holiday vii: christmas 2014 and some miscellany

Illustrious Colleague and I repeated last year's endeavors for this past Christmas' warm and fuzzy sharing and holiday cheer and all that crap.

This year it was a holiday version of an old favorite.

Again, Illustrious Colleague did the hard engineering part and I did the fun designing part. She says she prefers the engineering over the illustrating, but, in my myopic microcosm, I cannot comprehend people not liking the things I like and liking the things I don't like.

It's an "old favorite" because this was our first version. Think of the santa card as "Carriage Pop-up 2.0: the Holiday Edition."

The reindeer also propagated.

I may or may not have slipped them an aphrodisiac.

If you want any of the above, you may go bother Illustrious Colleague about it on her Etsy shop.
In retrospect, I probably should've blogged all this before the holiday season, but I can't seem to bring myself to care.

medium: sketches mostly done in pencil. some digital. everything else i forget....it's been a while.

experiment iiic: paper sculpting

Alas, I was not always a jealous paper copycat...

papers + vellums

I actually experimented a long time ago with paper art but completely forgot about it.  I did these pieces in high school--Helen, as a teenager, sitting on the floor watching tv and using the back of a watercolor pad to cut on because she didn't know what a cutting mat was yet.  I actually find life takes you in full circles like this very often....

And so, that which had fangirled Spirited Away, has grown up and...continued to fangirl.  Anyways, here is a cloud series inspired by a Diana Wynne Jones's book, Castle in the Air.

That which once paper-arted before, shall paper-art again!

So it has been decreed.

The conclusion of my experiment: I adore paper as a medium.  Expect to see more in the future.

(finis!)

experiment iiib: paper sculpting

It was illustrious colleague who re-introduced me to paper as a medium.  Through her I found other amazing paper artists (wait, one more; just because he's amazing) and was overcome with a severe case of paper envy...so I've been spending the past few months exploring the medium and all its possibilities.

The multi-dimensionality of paper creates some very curious and beautiful effects...

This one is only kind of funny if you've seen the drama.

I kind of like the background as it was....

(to be continued)

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 ii

Ripping off Madonna of the Rocks.

Madonna of the Rocks is a personal favorite of mine because I love the sketches and the angels (both angels: London and Louvre).

I know there's a whole Da Vinci controversy as to who painted what and what painted who, but I find these images curiously compelling.  Whether Da Vinci drew them or not, painted them or not, is of little concern to me; I like what I like and I can look at these all day.

medium: watercolor and gouache on watercolor board

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)

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

experiment i: yuki-7

These were a set of drawings I worked up for a potential project that wanted a yuki-7/tadahiro uesugi look.
This was a practice round because I'm not at all good at that yuki-7 grundge brushwork. Alas, the secret seems to be not in the brush but in the colors! Imitating Kevin Dart has evaded this sad illustrator because her color sense is lacking (T_T). pauvre fille!

But I'll post anyways! It's important to be open to failure. As in this case, trying to tackle one perceived shortcoming has illuminated me to an actual, much more important, and very serious one. I must go do penance and study color til my eyes burn.

The subject is yours truly because my life is so laughably not super sexy secret spy. My dog has more sex appeal than I do...

On one of my many trips to the hardware story, I found an herb

called Pineapple Sage. And it really did smell like pineapple!

So I took me one home because "what can be awesomer

than fresh pineapple smell on demand?" methoughts.

But all pineapple-smell-on-demand did was

make me want dole whip all the time....

Fail. (T_T)

medium: photoshop