Think About Birds

I've been working on my final for Colorworks all day. These are the first two pieces from a three-part series. I had some compositional issues with the third piece (the material from that adventure will be posted as soon as I have a scanner) so I've been painting the other two. In fact, the first round of acrylic glazes on that second piece is drying on my desk right now. I'm going to come back to it tomorrow; at the moment, all I see is purple.





I really have been working all day, except to eat Pop Tarts and watch Rescuers: Down Under with my future roommate and her current roommate. I spent the entire movie ripping out four rows from the shoulders of my sweater, but I've finally started knitting again. I (hopefully) have all the yarn I'll need to finish this eternal sweater, just in time for summer.

Alternatives To Writing My Term Paper

In between reading about sixteenth century Flemish benches and recoloring my comic book homework, I colored a couple of sketches that had been floating in my sketchbook.


This was a proposal for a book my comic book class is (hypothetically) putting together, featuring comics about how to do (and not do) a few everyday things. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to draw a squid.


And this is the result of listening to a lot of Of Montreal over the last few weeks.

Critique

Like, I assume, most people, I spend kind of a lot of time thinking about my flaws. Some of these are bizarre enough to draw, hopefully.

And so I present three instances of self obsession, all from my sketchbook and inked with Faber-Castell pens, my new darling tool.






This last one was inked with a brush pen and then colored in Photoshop with my (this semester, at least) tragically neglected graphics tablet.


And now I am incredibly sad that it's Sunday and I can't get a perfect burrito from Watermark.

A Long Time Later

Okay! After a couple of near tries, I am finally, finally updating this thing, and the result is what can only be refered to as an art dump!

Granted, it's only four pieces, wretchedly photographed, but each is so terribly new and unique.


This is a gouache color study for an N. C. Wyeth painting. I did the final in acrylic glazes for my Colorworks class, only to find out during my critique that the image I was working from was far, far away from what the original painting looked like. Still, the whole thing made me take a very patient look at color and the use of glazes, and this study reminded me how very much I love gouache, even when it isn't entirely cooperative.



This was a three-week in class painting, using acrylic glazes again. Please ignore most of the painting; I'm posting this because I love the face of the woman in the coat. I did it with some careful observation and just three glazes. It's these sort of almost-effortless, almost-accidental successes that make me feel comforted as an artist (and more so as a student).



Here is yet another example of mushy anatomy for an artistic anatomy assignment, but I love the shapes of color. I did this in sepia and white conte crayon on really soft, tan paper that turned green as soon as the conte hit it. (Thanks, color theory!)

I whiled away my entire afternoon on this last piece. I've been dying to play around with Sculpey and actually make a real, live object, so this is a 3d model of a character I designed for my Colorworks final. (It's three or four sequential pieces, about a boy who's obsessed with birds and what ensues. I'm hoping to use the cuteness that is so omnipresent in my illustration pieces along with a bit of darkness. It's always a fun combination; I just have to consciously try to keep the bite in my work.)

I used Styrofoam and armature wire inside so, sadly, I probably won't bake him.





And here he is on an Altoids tin, for a sense of scale.



Coming next: work from my comic book class and a pile of weird sketchbook drawings, hopefully within the next few days.