

Materials: Prismacolor colored pencils, HB graphite pencil.

The Inuit & The Whale

2008-10-30T22:14:00.000-06:00

Okay, I'm reposting this in high quality because I got to a scanner for a while today, and because I fixed the..."typo" that I made when writing out the whale half. And also because people seem to really like it! So, uh...yeah. (Vicki says this should be a shirt.)
Materials: sketchbook paper, micron sakura brush pen, watercolor, Kate-on-too-much-caffeine.

Excerpts from my sketchbook...

2008-10-29T00:04:00.000-06:00

Here are some quick snapshots of pages from my sketchbook for this semester...

Materials: 9x12 sketchbook paper, Micron Sakura brush pen, carbothello pastel pencils, blending stumps for that pastel, random watercolor, and inkjet printed text on tracing paper

Guilt and penance...

2008-10-25T16:13:00.001-06:00

I was raised Catholic. The whole cliche about guilt? Totally not an exaggeration. Months and months ago, I started feeling guilty 'cause I was tardy with a PE drawing for someone. This, then, is my penance drawing, my attempt at apology and atonement to deal with that lingering guilt.

Jorie Rikard and her design (including accessories) is copyright © Sarah Heinemann

Lee Mynatt insisted that this was a case of "MUST COLOR" and so she did so with my permission. I like the way she handled the gun and made everything look gritty and dangerous, so I'm sharing her color rendition here!

Ugh...stop it, whim-OCD-brain...

2008-10-25T01:40:00.000-06:00

I have redrawn this a billion times since it was started a billion ages ago. I need to stop doing that and just finish it.
But I can't. I want it to look good, so help me! It is a problem, this obsession with things looking good...looking RIGHT. Lee and I give each other a hard time on it now and then.

Sometimes, when I'm drawing, I suddenly develop what I call artist's tourrete's: I cuss like crazy, for no apparent reason, even though I'm enjoying the drawing. This seems to come out more when I am redrawing something than when I have drawn it for the first time. Consequently, this drawing has earned more collective profanities than any other! Woo!

The full flourfy...

2008-10-17T16:06:00.000-06:00

Aaaand here is the full "flourfy" image! Custom brush used to create the border pattern.

A commission for a wedding reception table centerpiece, done for my dear friend Zodi, who got married October 4th. I am very happy for her and wish I could have made it, but money and school prevented that. Regardless, she had a good wedding to a good man, and that makes me happy.

Zodi loves birds, and long-tailed hummingbirds are high on her list. Instead of the traditional rice toss, she had people blowing on bird whistles.

This is quite possibly the corniest thing I've ever drawn, and almost embarrassing for a somewhat-tomboy like me. But because I love my girl, I am putting this up!

Love, Zo! Don't go running off with any sexy Italians on your honeymoon!

Aboidoodles...

2008-10-04T00:22:00.000-06:00

Tam and I decided to start a blog on which we could dump all of our Aboidoodles. So from now on, I highly recommend checking out http://aboidoodles.blogspot.com/ for extra artwork!

...we'd appreciate it?

New adjective: flourfy...

2008-10-04T00:16:00.000-06:00

I just can't think of how else to describe this thing...

I mean, seriously...how would you describe it? Anyway, uhhh, sneak peek-ish? I'll upload the image this is from to deviantART sometime tomorrow, most likely!

Aboidoodles: Kip (1)

2008-10-03T00:51:00.000-06:00

I did a quick headshot today for my gal Tam, because she is my dearest partner-in-crime and needed some smartass medic boy to fill her with giddy. Heh. So here is Peter "Kip" Kipson the Fourth, one smirky little jerk whom we can't help but love.

'Toom 'Tempt 1...

2008-10-02T11:45:00.000-06:00

For a long time, I've been wanting to develop a quick, cartoonish style of drawing that I could potentially use for sequentials or short comic strips. I've tried a few different ways, but I've never settled on one that I'm really happy with.

I figured it was time to start trying to develop that skill again, so I took a break from homework for ten minutes today and scribbled a figure. So here's that. Now I'm off to the Forney Museum to look at antique "things with wheels" (trains, cars, carriages, etc) and creepy wax people. And draw them. 'Cause it's for a class expedition. Yep, yep. Woo! Hi, ho, silver awayyyy...

You would think being an arts major would mean more art, but...

2008-09-29T09:08:00.000-06:00

I haven't had much time to draw stuff lately. At least, not digitally. Classwork is consuming my soul and it's starting to take a toll. Sometimes, when I haven't gotten to work on personal projects for an extended amount of time, I lose brain power. I start to do poorly in classes.

Luckily, I have one class this semester that lets me draw almost whatever I want, whenever I want, for a grade. But unluckily, I don't own a scanner and so I have a hard time getting access to one long enough to scan things to show here. Ah...well.

I sure hope I can find time to do ME stuff soon, especially working on Aboideau, because I miss it very much and it's occupying my brainmeat heavily.

In the meantime, here's a quick doodle done of Angelcita/Angie last night when I couldn't think anymore to work on my synthesis paper for a class. I've been meaning to revamp Angelcita's portrait for a while, since the previous one is so outdated that it's not even accurate to her existence in Aboideau anymore. Whoops?

Puffy sketchy...

2008-09-16T21:33:00.000-06:00

I think I'm starting to have a real "thing" for dandelion clocks.

"Clocks" is the term for the head of the dandelion after it has turned into a fluffy globe of seeds.

Kagen and the Eland (post one)...

2008-09-14T14:59:00.000-06:00

Another sketch from one of my sketchbooks, this time done with carbothello pastel pencils and a blending stump.

My artist's journal class had gone to the Museum of Nature and Science downtown and gotten a private room to study a ton of pin-dried arthropod specimens. Ever see that scene in the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom movie, where that HUGE insect crawls through the chick's hair? We got to see some of those insects, and they were much bigger in real life, I swear. It was FANTASTIC!

...anyway. One of the specimens was a mantis, and I love mantises (I love a lot of insects and arachnids, for the record). I went home and looked up some of the old records of bushmen folktales from the late 1800s that were in the manuscripts of the Lloyd and Bleek Collection. I wish I had full access to the collection, but my college isn't among the participating institutions...grr. Anyway. I read up a lot, from there and other resources, on Kaggen/Kagen/Cagn the Mantis, a superbeing (not really a full deity by bushman concept) and especially enjoyed the stories of him and the Eland.

Supposedly, when Kagen discovered the newborn eland and learned its name (stories vary on how this came to pass, from Kagen's wife the Dassie birthing it after he punished her to his creation of it in secret on his own, to having turned another being's shoe into the eland), he hid it away in seclusion and nourished it on honey which he was supposed to be taking home to his wife. A relative, the Meerkat/suricat, discovers this and goes to find the eland. Not knowing of Kagen's purpose for the Eland and being a selfish and presumptuous individual, he slaughters the Eland and makes it into meat. Kagen is griefstricken on discovering the murder of his pet, and says that from that point forward, because the Suricat had spoiled the eland for its true purpose, the suricat must always hunt the eland. Supposedly this is the origin of both the eland, the largest antelope in Africa, and the ritual of hunting among the bushmen. Certain rules, according to Bushman rituals, must be followed to successfully hunt and kill an eland, or otherwise Kagen protects them and will not let them come to harm by the hunters.

...um. Anyway. So I just found the idea of Kagen the Mantis caring for the Eland so affectionately (he also had a pet springbok which was once stolen by an elephant who replaced the little antelope with her own calf, which Kagen did not appreciate at all -- he killed the calf) to be a very intriguing story.

I'm of a mind to, at some point, attempt to illustrate a short storybook in which I could revise the stories of Kagen to make for a good children's story.

Tell it to the bees...

2008-09-11T20:22:00.001-06:00

One of the sketches from one of my sketchbooks this year, which I only got a chance to scan because I had two minutes with a school scanner. Heh.

For centuries, it has been a tradition in beekeeping families to "tell it to the bees" when a member of the family dies. Usually it's a child who goes down to the hives immediately after the person has passed and informs the bees that a beekeeper has died. Later, the bees are given a portion of the funeral cake or some other sweet to feast on, and they are formally invited to attend the person's funeral. There have actually been several recorded cases where the bees did, in fact, honor the invitation and come to the funeral. It has also been suggested in beekeeper folklore that the bees will not only empathize with the family in the event of a beekeeper death if told of it, but ensure that the soul has safe passage to the afterlife.

Much of the folklore surrounding beekeeping, and the rituals of beekeepers and their families, really intrigues me. I find it sweet and quite spiritually admirable at times.

Either way, this sketch was inspired by the idea of "tell it to the bees" and the insects' escort of the beekeeper's soul.
Prismacolor colored pencils, black fine point ink pens on recycled sketchbook paper.

Head haunting poetry and how to blink...

2008-07-25T03:05:00.000-06:00

I've had this little three-line poem thing in my head for, I kid you not, over a year. Today, inspired by another artist's moleskin visual poetry artwork, I decided to go ahead and do something with the haunting in my head... I'm calling it "Weather Regret" because I have always visualized it as something you write on a wet window pane...and then walk away from, and "whether" or not I regret the fact the poem narrates is something that depends on the shift of moods in my head...like the weather in the skies, if I'm gloomy I may regret this, and if I'm not...I'm almost glad of it.

I recently animated a drawing of myself to "blink" and each time the eyelid opens, different text is written on the eye instead of an iris and pupil, with a little fact about who/what I am. Eventually, it cycles back around to a normal eye again, perpetually looping. A blink is a very basic animation, but it is a good one to learn from. I thought I'd show what I, personally, use as steps in animating an eye blink...

Step 1: Open eye. Have the eye as open as it's going to be.

Step 2: On a new layer, recolor the skin (in this case it was just a green background color) over the eyelashes slightly. On a second new layer, redraw the eyelashes a little lower this time. Include an eyelid crease. My eyelid has two creases, so I have them squished against each other in this step.

Step 3: Repeat step 2, but lower the eyelid even more, and this time I separated the eyelid creases ever so slightly, as the skin is now starting to stretch a bit and be less squished together.

Step 4: Repeat step 3, but also start making the eyelashes a little longer. As the eyelid lowers, you can see the eyelashes from an increasingly different perspective and should be able to see more of their length as they are no longer pointed at the viewer. Note that this is the halfway point, and so only half of the eyeball is showing.

Step 5: I always think this one looks a bit creepy. The step after the "middle" stage of the blink tends to have very separated eyelid creases that are almost parallel lines and relatively straight, very much longer eyelashes, and less than half of the eyeball showing (which is the creepy look, in my opinion).

Step 6: Repeat step 5, but by now only the slightest glimpse of eyeball should be showing under the much much longer eyelashes. The lower eyelid crease should know curve just sliiightly the opposite direction of the upper eyelid crease. This helps to give the impression that the skin is being pulled downward.

Step 7: At this point, the eyelid is completely down. Your eye is closed. Your eyelashes are at their longest and should overlap the lower eyelashes. The lower eyelid crease should be more strongly curved than in step 6.

I then open the photoshop file in ImageReady and use the animation toolset to create a frame-by-frame sequence. The "Step 1" eye gets 3.5 seconds to show before the "Step 2" frame begins, for this particular animation, because it needs to go fast enough for people to still be looking at it when the first text appears instead of a normal eye. However, if you're doing a more natural looking blink, I recommend keeping the eye on "Step 1" for at least 5 seconds. Step 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 get .01 seconds to show each. After "Step 7", I then "climb back down the ladder" by putting in "Step 6", then 5, 4, 3, 2, and then that's all. I set the animation to "loop forever" so that when it gets past the second showing of "Step 2", it cycles back to the first frame, the one of the open eye in "Step 1". This creates the illusion of perpetual blinking.

Then I save the image, optimized as necessary, as a .gif, and have an animated blinking face doodad. Woohoo.

For added variety, create more frames with alternative eye behaviors, such as gradually moving the eyeball to look to the side, or perhaps make it "roll". Here's an example, an icon I animated for a friend of a wall-eyed kitty she'd drawn.

I was yelled at to update.

2008-07-22T01:37:00.000-06:00

I have been...not here? Heh. Well anyway, "someone" yelled at me to update this thing, so...I'm going to do so in the worst way.

The following are a bunch of images which I shall blithely neglect to explain in any manner. Suffice to say, instead, that they are things I have drawn and/or been working on for some project or other for the last couple months. Many of them are incomplete thus far. SO THERE.

Chestnut copyright © Gaia Gandolfo
Unavisi concept and project copyright © Brianne Goetz

Lion copyright © Ruth Collins
Unavisi concept and project copyright © Brianne Goetz

Raven copyright © Elle Skinner

Timber copyright © Marissa S. Pittman

Grace Black copyright © Julie Davis

Aidan copyright © Amy

The following are images done as personal projects or as portions of work-in-progress commissions...

Song (well, more of a ditty really): "Muhammad Ali"

2008-05-28T12:54:00.000-06:00

This one is for all my under-age-30 buddies trying to find summer jobs. I'm with you!

Um...warning. I did this in a goofy style. I didn't breathe enough. And I was making it up as I went. Eh heh. Yeahhh, it's bad. (Though apparently also funny to some people?)

So, uh, yeah. I'll post the words if anybody wants them buuut I doubt you will. lol

I scribble a toon?

2008-05-27T12:28:00.000-06:00

Okay, not really a toon. More like a short bust-sequential thingy? Errr...either way. While talking with Lindsay a few days back, we got it in our heads to do quick doodles of each other. This was mine...

Photoshop, Wacom Intuos3.

Self in Season: I Blow Away

2008-05-17T20:33:00.000-06:00

I've decided this is a part of a series, actually, with my personal thoughts per season of the year (spring, summer, fall, winter), since I used myself as reference to create the face. I have idea sketches for the next two done. This one is autumn/fall.

Day in the life of an mp3 player...

2008-05-17T20:12:00.000-06:00

So here's seven panels from a sorta-kinda narrative I did for my DrawingII final this semester. These are such crap photos, everything looks wonky. I'll maybe scan them after this coming Tuesday.

Out of curiosity, at the moment, which is your favorite? Second favorite? My top fave is "Hand in My Pocket", followed by "First Day of My Life" and then "Old Fashioned Love Song"... Least favorite is "We Went For a Ride". Haaate it. I can't make it look good no matter what I try. I should've gone with my first instinct and made it a plains-country highway.

These were done with Nupastels (aka, chalk pastels, soft pastels) and CarbOthello pastel pencils (another form of chalk/soft pastels) on various colors of Canson Mi-Teintes pastel paper.

A little bit of photo-stop-animation music video thingamajig, anyone?

2008-05-17T18:08:00.000-06:00

Hey, who remembers the "cocaine" project? Nobody? Right. Well! Errr...here it is. Partly. Sort of. So here's a...sort of like a music video, I guess. At some point, I want to finish the rest of the song out properly, since Sia is a wonderful brand of ridiculous ~~and may pimp it in some way, which would be great for my resume. >_>~~ (Edit note 6/1/08: I totally just left a message for her with a link to my blog so she could see the vid if she wanted to and oh crap, that sounded so embarrassing now so I put a strike through it because altogether removing it would make me a coward!)

-- Thanks to Zodi for finding the MonkeyJam program when I panicked about how to pull it all together properly.
-- Uber thanks to Peta and Vicki for staying up late to help me try to finish this at one point. Though I didn't use your words in the end (since I had time to shoot them myself after that), you girls kept me from panicking and giving up. <333
-- Thanks to my baby sister and to the semi-adopted sister Kim for help with writing a few words.
-- Thanks to all y'all who've been listening to me go slightly insane doing this for the last week or two

Materials:
Baking soda, table salt for the fake "cocaine" mixture.
Two nylon paintbrushes and two straight razor blades to move the powder mixture around.
Black boards stolen from a couple of my art storage pockets.
My dear and lovely Casio Exilim digital camera.
PLiska Image Resizer to resize all my photographs to a more manageable size in one big batch.
"The Girl You Lost to Cocaine" by Sia (note: no permission gained)
Audacity to edit the song to a shorter length and to measure the length of each word.
MonkeyJam to piece together some 600 frames in match with the audio track.

(Note: the three above-mentioned programs are all freeware. Try 'em!)

My brain thinks sleep is overrated.

2008-05-02T02:04:00.000-06:00

So it told me it wasn't going to let me sleep until I executed this idea. So I got BACK out of bed, did it, and am going to go back to bed now. Guh. Will rework the crappy parts of the letters later.

I actually happen to LIKE sleep, brain. So shut up!

Lemon drops project (fin?)

2008-04-27T21:10:00.000-06:00

Lemon drops when I was finished with it. There was a lot about it that disappointed me, but oh well. It wasn't my intended thing anyway.

...I'm bleh y. I'll talk about this one later maybe. Heh.

Cocaine project (2)...

2008-04-25T12:20:00.000-06:00

I'm in class right now, but we're at lunch break. I've been working off and on on the cocaine project (it's for this class). I thought I'd show the development.

Things changed:
- polaroids
- razor blade
- consideration for depth of objects, shadows, reflections
- tape
Er...basically everything except the powder itself. And there's a lot still VERY wrong that will be tweaked.

A lot left to develop, add, subtract, manipulate, and sooo many words left to work out.

Shifty Lover (mp3)

2008-04-25T02:48:00.000-06:00

Sometimes I sing (badly) and record it. In this case, it was partly a character song, but also a general song at all. My character Dreor is complicated and trying to explain how she loves completely but is a difficult lover to have is hard to get across. She's a bit of a mess, but she likes who she is and could never change totally, no matter how being in love might bring out another side of her. But this song also happened because I think love is never perfect, and neither are people. Sometimes love is a different flavor than that romanticized and fairy-taled style we so often believe until we get a taste of reality.

This is NOT my typical or preferred style for singing, but since folks were sleeping in the house at the time, I had to keep it down and sing almost under my breath. I wanted to get it down before I forgot the melody (I can't read/write music). Er, so here it is. Sorry 'bout the awful sound quality and the weird clicks.

Lyrics:
Let me love you
And adore you
But don't let me get too near
I can kiss like
Sun and honey
But my mood may disappear
You've been nothing
But understanding
You've adapted and let go
You've weathered rages with such patience
So surely you cannot be thrown

Sometimes I scream away the mornin'
Sometimes I tear the day apart
Sometimes I just don't wanna love you
But that doesn't stop my heart

I'll do tender
I'll do sweetly
Until I change my mind again
You can hold me
You control me
Until I start craving some sin
It's not like you
Didn't know this
It's not like you couldn't see
When I whisper my "I love you"s
Remember it's not always me

Sometimes I scream away the mornin'
Sometimes I tear the day apart
Sometimes I just don't wanna love you
But that doesn't stop my heart

Sometimes I scream away the evening
Sometimes I tear our world apart

Sometimes I refuse to be gentle
Sometimes I get a little mean
Sometimes I act so wildchild
But you're the quiet inside me

Let me love you
I adore you
But don't let me get too near
And if I claim that I don't love you
Just pretend you didn't hear

First of all, I ain't a druggie.

2008-04-25T02:42:00.000-06:00

New project! Loooong way to go, so this is all I'll say for now...

The cocaine is fake.

Materials: black mat board, dry paint brushes, baking soda, table salt, casio digital camera, photoshop cs, intuos3 tablet. Yeehaw!

I have an objective eye and subjective hands.

2008-04-18T00:53:00.000-06:00

We had a couple days of lifedrawing on top of regular assignments in one of my classes this week. I love lifedrawing. I love drawing people. I love figures. I love the beauty and metaphor that I can find in a curve of a spine, the fall of light on a cheekbone, how the thigh meets the hip when folded just so...

Anna (instructor) told me a couple years ago that I should take the lifedrawing courses offered at our school, that I belong in them and would enjoy them and so forth. She repeated that, two or three times, this week. It amused me. I also got a couple "Kate, you suck!" comments, which always make me feel quite the ego boost (it's a compliment and they say it with a grin). Somebody get the needle for poppin'. Our class had a few really good people on it (Lori Clark and Bill, for instance, were doing gorgeous ones. Lori's especially were like little finished quality pieces all on their own).

Anyway. Monday, we did a lot of gesturals and then a longer sitting which was broken up by the model taking "breaks" which I hate, because they never return to that pose they were in at the start no matter how they were marked out with tape. The woman had a very unhappy face, but lots of interesting pudge and proportion to work with. Anna had wanted us to start with contour drawings of the entire basic shapes in colored pencil. I, rebel that I am, blocked out the shape of the head and shoulders and fist and then started establishing rough facial features -- in CarbOthello pencil! Hahaha. I'm wicked. By the time Anna came around the first time, I'd established her down to the belly folds. Anna asked me to correct the face, shave some off the far side of it and pull the nose over. I nodded and went along with it, and then ignored the advice when she moved on. lol I know what I know, and I knew that when I'd started, the model had been facing that way, not the way Anna thought. And I knew I didn't want to move or change her, so I didn't. Later, Anna wanted us to fill in values with colored pencil in actual fleshtone. Rebelling again, I went for a greenish-yellow, an whiteish-yellow, a blue, and a pale rose in NuPastel. Hahaha, I cannot be stopped! By the time Anna came around again, I had most of what I wanted. She admitted that it looked great and she didn't advise any changes -- even though I hadn't changed the things she'd asked me to! I love Anna, she's a great instructor and very knowledgeable. But I'm of the opinion that agreeing with teachers all the time just because they're teachers/authorities in the classroom? Is dumb. Sometimes you go with your gut, and you should be able to be happy doing so.

Wednesday's model was a native american (I think) man. I really really really wanted to focus on his face or his feet because they were very neat (he had a funny tic in one foot too). But when we got through with gesturals and moved into the longer sitting, he had his back to me and I couldn't move to a spot where he didn't. Anna wanted us to do subtraction method with oil pastels for that drawing, so I threw down a layer of bright orange on dark blue paper (osnap, complimentary contrast, woo!) and went at it with the x-acto. I haven't tried that method before so it took a while to figure out. When I realized I could use what I scraped off to add back into the image, that helped a lot! I got a few more "Kate, you suck" compliments (hehehe), and I didn't get to see anyone else's (except Lori's, which was of course freaking awesome because she's wonderful like that).

I hate oil pastel. My hands are still a little bit orange. Ugh ugh ugh, itchy.

I think it's worth noting that these were done in the dark, because we have to keep all the blinds and doors closed when nude models are present to prevent issues with people from outside the class, and the lighting in our classroom SUCKS.

The jellies continue...

2008-04-18T00:26:00.000-06:00

The jellyfish were requested for display (I'm on a roll with getting things on display!) so I added a few more panels, did a little editing to a couple of old ones, and rearranged their composition. I think this new arrangement makes more sense overall and sort of mirrors the jellyfish themselves, though I feel as if there should be paths of connection via overlap from top left to bottom right, instead of this divide in the middle. I also think I want to add more panels with jellyfish, and continue to repeat that trick of the jellyfish escaping the rectangles/squares that I did with a couple of the upper pieces.

I have yet to get a photograph that is true to color of this collection, gosh darnit!

Anyway, jellyfish continue!

I am a horrible braggart.

2008-04-13T18:49:00.001-06:00

This post is just to boast that: hey! Lookit what I got the header of this blog to do! I figured out how to modify the html of the layout so that I could embed a flash file for the header image, and thus there is now my chameleon poppin' off his colors at the top. Baha, wiiiin.

For references' sake, the font in the image is called "bleeding cowboys" and can be found here: http://www.dafont.com/bleeding-cowboys.font It's made by Last Soundtrack, who happens to be the author of several of my favorite fonts.

Birdoom!

2008-04-12T23:16:00.000-06:00

Righto then! Here's a page of doodlery from my current sketchbook, dedicated with all due ♥♥♥ for my dear Zodi. I actually doodled these as practice for the wedding present I'm making her.

I think the cormorant is my favorite (yes, Jeromie, you were right; not an albatross - shut up). He just looks so...cutely mischievous/ghastly somehow. lol Maybe because cormorants' faces are so similar to plague doctors'? Hm.

So anyway...

♥♥♥, Zodi!
-- your Cake

The Ink & I

2008-04-12T13:35:00.000-06:00

So here's a fun little series I did a few weeks back for one of my digital imaging classes. We were doing "scanner art" (I was the only one calling it that, I think) for an assignment: putting things on a scanner, scanning them, and doing little editing before printing them as pieces.

I have a decent collection of india inks and acrylic inks, which I like to draw with using colour shapers from time to time. So I got the idea into my head of putting ink (wet stuff!) on the scanner (electrical device, oh no!) and letting it run wild. It was a sort of exploration of the relationship between the artist and the artist's medium. Is it a partnership, with artist and medium cooperating to produce? A dictatorship by the artist in which all movement is tightly controlled? More of a master and assistant interaction, with the artist making most movements and the medium as the assistant to make creative suggestions here and there?

In art, as in many other fields, there is a theory of children producing the only "pure" art, creating without outside influence playing into their thought or process. When others, parents or teachers or friends or whatnot, step in and offer direction or commentary, the purity of the child's ability is tainted, and thereafter all art has borders and control forced into its every fiber.

It felt to me as if the ink were representative of the pure child, and I was the kindergarten teacher who stepped in to instill method over madness. Both of us could produce beauty, but was one product more beautiful than another?

How it was done: I placed an empty picture frame on the scanner to act as a containing wall, then placed saran wrap inside to protect the scanner from the ink. Then I dumped ink on that saran wrap and let it run wild. I could only choose when to hit SCAN. I could not "preview" a scan, since the ink would have moved again by the time I approved a preview. After that, I could only choose scans to include in the series, and the only editing I did was to straighten the cedar picture frame before printing. The pieces where I stepped in and took away the ink's freedom to create as it would were done by removing the picture frame and pulling up the saran wrap (in the diptych part), or by pressing pieces of ripped up paper and my hand into the runaway ink before balling it up into a form (the triptych part).

Overall, this series was fun to execute. I have a tendency to look for projects that will be fun for me to make rather than impressive to view. Still, my instructor took it from me to put on display for a week, which made it the second of my pieces this semester that was chosen to be put on display. I'm on a roll!

EPIC: We Were Small (4)

2008-04-10T17:13:00.000-06:00

Oh no! More tiny people! Aaaaaah!

EPIC: We Were Small (3)

2008-04-10T15:32:00.000-06:00

Smack talk!

2008-04-09T21:35:00.000-06:00

Y'all remember the jellies? >_> Yeahhh, well, I'm a goofball.

Where troubles melt like lemon drops (sketch)...

2008-04-08T23:08:00.000-06:00

Okay, I might have an opportunity to execute a concept that's been vaguely floating in my head. Granted, not the way I wanted to do it, since the assignment parameters won't allow that, but still!

This here is the 5" 'thumbnail' sketch I worked out in my sketchbook during class to help plot the composition. It'll be 12" tall, maybe 14" long? I don't know yet, I'll figure that out.

The lemon drops will have to extend a bit toward the lower part of the image the way they do toward the upper as well, I think. They also need to go further into the bg. It was just a small sketch and I didn't have an eraser, hehe.

I'm thinking I'll do the image in chalk pastel, frisket saving the spots for the text because we're required to do text transfer for this assignment. I'll just work the pastel in over the text once it's added. I haven't picked a font yet.

Basically, there's going to be "troubles" on some of the lemon drops. Things like: hate, war, disease, shame, pain, fear, jealousy, poverty, hunger, slavery, famine, prejudice, regret, guilt...

I'm not sure yet which words to use, since only so many can work with the image. I'm also not really entirely certain what font to use.

Thoughts, y'all?

EPIC: We Were Small (2)

2008-03-28T21:35:00.000-06:00

Another image from my EPIC: We Were Small book. This one was taken in a Footlocker store at the mall. The guys there seemed quite bewildered about what I was asking them for permission to do. Normally, stores are very adamant there about cameras staying out. I have been threatened by a security dude there once because he thought I was photographing window displays. Lucky me, with my talent for talking my way in and out of almost everything.

Anyway, the Footlocker boys were polite and very amused watching me set my figure up and then my macro to take the photo. It took several tries to get what I wanted, this strange parody of a climbing wall or a monument. 2 for $89.99.

Some editing was necessary, as there were some unfortunate bars disrupting the scale contrast in the bottom right. I think I got them all out fairly well.

Oh my darlin', oh my darlin'...

2008-03-27T20:58:00.000-06:00

...oh my daaaarlin' Clementiiiine. Hehe. Morbid song, that'un. Well, either how. One of my Unavisi characters is Clementine. Here's some art farts of her.

Designing Clem's getup was a blast. We have all sortsa influences there. Ten points if you can find and name 'em all!

There are no firearms in the Unavisi world, per design of Brianne, who owns the Unavisi concept, so coming up with a suitable alternative for Clem meant bullshittin' with the idea of a crossbow-rifle and making it look MORE like a .22 rifle. I didn't study the physics of crossbows quite as much as I maybe should have before drawing it, and it shows. Ah, well. Live some, learn some.

Now, as to Clem's face, well. I've pictured her for a couple years (only got to draw her recently) as resembling actress Kate Hudson in terms of facial structure...if little else.

So yup! Clementine is copyright me, Kate NY. The Unavisi concept and overall design is copyright Brianne Goetz (http://brianne333.deviantart.com & http://www.sacredkith.com).

Media used: Photoshop CS and Wacom Intuos3 tablet and Wacom Graphire4 tablet.

To plot, to plan, but when's it pan?

2008-03-26T00:23:00.000-06:00

I am incredibly prone to planning images that never get finished. It's a fault and a frustration. I thought though, that I'd share a couple of the planning sketches for pieces I want very badly to finish for myself someday.

This one is of three Unavisi characters. The Unavisi are a concept belonging to Brianne Goetz (http://www.sacredkith.com & http://brianne333.deviantart.com), a dear friend. The guy playing the clown is my boy Mac (aka Macadamien). The other fellow, Kopek, and the little boy Huckleberry are Mac's kinda-sorta-buddy-family of a kind, and copyright Mel Miller (http://melmillerart.blogspot.com & http://anathemasremedy.deviantart.com).

This one was a plan for an image of a character of mine, Angelcita Black, and another character who shall remain anonymous for the time being but is obviously a child. I struggled with plotting the positioning for Angie's wings. Angie is a character from Aboideau, an ongoing personal project I share with Tamara Williamson (http://www.interbalstudios.com). Hoorah, pat-a-cake!

Ah, that's all for now because I'm half-asleep.

Er, obviously these are digital sketches. Done in Photoshop CS with a Wacom tablet. Yeehaw.

Sketch dump! #1

2008-03-24T14:44:00.000-06:00

Left: 4 inch tall doodle done in the dark during class. Haha. Mechanical pencil and prismacolor pencils.

Right: Just some various sketches and doodles. Actually, I kinda like the asian face in the upper right. Hm. Digital, via Photoshop and Wacom Intuos3.

A class exercise that happened to be my first ever experience with watercolor, and also with Prismacolor pencils. Uhhh...yeah. I was cranky that day, can you tell?

EPIC: We Were Small (1)

2008-03-23T19:06:00.001-06:00

For the current project in one of my classes, we all made up a list of words, put them in a hat, and each drew one out. I drew "tranquility" but wasn't feeling it, and REALLY wanted "epic." I managed to make a trade for it, hoorah!

Well, word drawn and all, the rest of the assignment consists of taking at least 24 photographs to represent this word. While it seems a lot of my classmates are favoring the idea of random images that interpret the word, I had a clear idea in my head before we even drew the words from the hat. Thus the reason I wanted "epic" so badly.

Since the final format of this is supposed to be a "book" of some sort, I decided it would be fun to make a semi-narrative. I intend to carry these little guys and others I collected for the project, who are less than an inch tall, around with me for a week or two, putting them in situations which are, for them, epic. But it's also meant to contrast them with the big bad world, ours, huge and seemingly absurd, and to find funny new interpretations of common scenes we take for granted. Mostly, I wanted to have fun, push the project with humor, and make something that I, or my friends or sisters, could enjoy after it was done.

I took this particular one at the local mall at the indoor "pond" that is just a glorified fountain in the center of the place. I took others there as well, but those will come later. It drew a bit of a crowd, I guess because people couldn't see what I was photographing and then when they could they couldn't figure out why. I can't tell you how many times over the course of the shooting I did there I was asked "what are those?" and "did you make those?" and "is this for one of the stores?"

...I could get a real kick out of making an ad campaign of some sort out of these for the mall. I once worked there for a while in a bookstore, and they insisted on employees calling it
a "retail resort." Yeahhh...MALL MALL MALL MALL MALL. Neener neener.

So how do you like my title? Haha.

Wall o' Jellies!

2008-03-23T15:00:00.000-06:00

Another assignment from this semester involved the concept of "grid" as contemporary composition. Most people chose to do a straightforward grid, a single image divided into nine same-sized parts and put in a square-style arrangement. I wanted to work with jellyfish and I didn't feel that arrangement would work with the idea of jellyfish, the way they overlap and entangle and spread and cloud the sea as they travel in groups. Consequently, I ended up getting a little more...varied and organic with my cropping and arrangement. I wanted to create an illusion of depth and distance through size and overlap and placement of each portion.

Chalk/dry pastel was the required medium for this project. Hoorah for that! Chalk pastel is my favorite color traditional medium (charcoal being my favorite traditional medium period). I have been toying with a gigantic box of nupastel chalk pastels for years on various surfaces. So doing this was fun. Add to it that I love jellyfish and it just got better.

One big source of pride for me in this piece was doing the bubbles entirely from imagination. I'm usually very dependent on references, and while I only looked at photos of Monterey Bay Aquarium lion's mane jellyfish and similar for understanding of shape, I didn't have to look at a photo at ALL for the bubbles. ...I realize that's not very impressive to most people, but to me it was an accomplishment.

The piece was decently received in critique. There was quite a lot of argument as to which jellyfish was the best, and some people opted to declare particular sets of bubbles as their favorites. Grades have not been handed back on it yet and won't for another week from now, but I feel moderately confident that it was an A work.

This cruddy photo was taken when I quickly put them up on a living room wall before exiling the poor jellies to a shoebox. Hopefully they'll be able to come back out sometime, because I think I'd like to add some more parts, perhaps turn it into a mural of a sort.

Media used: Stabilo CarbOthello pastel pencils, a couple Prismacolor NuPastel color sticks (a light blue and the white at one point), tortillons and blending stumps. Canson Mi-Teintes paper in champagne color.
Dimensions: N/A

Self Portrait: Charcoal Insomnia

2008-03-23T12:54:00.000-06:00

So here we have a less than glamorous photo of a less than glamorous self-portrait done in charcoal for an assignment in a class this semester.

Charcoal is my favorite traditional media, and the only one I am comfortable enough with to feel like I can always get the result I really wanted.

The photo I used as reference for this was taken during one of my bouts of really hardcore insomnia, which I have suffered since I was maybe eleven years old. Ironically, I ended up doing about 75% of the work on this piece during a night of insomnia as well.

The portrait was well-received in critique by my classmates and instructor, earned an A+, and was requested for display at the school. It ended up not going on display when I couldn't make it in to campus the day they needed it for hanging.

Yes, my eyes are that crazy.

Media used: Alphacolor CHAR-KOLE sticks, General's charcoal 2B/4B/6B pencils, Winsor & Newton extra soft vine charcoal, blending stump, kneaded eraser. Strathmore paper, will have to check what lb.
Dimensions: N/A

Agh, it's nigh to 1 AM. My eyes hurt.

2008-03-23T00:49:00.001-06:00

Well now. This is just to go "oh crap, I have a blog" and act as a first time placeholder or whatnot. So...yeahhhhhup. Here it is, kids.

Now where's my bed?