website is up!

my website is finally up and running!

right here!

still need to scan in my prints from last semester and take some good pictures of my paintings... but it's almost all good to go. woohoo!

visual worlds: the rest of fall semester!

so, i had a bunch of projects in visual worlds, my class with doug, but they all lead up to one personalized project at the end of the semester. im only going to post that because it's the best thing, and the most developed visual language i have been able to solidify so far in my "illustrative career". enjoy the following spreads (cover spread, then bookends, then spreads) of the progression of a night of a party, aka my life and involvement at the zbt house that i currently live next to...

editorial: the rest of fall semester!

well, this is not going to be a short post! i'll start with the most recent things, and go back in time. this image below was a spread illustration for an article about The Dark Web, an operating system which uses known terrorism linked websites and branches off of those websites to find other links to more obscure terrorism websites. in order to come to this solution, I actually went out and bought an old PC monitor and smashed it in the parking lot, office space style, to find the computer motherboard to do the drawing. totally fun, and it was really worth it to see how the chip is supposed to look.

these two images below were for our villains project. we were to choose two villains to depict, one from 19th century literature or before, and one from contemporary film. i chose hades and his three-headed dog, cerberus, and the white witch from the chronicles of narnia films with her pack of wolves that did her bidding. it became more about the familiars of the villains, clearly, but i really loved the freedom i got to have with this assignment and how i used a plastic space instead of putting them in a real space.

this image below is probably my most unsettling piece i did this semester. i was to come up with ways of depicting "love hurts". my idea was to show a woman's love for diamonds and her blindness to the effect her love was having on african citizens (blood diamonds). i had a lot of versions of this and i revised it a few times for my final crit. here's what i had at the end.

and finally, the project i had right after the celebrity portrait illustration was this book review assignment. we were given a short summary of the book, called the gargoyle. it is the story of a porn director, who was high on cocaine and drove his car off a cliff. in order to save his life, his skin was completely replaced by skin of other dead bodies. here is my book review illustration i came up with.

all in all, i think i had a really great and successful semester in editorial illustration. i am definitely going to try and keep it up and freelance illustrate for any articles whenever i can.

is this digital love? - mashup of daft punk and bob marley

pete and death

our first assignment this year in editorial was the friggan best thing ever. not only was it really fun, but i think i found a medium i can work really well with (micron/ink with liquid acrylics), and could communicate what i wanted to say very clearly. we had to choose a celebrity (of course the first one that popped into mind was pete doherty), and then do an illustration of them voicing an opinion of how we felt about them. i had many pretty accurate ideas to show how pathetic pete here has become. having him with someone who was pretty gross, and then having that person being grossed out by pete was a simple idea, but when i replaced that person with Death, it got to be a little more complex... you get the idea. here is my final art:

it has been a while...

it's been a real long time since i have written anything... bad bad bad. i was stumbling today though and found this great stuff but zachary flagg baldus. i like it a lot, especially the ones with the patterns behind the characters. i also love the way in some of them, everything is very simple and one color except for the face, bringing real attention to detail and character.

a new guy!

Zach Johnsen - Portland, OR. Awesome stuff. I doodle the way that he does the hair of the big dude in this one! So cool.

So not only does he do illustrations on paper, but he also makes these sweet cut outs. He did a whole identity of 'Acid Ice Cream' check it out on his website http://www.zenvironments.com/

And I absolutely cannot stop listening to this song, it's too good.

Golden Cage (Fred Faulke Remix) - The Whitest Boy Alive

apparently

this was my best work of the semester. even the teachers that i didn't have for the class i made it for flipped out when they saw it up at review. cooooooool. this is the fable of the eagle. i made it with ink, red pen, and gouache.

stina persson = love

i have been in love with stina persson (well, her illustrations,) for over two years now. she is definitely my favorite illustrator, along with egon schiele (who is actually a painter, but i kind of place him as a very very early illustrator). i almost had some sort of an internship with her company... almost....i had an employee of hers on the phone... last summer and i can't believe i couldn't really pursue it because of the rate of living in NYC. bummer. here is some of her stuff though, and i really hope i can start using some new methods to try and figure out how she does her stuff.

things i like about her work: fluid but in control, planned but seemingly not, saturated colors, dots, drips, use of negative space, embracing of the watercolor feel - not trying to hide the medium, and so many other things. you da bomb dot com, stina.

and i will leave you with a song. i probably listened to this album seven times in a row yesterday while working in the studio for over 12 hours.. still not tired of them. erlend oye for ya, good stuff.

Fireworks - The Whitest Boy Alive

a presentation

it's confusing when a class is constantly cancelled because of a professor's illness.. i want to be stoked for no lecture, but this means he has been sick for like a week now, and that's no good. well, i hope he gets better. in the meantime, i have an extra hour or so to get some work done and prepare for my presentation that i will give at approximately 11:30 today. 

for my commercial modernism class, i have been researching Maynard Dixon, an illustrator who produced the majority of his work from 1910 through the 1940s. a lot of his beginning works were illustrations and paintings for advertisements, but later on he painted some fascinating landscapes and figures of the west that absolutely blow my mind. 

for the time period that he was drawing and painting, his methods seem SO modern, it's unbelievable. i totally dig the graphic quality of all his stuff, and even the subject matter is really interesting. one of his childhood heroes was Frederic Remington, who was the best Western illustrator in the Golden Age of illustration. Dixon took most of his inspiration from him and from Charles Lummis, an editor he worked under at Land of Sunshine, who was a journalist and native american activist. Dixon created these gorgeous paintings of native americans and cowboys in order to express his pure love of the west.

what i also found really fascinating about Dixon was how he labeled his sketches. i began to notice this small kind of logo of a bird in a circle that appeared on most of his sketches (in the sketch below it is at the way bottom left). 

i couldn't figure out what it meant, and it was only mentioned once in one of the books i was reading. i called the Thunderbird Foundation of the Arts (probably the location of the most art and information about Maynard Dixon) and asked a woman there about it. she told me he used the thunderbird as a kind of trademark for his work. the thunderbird was a legend of the native americans in the southwest and pacific west coast of this bird whose wings were so big they created the thunder when they flapped. this bird also controlled much of the weather, including rainfall. so it also had the power to produce a good or bad harvest. Perhaps Dixon used the mark as a symbol of power to add to his work, or maybe it was more of a tribute to the thunderbird to show his belief in the culture and constant admiration of its power. this has been a really great learning experience, and i'm glad i got to talk to someone about it first hand as well!

just for fun... a great new band im listening to, via Knox Road, a great blog to check out!

Fredrik - Alina's Place

nello studio

so i am in studio right now, about 30 minutes of class left. the last project we did in word and image was pretty cool. we each did four illustrations for an article about nuclear meltdowns. by using exaggerations and metaphors, people came up with some clever solutions. here are my illustrations, full page, then half page, and then spots.

to begin with

well i figured it would be a good idea to start a blog to just keep track of ideas and artists that i find interesting or inspirational so i have a place to look back to. it's kind of like an online diary type of thing, huh? i hope i can put music on here too.. i will have to do some more exploration soon. hooray!

Little Boots - Meddle