New Chapter

I'm afraid this post might be a bit of photo dump. I however love a good blog post jam packed with pictures.

To give you all an update on what I've been up to: I now live in Astoria, Queens NY. It is a beautiful neighborhood with lots of good Greek food and live music in the parks. I think I could stay here for a while. I've been working at DaVinci Artist Supply in Chelsea. I thoroughly enjoy helping students figure out what it is that they need and meeting fellow artists. It sure is inspiring.

I did an illustration for a "get well soon" greeting card recently. It was fun but I'm afraid I won't be sharing. What I will share is some of the many sketches I've been doing of these silly faces. There are certain things that each artist doodles in their spare time, and mine has been silly faces lately. I watched a video demo on how to exaggerate faces and it has definitely influenced me.



When I was thirteen I took a landscape painting class at my local arts center. It was the first real art course I had ever taken, plus everyone was over three times my age. We sat around the center and did oil paintings of the corn fields surrounding the area. Sadly I was so full of painting uninteresting fields that I despised doing them for the next ten years. I now find myself back to landscapes and find them very relaxing for viewing and painting. They can be interesting sometimes right? Here's one of my new ones:



In other news, I sent out my first official set of promotions to some of my favorite designers! If you received one and made it my site, thank you very much for taking the time to visit. I plan on sending a set of postcards by the end of the month so keep your mailboxes warm for me.



On Friday I went to a much anticipated show at the Society of Illustrators. Yuko Shimizu, Sam Weber, and Tomer Hanuka are three of my favorites and this show was everything I had hoped for and more. I took a lot of pictures (for personal interest) of the preliminary work that was set up downstairs but decided it would be unfair to post another artist's work. However, here is the crowd of wonderful illustrators. I met a lot of great people.

Excitement Ahead

Well ladies and gentlemen, I graduated! My lease is up in a month so I decided to move to New York for sake of convenience. Plus I really do love NYC. More excitement to come...

New Cards

Just got these in the mail yesterday. I already packed them up in cellophane sheets and they are ready for distribution. Top row is the front, bottom row is the back. This is just the mock-up, the actual cards have rounded corners.

Ely

I realize now that I never posted my Ely which is a fancy name for our senior thesis project. I wanted to wait until the very end of it to post it anywhere because it went through so many renovations. I have a collection of about 100 vintage postcards acquired over the past 7 years or so. Each one was selected not because of the picture on the front but for the mysterious messages written on them. This project was intended to visually show my interpretation of the messages written on these postcards. I hope to eventually publish a book of these and more.

Little Match Girl

This was one of two parts for the story of the Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen. For those who don't know the story: a girl is selling matches on New Years. When she doesn't sell any she decides not to go home because her father will beat her. To keep warm she strikes match after match, seeing an inviting hallucination each time. This painting is one of her visions of looking into the window of a rich merchant's home on Christmas. She dies from the blistering cold in the end which will be part two of this series.

New Yorker and Punk Blues

Well the school year is winding down and tomorrow is my last class before the essays and portfolio reviews. It feels good to have come this far. I'm ready to get out into the business world and make my mark.

There's about 5 pieces I've been juggling to get finished. Otherwise, about a month ago Tony Auth (a wonderful political cartoonist) came in to teach a workshop on editorial illustration. He assigned for us to make a new yorker cover. I was thinking a lot about commuters and my own daily commute. When you watch crowds submerging in opposite directions they resemble schools of fish, never touching or colliding, always fitting themselves into the wave amongst themselves. So I took a well known new york train station (grand central station) and turned the people into fish, going about their daily commute. Voila! Its a new yorker cover. The image to the left is the version without the binding or the type due to copyright infringement.

I'm very happy with the way it turned out. Originally the fish were rendered and detailed but it became too busy and hard to read. Transforming them into silhouettes fixed the problem.



The next image is a zine cover I did as a creative project for my blues class. It was hard to decide what symbol to use for "punk" so I decided to go with a simple safety pin to let people decide for themselves what punk is, because I couldn't tell you. Robert Johnson is an obvious choice for a symbol of the blues. This is basically a zine that is going to house my final essay for the class. Art school really is a blast, I am going to miss it.
Both images are blue and brown completely by accident.

Too Many Sketches

...or is there such thing?

I feel like I haven't posted in a while so I wanted to let everyone know what I've been up to. For some reason every project for every class started at the same time, including a freelancing job. The work I was doing was all sketching night after night. Finally I get to do some fun stuff (aka finished paintings) so I'm very ecstatic about that. Once I have finalized some of them I plan on posting them for your viewing pleasure.

Otherwise, I just received my postcards in the mail. I am not happy with overnightprints.com. First of all, I opened the package and they were just loosely thrown in with no security, bouncing around risking damage. Second, the picture side of the postcards had streaks through the image which is a sign that they didn't line up their ink cartridges properly. I took the risk of digital prints and will probably never opt for the cheaper alternative again. Luckily I only ordered 50 prints rather than large shipments like I normally do.

I think I will stick with premiumcards.net. It takes longer to ship because they are in LA but it is totally worth it. The prints are spectacular. Plus they are very nice on the phone. Hopefully this review helps some people out with choosing a printer for business cards and postcards. I am sure there's lots of good printers out there, I'm just sharing my experience with these two.

Sorry no pictures. Next time!

Mad Hatter

Well Hawllo. This weekend I took a break from my busy life to celebrate my birthday.

Friday: dinner party, including asian goodies and cake
Saturday: much needed sleep
Sunday: sushi and frozen yogurt courtesy of my wonderful boyfriend, Kei.

So now back to business. Tonight I printed out a couple of portfolio pieces for Tuesday when people working in different illustration fields come to my school to chat. This is one of the illustrations I put in my folio. It is an editorial piece to accompany a bad review for Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. It is Johnny Depp as the mad hatter sitting in a coffee shop in the real world. I finished it about a week ago and it is the last traditional oil painting I plan on doing for a while.

Speaking of printing, we just bought a new printer. We named our Epson 1400 "Audrey" because we love it that much.

Business Cards

These were the business cards I designed. They actually came about a month ago but I love them so much that I wanted to post them before too much time had gone by. I bought a thousand from www.premiumcards.net. A couple people have suggested other companies to me but I used the site because they produce cards of different unusual sizes and formats. They also do postcards which I might considering ordering in time. I have been leaving these everywhere I go, coffee shops, bookstores, galleries, everywhere in Philly and NY. The one criticism that people had about the size was that it didn't fit properly in their wallets, but it did fit. I like to think of them as mini flyer/promotional pieces that double as a business card. The painting was originally done a couple months ago for a book cover about a femme fatale who steals men's eyes. The playing card idea came to me in a dream. Those are the best dreams.

Final Open House Poster

This is the final for the sketches I had been posting for the past month. It took this long because I was balancing four paintings at once. I'm pretty happy with it. This is digital painting number 2 so far and it will only get better and better.

Evolving

After much thought and talk, I've finally decided to go digital. Completely digital. Here's why:

a) I am so sick of the toxic fumes and sticking my fingers in lead paint.
b) I cannot afford a large format scanner and even when I do scan, all the dark areas becomes shiny and unreasonable. Also, taking pictures of my art takes the detail away.
c) Some of my favorite illustrators are digital. For example: Sam Weber, Zina Saunders, Brian Despain, etc. After listening to an "Escape to Illustration Island" podcast interview with Sam Weber, I was convinced that digital is a good way to work
d) It just looks better in print.

When I announced that I was going digital to my classmates, most of them were quite appalled and thought I should continue to do my oil paintings. Ridiculous. It seems that my school is a bit behind on the times and the digital world. I'm ready to leave this bird's nest...

Anyways, the picture posted is a layout and illustration I designed for a children's alphabet book. Sally saw snails slowly soaring from the sky in spring. Also, this is my first completely DIGITAL painting! I'm very excited for my new medium.

Spinning like a Carousel

In the past week I have been juggling four paintings at once, while revising four others. I sure love to keep busy. One of those paintings is the hermit crab which I posted sketches for earlier. In the meantime...

I wanted to post this painting that I did to advertise the senior thesis show called the "Ely." The horses on the carousel are budding wings and breaking free. The carousel represents the school preparing its students to be let free into the world.

I really enjoyed working on this painting. I'm pretty sure this is the most colorless carousel that has ever been conceived (on purpose, mind you).

Art of Fashion

In February, Webster Hall in NYC put on a fashion show to celebrate fashion week. Part of the event featured fashion illustrators and photographers. This is a picture of me at the exhibit with some of my work. Excuse the low quality photo, it's a cell phone pic.

Final Sketch for Open House Flyer

Of all those sketches I did, my alternative idea was the chosen one. So here is a finalized sketch of a hermit crab that found his home (which is uarts). This is the version without type. The final product will be filled with tidbits of information.

Lots of Sketches

It sure has been a long time since I've posted anything. I've been so busy with school and side projects and such but no excuses! This is a very late new year's resolution to post in my blog more often.

Onto business, these are sketches that I did for a brochure advertising the Uarts open house. The three themes were finding your fit, directions, and creative utopia. Mostly I chose "directions" but strayed to "finding your fit" as well (those are the ones with a hermit crab finding a new shell). The main idea I was trying to portray is a compass that points to Uarts. These were a lot of fun and I'm excited for the final product. Will post a more finalized sketch next.