Limited Palette

Still more work from this week and a couple of weeks before.

This is another piece for the same Editorial assignment.

This hasn't been critiqued yet, so I'm not sure how well it reads, but the review mentioned the mountainous Irish landscape and a highly symbolic dead robin. (Consider that a big hint.)
The piece is a linoleum block print with watercolor washes.

And, for Style and Substance, a full page illustration for James Thurber's "A Box to Hide In."

This is watercolor with gauche. I love gauche. Sometimes I forget exactly how much I love it. There's a class spring semester called "Wicked Watercolor,"so perhaps this love will expand to watercolor as well.

A Change in Tone

Two black and white (and red) pieces from a couple of weeks ago:


This was a spot for Editorial for a book review. The book is about a man who returns to his hometown in Ireland and promtly goes insane. It was a little intimidating to work with such a dark subject, but I enjoyed being a little more free than usual with the watercolor. This was done with black and indigo watercolor, Speedball ink, gel medium, and white gauche.

For "What's Your Story:"



This is a comic from a personal memory, i.e., the first and only time I ever fainted, which happened to be on the subway in New York. I owe a lot to Ian Falconer for the color palette. The pages were inked with a brush, lettered with a pen, and toned with charcoal pencil and a red pastel pencil.

Absolut Illustration

I'm relatively sure that every student in illustration has to do a piece inspired by Absolut's old ad campaign (the second-longest-running continuous ad campaign, after the Marlboro Man). Here's mine.



There are...a lot of bottles. This reads better a little bigger (so, you know, click on it.)

I love color-filled lines so very, very much. It was fun to do patterns again (after working with Illustrator all summer) and to do a digital piece.

Knitting and a 3D piece coming soon, I promise.

A look at process

I wanted to show something start-to-finish (sort of...I generally feel that all of my finished pieces can be changed or reworked in some way, but that's another story) since my process has been pretty consistent this semester.

This was for Editorial Illustration for an article about "The Secret." (Oprah's big on it.) I started with a concept sketch.


I noodled with the gesture and the composition of the figures then inked the piece. I scanned the inks and did a color study.


This came out reasonably well except that it looks like a backyard party. I tried to tone down the colors a bit for the final, which I did (for once) right on top of the ink in acrylic, watercolor glazes, and gauche.


The creatures turned out, I think, a little too adorable to really be the destructive and burdensome secrets we all carry around, but I think the piece has promise overall.

More blog news: I need to take some photos, but I have some 3d work (and, uh, knitting) to show off in the next couple of days.