Some work from school

All of these are works in progress.



This was for Photoshop class. We had to collage together various scans of fabric to create a summer scene. The boy and the monkey are from an encyclopedia on the events of 1970, and I had to color them because they were originally in black and white. The rest were embroidery with various filters or color gradients applied to make them look more like a naturalistic scene.



This is for Intro. I guess severed limbs are becoming part of my style.



For Adobe Illustrator class, we had to make a building to demonstrate our knowledge of shapes, grouping, and color swatches. I created the double curve on the onion dome by layering two circles over the dome and turning them the same color as the sky, and the arched windows with more circles over rounded rectangles. The soda bottle is a stretched circle. The crescent moon is two circles, slightly displaced. The chain link fence is a group of rounded rectangles. The pennant string is a warped ellipse. I went crazy with the curves.



For Adobe Illustrator class we also have to design a pattern. This is one I did today, inspired by the "Monkey Vs. Robot" song. Oh crap, I just realized the video was made at Coney Island!

The Jungle Book

This was for my children's book project. I wonder if I made Mowgli look more African than Indian, though giving him dreads made sense to me. I mean, I don't think a kid raised by wolves would have silky straight hair. It would get frizzy and lock up in spots even if he were Chinese.

Some depictions of Mowgli are quite pale. There's a lot of variety in skin color with native Indians, but a pale, European-looking Mowgli is weird to me. I mean, one of the cool things about Mowgli is that he's an Indian boy, not a English dude like Tarzan. He's not foreign to the village near his jungle. And there are lots of children's stories about English kids, not so many about Indian ones.

I originally used red to denote shading on Mowgli's body, but then I decided it was better to use a 6B pencil. Pressing harder on a regular pencil gets you darker, but with a colored pencil it just makes the color more saturated, which doesn't work well for shading. In fact, I went back over Mowgli and added yellow and pale brown (same as the tree) to his skin, after the intial round of red and 6B, to correct my problem with saturated shadows.

The second problem I had with Mowgli is that I inked him after coloring him, and it looked bad. I thickened his outline, then selectively thickened the lines within his body along more raised forms, like his cheeks. I still think his eyes need work.

I used black ink for Bagheera to distinguish his black fur from Mowgli's dark hair and pencil shadows. I think that was a good choice, because otherwise there would be too little contrast.

The two layers of jungle are cyan with green over it, and yellow with green over it. I didn't have access to much variety of green pencil, so I had to mix it on the paper.

Urban Animal Alphabet

I had to design an alphabet for my typography class. I had many ideas, such as a hair alphabet, and a face alphabet, but the professor liked my drawings of animals.

There are a lot of alphabets based on animals, but I tried to base mine not on exotic jungle beasts or zoo animals or farm animals or anything like that, but on the pets and pests we have in New York City. Originally, I used a human as my Z, but my professor insisted I keep my alphabet "consistent".

Sometimes it was tempting to get a bit uncommon, with bats or red-tailed hawks or owls, but I restrained myself. The least urban animals I included were a chipmunk for C and a pet ferret for N. I regret not saving a spot for a roach, but they're not very evocative of any particular letter shape. It was hard enough coming up with a different animal for each letter (though I did include 3 dogs).

The animals are, in order: Rat, pigeon, chipmunk, possum, hornet, dragonfly, squirrel, raccoon, millipede, grasshopper, mantis, mouse, spider, ferret, earthworm, moth, bulldog, house fly, cat, tern, centipede, chihuahua, ant, two-winged thingy, Asian long horned beetle, and spaniel.

Inking this was a bit tricky, because the figures are so small. I usually use a two-tipped marker to do everything, but this time I needed to switch to a micron for the finest details. I used the finer point of my marker for outlines and thickened my micron line for features within each figure's body that could use it, like mouths or tails. I was inspired by the original guy who did Spy Vs. Spy, who I heard created varying line widths using nothing more than an unvarying technical pen.

This is a Xerox of the original, which I have to mount on matte board tomorrow.

I hate Christmas

However, I've been assigned a Christmas card project in 2 separate classes. Joy to the world!



This was the third version I painted of this damn scene. I had to make the colors very saturated so it could copy well, but I don't think it made for a good picture.



This is for Quark. I'd like the photo's colors to be flattened down to black, white, and blue, but I've been having trouble getting it right.

Major Fair Poster

More school stuff

This is a detail I scanned from my Brooklyn Book Fest Poster. I'd hve to digitally stitch the whole poster together because the scanning bed is too small.



My Typography prof wanted me to use this scribbly frog design for my latest project. The frog is a P that turns into an R when he sticks out his tongue and eats a bug.



This got completely screwed up when I accidentally got red paint on it, and tried to remove it.



This is the finished witch. I think I don't like the black marker strokes. Maybe next time, I can brush on the black with poster paint or ink.

Progress

This is an incompletely colored drawing I did of a witch. I'm thinking of doing some Halloween cards to sell at Everything Goes Book Cafe.



This is a copy of the inking job I did on my Illustration project. It's the same project I was discussing in my recent post on inking. It is currently fully colored, but the copy machine didn't do such a good job of preserving those colors, so I'll be taking a photo of it soon. Unfortunately, scanning it isn't an option yet.



This is quite ancient. Remember when I entered the major fair poster contest and placed second, and was going to take a photo of my fully colored poster? Well, I never got around to it until just now. But that OTHER poster I was just talking about, you know...that'll be TOTALLY different!



Here's a sketch for my next Illustration Style project: a poster for my college's EcoFestival. New York has an annual City of Water day that promotes green initiatives in the city. There are actually kayak launches all around NYC. A boathouse in Manhattan even provides free boats and training. I went to a session once or twice, but I just wound up arguing with my friend a lot and drinking too much afterward.



This is a...version...of my Computer Art ad. I say "version" because I actually did half the design on a copy machine, instead of using Quark. It's really frustrating to me that I only have 4 hours of class time to work with the program. Computer lab hours are going to increase soon, though, so I'll have my pick of time slots.



Here is a bad photo of my completed watch design project. Notice how the flash is artistically reflecting off the glass!



These are some sketches I did for my latest Typography project. We have to transform one letter into another, and tell a story with it. Here I am, transforming a Bookman typeface-inspired P into an R, by making the letters into a stylized frog. I used Bookman because I had a sheet handy showing all the letters and numbers in that typeface. It's the same one I used for my Brooklyn Book Fest poster, and some of the watch designs.

Where I've been for the past 2 weeks

Bacon in a Bottle logo design.

These two are for my Computer Art class. We're learning how to use QuarkXpress 8. I've never even used a Mac before, so it's pretty confusing, but I've done print work and know how to use other image manipulation programs, so it's not THAT bad. Right now, my main nemesis is Bezier curves, cuz I want to do some bacon fat white and yellow stripes under the logo text, like the Coca Cola logo.



These are for my Typography class. My professor wants "practical" yet "nontraditional" watch face designs, which drives me kind of crazy, because it seems like she likes my designs better when I just scribble a jumble of numbers together. She would probably disagree with this and say she prefers asymmetry and sophisticated compositions. I missed class one day because I was working the primary elections, so I'm out to sea on what she expects. I just started playing with the numbers for these two and crossed my fingers that she likes them.




Speaking of which, these are some subway studies from Primary Day. I wasn't interested in being very realistic. I just wanted to copy down as many little details as I could.





These three are from my first day of Illustration. We had to wander around campus and sketch interesting compositions. My professor didn't like my compositions very much and said she'd prefer more cropping and asymmetry. I actually think one of my faults is that I often don't include the whole figure in the frame, so I've been working against that to make my pictures clearer. But I agree the mongoose picture could benefit from tight cropping on the two opponents' faces. We actually DO have a stuffed mongoose and cobra on campus, right next to my old Art History classroom.



Right now we have to design a poster for the Brooklyn Book Festival. This is my sketch for it.





These are studies for my poster. The last one includes a sketch I did of Housing Works when I went to see Dr. Frank at his book release show for Andromeda Klein. MC Chris was there, too, and was awesome. There were also a bunch of other folks, including a pretty good band that played 2nd. I never caught their name but they rocked.



Finally, this is the latest version of my first Illustration Style project. We had to paste our images on to the article. My professor recommended I add gray to the background. She liked the grassy texture I used for the gray. I think I should have grayed in the foreground, too, but oh well. It's turned in.

Illustration Style homework

Professor asked us to illustrate an article from the NY Times about the criminalization of poverty. Cities and counties are increasingly cracking down on the homeless and imposing tough fines that disproportionally burden the poor, partly to fill the coffers during these "tough economic times". What strikes me in particular about this issue is that the law is tying people down to being poor, creating obstacles to a better life and being sternly self-righteous about it to boot. The original article has a very stark illustration of a shopping cart with prison bars, but I consider my strength to be more in cartooning than in creating really designy, symbolic images.

The border around the cartoon is quite sloppy, and I worry that the greys on the poor vet blur together and make him hard to make out clearly. However, I'm happy how the policeman came out. The line work and the background especially owe something to my studies of Frank.

Summer school projects

I'm taking a graphic design course over the summer. Right now we're on our third project, redesigning an ad. You can see the ad I'm using over here: [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Game Boy is Twenty.



The inked board with all 3 concepts.


Our second project was the "black and white problem". We had to design shapes in silhouette to express images or ideas. These are my sketches.


This is the final.


This is my first attempt at the black square problem our teacher assigned to us as our first project. I gave it another shot, but that copy is currently being graded. The images represent, left to right (first row) order, increase, playfulness and (second row) congestion, instability, and floating.

Toothbrushes and Leeks

Exhibited

Top left. That's Pippi!

Collage and Ironside

Conte Crayon Day

More stuff from class

So the bunny picture from April is finished. Trees are scary!


I'm so used to drawing in cramped notebook margins, I have to remind myself not to crop things unnecessarily. Like the top of this guy's head. I like to draw ear whorls accurately when I'm sketching from life. They're not particularly important to establish a likeness, but everybody's is different.


Our drawing classes have thrown us into the deep end with nude models. I had a hard time with her. I couldn't seem to get everything down within her 15 minute poses, and then she'd shift a little for the next round.


The naked guy was somewhat easier. I walked into class late, but I basically had this drawing done by the end of my first 15 minute session. Once again, I cropped out the figure unnecessarily.


I don't think this is as good as the first, but the pose is leaning less and he has some feet.