various school things

More things from my time at Art Center.

Painted traditionally (watercolors, gouaches, acrylics, inks....acrylic inks.  I was very adventurous). 

Painted traditionally, for the most part, I should say: there was digital adjusting to the last two.  I once met a fine artist who completely denounced digital -- the use of it at any and all stages of the creative process. 

"T'is cheating," he said. 

"I cheat," said I, raising my hand in dutifully-demure self-abnegation.

He had thought me one of his fold.  I corrected his assumptions and confessed to him my sins.  He patted my head, pitied my youth, and I walked away humbly absolved.  I'm afraid to report that, years later, my dereliction continues and has degenerated further still in its deliberate delinquency.  Call me cheat, scamp, lady of the night.  If you ask me, I bet Da Vinci would've happily (and readily) digitally edited his sketches, particularly before committing them to paint -- to very expensive, hand-mixed paint.  His purity was less from piety, I think, and more from a lack of resources.       

Can you see the violin?

A wine list for children 

A J-rock themed thing.

A mollusk.

medium: watercolors, gouaches, acrylics, ink, acrylic inks, and whatever else pleased my reprobate soul.

digital things

I think I'm just going to throw my digital stuff into this post.  Some pieces from here and there, accumulated during my tenure at Art Center.  

This  was another one of those projects where I ended up liking the sketch better than the final. 

Nuance-y, process-y, technical bits for those who like that kind of thing.

(I happen to like that kind of thing):

Here's where you take the photoshop lessons, the digital matte painting lessons,
and the perspective lessons you've accumulated over the years and mix it all in a pot.

Carnivores.
This is just vector art.  From adobe illustrator lessons alone.
Sola illustratio.

A self portrait.

A painted desert. Pft. See what I did there?

Yet another: sketch preferred over final. Sigh. Mastery is a process, right?

medium: digital

2½-D!

Once a week for the past ten weeks, I had the inordinate pleasure of attending Motivarti's summer class Story in a Picture, which was taught by one of my favorite teachers from Art Center.  

This was the final I submitted to class: a triptych done with a neat technique I picked up from another artist that the teacher dubbed 2½-D.

Ha! I like it. 2½-D it is.

medium: pencil, digital, paper (in that order)

WonderCon 2013: behind the scenes

Good times at WonderCon

I am convinced that 90% of design is problem solving.

"What sort of problems?" do you ask, friend?

Is the action reading?
Is the color treatment adding to or subtracting from the focal point?
Why does this nose look like a mushroom?
Is the story clear?
Do I need another mouse in the house reading Goethe's Faust?

The problems are approached (and solved) before the piece is begun, while the piece is materializing (be it in paint, paper, or digital medium), and after the piece is finished.  This, in whole, is the design process.  What separates the professional designer from the tortured artist is the ability to solve these problems in a satisfactory manner in the before and during phases within a given timeframe.

Is there a point in one's artistic maturity in which one has successfully culminated from tortured artist and metamorphosed into consummate professional?  Ask me at my deathbed, but I'm pretty sure the answer's "No."

So for WonderCon (and all future conventions--stay tuned ~_^), illustrious colleague and I wanted a pair of banners that both portrayed our respective approaches to illustration and showcased our collaborative work.  So it started here:

pencil
(i think....)

We liked the idea of a swooping line connecting our two banners.  An idea inspired by a previous piece.

digital

watercolor & gouache

paper, watercolor & gouache

Alas, when it was finally worked up, we felt that, yes, the swooping clouds connected the banners, but the connection felt too fragile.  The differences in not just color and material but in the two completely separate stories made our banners feel disconnected.

The final was pleasing to behold, yet we were still displeased.

So we moved on to a banner concept where the story of one told the story of the other.

paper, watercolor & gouache

This one told a satisfactory beat-1 to beat-2 story, punchline and all, and we were ready to run with it, when at the eleventh hour I sent illustrious colleague a silly email with this attached.

digital and pencil
(i'm pretty sure this time....)

Both of us were like "I like the first octopus a lot, but....oh no, I LOVE the second octopus."

And then there were a series of emails that were very much a back-and-forth of 

"Should we just go for it? I think we should go for it."

"Totally need to go for it."

"You think it's worth doing? We're already out of time...."

"Totally worth doing."

The back-and-forth really was necessary because it really was the eleventh hour, and we were going to take it to print that day.  Stinkin' artists.  No respect for their deadlines. Tsk tsk. 

watercolor & gouache

So here was the final painting for our third banner concept.  But, when we finally put it together....

paper, watercolor & gouache

I felt that our second banner concept had a story that read fluidly but the two still felt too dissonant.  I had thought it was because the palettes were too different, so I compensated this round by going way cool for my banner's side.  Illustrious colleague noted that it looked fine as a stand-alone painting, but, when placed side-by-side with its other half, a wispy watercolor painting felt unfinished against the solid, graphic color of the paper.  And I missed the warmth.  

digital, paper, watercolor & gouache
printed at banners.com

And so, our lovely little banner duo was born. 

The moral of this story?

If at first you don't succeed,

Fry, fry a hen. 

Also: waste not!

printed at moo.com

experiment iiia: paper sculpting

Sorry, ladies, I'm not much of a Lee Min Ho fan.  Lol.

paper + photoshop

paper + no photoshop

Yes...Helen watches Korean dramas.

And I did enjoy this drama--or at least the first ten episodes...it was pretty awful after that.  But the characters were so interesting and the acting so compelling, I felt that little twinkling of inspiration somewhere, deep within...

Mortal Kombat!!

These were the good guys--but they were also secondary characters.  So, in the fashion of tragic Korean drama saguek fusion, they're all dead.

Oh. Oops. Spoiler Alert.

These were the bad guys.  I still don't have a solution for the background, but I'm so pleased with how the figures turned out that I still felt compelled to share.

Ki Chul may be one of my favorite villains ever.  He's just so weird.

Sorry, I'm not a Lee Joon Ki fan either!  But this was one of my favorite dramas last year (of which there are three...which unfortunately does not include Faith...sorry, Lee Min Ho).

The story goes like this: Arang is a ghost who is tasked with solving her own murder. 

(to be continued)

pets iii: semper fidelis

digital

For those who've lost a good friend or two.

doljanchi

A doljanchi (돌잔치) is a korean first birthday celebration and it's a pretty big to-do as, up until even my own parents' generation, children didn't survive their first year of life. 

That being the case, you would think that with the advent of modern medicine and lower infant mortality rates the ceremony would have become obsolete, but, no, the tradition is going on stronger than ever.

I personally blame cameras and the internet.  

It seems to me the Korean-American crowd is more dol-crazy than even native Koreans, but that could just be because my search engines are set to English.  A bit of worldly wisdom: being selfish for your children doesn't make you selfless, my friends.

Happy first birthday to a certain awful child.  Auntie hates you.

medium: pencil, watercolor, digital

intermission ii

The intermission continues.

I'm not ashamed to say that I am not above fanart.  I like me my television and movies and random, frolicsome fictions.

It's nice to get lost in different worlds and come back again with intangible treasures.  And being in the creative field, it's only natural to want to build still more onto these castles--as much as you can and as gloriously as still more can be built--before the spirited moment subsides and the remnants of our constructive effervescence washes away to be reformed, rediscovered, and rebuilt into some entirely other thing across the ocean.

That being said, I'm not sure if I'm a fan of Once Upon A Time.  I think I just don't know what to think of it.  It's different.  And different is usually awesome...but not being different for the sake of being different.  And I think the show toes that line of trying too hard.

But the characters are so fun.  They're expressive (equal parts silly and tragic), they feel like caricatures, and you get two versions of each.  That's a fun energy to play with!

medium: scanner, photoshop, pencil (not necessarily in that order)

intermission i

I was sorting through some old files and completely forgot about this.

Been a busy bee, though my hive is woefully neglected. So in this dearth of updates, I'll throw in this one I did a while back when I had the pleasure of taking Chris Runco's class at Motivarti.  It was for our ren-punk (that's renaissance version of steampunk) time traveling theme park final project, and this was a little photo-op I made of our characters discovering soda pop (which doubled as an ad moment for outside vendors).  The closest equivalent they know is sparkling mead, so they think they're drunk.

They're made of that weird plastic that everything in Disneyland is made of and they blow bubbles at you. 

I dunno.  I thought it was funny. 

medium: photoshop

holiday iv: happy valentine's day

disaster on demand?

My holidays were belated because I was at Thinkwell for three weeks or so making trouble with some old classmates.

So Willi, Patrick, Linda, and I are leisurely lunching (sharing old war stories, gabbing about the perils of business, and bleeding our sad little artists' hearts) and, with our patented plein air skills, taking in our surroundings (shadows and textures, interesting signage....). 

One does wonder how lucrative the earthquake business is...

I guess it'd be a bit like that Uma Thurman movie: the one where the villain's company sold weather (messing with agriculture and travel; selling ecological terrorism to the highest bidder and such). 

My color is still suffering.  I think I need to pull a Mary Blair and have a transcendent color epiphany in some exotic country....pity I hate to travel.  Must learn to make do sans transcendence, I suppose.

medium: watercolor & ink, photoshop