The label I had in mind while working on the Editorial Sketch assignment was something I'd started up for a friend a while back. That project has progressed slowly, but the more I continue to work on other aspects of drawing and design that were rough for me the more inspiration I get to wrap this up. It's not far! But the last bit of feedback I got was that the figure was more "Rubenseque" than (green) faerie-like. The final look and feel I'm shooting for is like something you'd find on the My Pet Skeleton websites (well, the older one anyway... http://www.mypetskeleton.com/index2.html) or on a poster from the Secession times... classy, a little provocative, rich.
Anyhow, here's one later iteration on the sketches I've done... Originally I set out to have this all be done digitally but sorting it out on paper has proved to be more helpful. I'll post up the finished label when it's done.
One of the final assignments for class was to carve a gorilla stamp out of a linoleum block (good times!!) for making prints. The gorilla could be in any style so long as it was carved with a greater composition in mind involving the primate appearing unexpectedly among at least two other people.
I'm so glad everybody else in class agreed that zombies count as people.
As a side note I'm also happy that a lot of the materials I used to make the gorilla block & prints were recycled. The practice print bristol paper had some other light drawings on them already; the plastic spoon (aka ink-to-paper distribution device) I used came along with my take-out order for lunch that day; the cardboard & plastic used in spreading the printing ink were picked up off the side of the road during a walk over the weekend; and the piece of metal that prevented me from severing my digits while carving the block was some random abandoned ikea furniture accessory I found lying around my house (and still in its plastic). Hooray!
As an antidote to the time-consuming nature of stipple, our next assignment was to use acrylic paints to illustrate a dream or a nightmare. I'm lucky to remember many of my dreams so coming up with ideas for this assignment was a cinch, and I ended up developing two of them simultaneously - painting one while waiting for the other to dry & vice versa.
The nightmare painting (done on vellum-textured bristol board) was the one used to fulfill the assignment requirement that all parts of the image be blurry besides one bit in sharp detail. It represents this reoccurring problem I have across various dreams (which as a result become nightmares) where I lose control over my eyes. I'm usually pretty cranky when waking up from dreams like that.
That reminds me! During the digital video editing techniques class I took in my senior year of college, the prof showed us an experimental video called "The Wold Shadow" by Stan Brakhage. I can barely keep my eyes on it for the duration of its 3 or so minutes because it evokes how randomly blurry the world looks to me in those kinds of nightmares! The video itself may seem a little dated (nightmare baggage aside, the blurring and sharpening effects make it look like he was just having a field trip with slider bars in an image editing program to audiences in the 21st century...) but don't let this deter you from looking up the writings & work of Mr Brakhage, as he has a lot of pretty interesting stuff to say.
Anyhow, to counter my nightmare dashed out on paper I also created this painting (on a preprepared canvas) of my favorite reoccurring power in dreams. Thankfully I have many more dreams where I can fly (if I get a good enough running start) than blurry vision nightmares...
*Around 1:34 in this trailer shows an example of how I fly in my dreams:
So, what is stipple? Ah, all ye ignorant people, consider yourselves lucky... Hahaha, just kidding! Stipple is a handy shading technique where tonal ranges are expressed via innumerable little dots:
The results are quite lovely, but the challenge is that it requires a significant investment of time AND concentration for an entirely stipple picture to come out well. Interestingly enough, although the prof gave us the option of creating line drawings to then fill in with stipple, most of the folks in class went straight for the all-dots approach.
I am pleased with the end results of my stipple portrait (of "Colonel" Funkhouser by the River Kwai...) but I definitely had more fun creating the pencil shading plan for this assignment instead.
After graduating from india ink + brushes, our next assignment was to create an editorial "cartoon" using india ink + brushes + gouache (I would call it an"editorial illustration" rather than a cartoon since the latter description makes me think of the funnies in the New Yorker or one-picture+one-liner strips like The Far Side). The editorial illustration is based on an amazing article from the Boston Globe about a middle-aged man who got laid off as an emergency dispatcher for sleeping on the job as evidence of his poor work ethic stacked up and as it became clear he had also probably set fire to another man's porch (in a drunken rage over the theft of his gold chain worth thousands of dollars)... As if that wasn't enough good material to work with, we also had to add a random element into the composition based on our answer to a question - what do you want to draw right this instant? - asked suddenly in the middle of the class. My answer to that was "Absinthe Label" (of course - hah!), which ended up being pretty easy to weave into the image.
Actually, the addition of the absinthe label/green fairy bit really pushed me to come up with a complicated dreamy design which I'm very happy with. It took me a lengthy 8 - 10 hours (and a lot of snippets of tracing paper as you can see from the sketches) to come up with the final composition but it was definitely worth it.
The other advantage to the dreamy composition vs the "altercation" idea below is that the details of each person's face are kept ambiguous. I don't recall the prof coming outright and saying it but as we went through the crit I remember thinking that for an assignment like this where the features of the figures are not clearly defined but the story is based on reality, it helps to leave those details up to imagination. Ambiguity is key since whatever you come up with might be totally inaccurate.
For this assignment, we were instructed to create a stark black and white image featuring at least one animal or human in motion. In my quest for the perfect manifestation of "less is more" I stumbled upon many rocks better left unturned (or better investigated via other mediums besides pure india ink painted as black as possible with brushes), but was pleased at being encouraged to go with themes involving exciting things such as squids vs. zeppelins.
In an extra challenge to myself, I tried my best to make this image as figure-ground-y as possible & NOT violent. The true distillation of all these ideas ended up being the Rock Star, although the tentacled menace was a close runner up (I also figured it would be more fun to add washes for the ocean water or sky in the cephalopod vs airship scene).
