Just because.

These are the slighty better drawings

I've been to two figure drawing sessions in the past 3 days. They're my first in two years and I'm all rusty, and still antsy about the performance aspect of drawing in a group. But there are no teachers to call me out and I like the freedom of drawing, not to get better at rendering but as an integrated part of my life. But what am I looking for now if not accuracy or a new revolutionary way of seeing? I want them to be truthful, natural and kind of frightening. Not imagery wise, but scary in that they happened and can't ever happen again. But that's it. I just like the motion of drawing descriptively, and as far as these kinds of drawings go, they inhabit a very seperate space than my other work you know? It feels a lot more like writing or dragging a stick across a picket fence.

I'm late, I'm late!

Thinking a lot about complex fabrics and unconventional profiles?

           The past week-ish or so I've been wandering around Nyc, getting accustomed to stuff. Am being drawn in more to digital work, partly because of the speed/ freedom I mentioned earlier but also out of convenience since I'm between places right now and don't really have a personal workspace. That's ok! It allows me to work and become more proficient with color choice and design? I do miss painting and water color IRL, but I'll get back to it soon ;)
           Ever since doing that Sailor Moon piece I realized how much I love doing close up compositions of people. Just focusing on large shapes, working with cut outs and placing in more carefully drawn elements. Allowing the image to evolve organically, not worrying about making a believable space. Ideas over space! People over space!
           I heard someone denigrate an artist recently because "they looked like they didn't know how to make an environment". As artist's we're all preoccupied with different things. Some of us like to sit up on hills and see things from very far away, and some of us want to lean in so close that we brush against a person's lapel and some just close their eyes and listen. It's all good you know? It's better to be obsessed with hills than be obsessed with how to push people off of them.

The heat here is pretty stifling and watching how people dress for it is really entertaining. These are a few characters/ clothing choices. Everyone is sweaty beautiful.

Sailor Moon Zine Submission!

My friend Laura recently told me about this Sailor Moon Zine (“In the name of the moon!”) that the cartoonist Vreni was putting together. She’d already put the first zine together and was putting out the call for submissions for the second. Wanted to submit immediately, but was unsure of how to go about properly paying homage to a cartoon that had influenced me so early on, and in such a lasting way. Especially since its significance had gone so beyond the original plot and characters. It’s snotty, but I didn’t want to make “fan-art”.

The peak of my Sailor Moon obsession was at the fat, androgynous and strangely quiet age of eleven. The characters of Sailor Moon were more real to me than a lot of real world things that were happening at the time. I would vehemently defend my intergalactic friends against slander when my family playfully mocked the reverence I had for my worn and slowly disintegrating collection of manga and books, even being hurt that they could be so skeptical of something that was obviously brilliant and life affirming. Any attack on Sailor Moon, was an attack on me. Or so I perceived it to be haha I’m sure the sailor soldiers symbolized a future where I would grow up to be a long-legged space warrior, find love and ride motorcycles. It was a feverish, escapist Delirium I was in that I distinctly remember in shades of blue rain and bleached summer sun.

If it weren’t Sailor moon it would have been something else. So I’m thankful that I spent my days fighting evil scientists and crafting magical things in my backyard instead of getting lost so early on. So in a way, Sailor Moon was the Bully that was on my side, keeping me safe on the schoolyard.

Thanks Sailor Moon!

SAGA CAMP T-Shirts

The final.  Just keep it simple!

       Another simple T-Shirt Design for the Seattle Area German American School’s summer camp series. I’d done a lot of mock ups because they wanted a detective themed image. Obviously I was like “WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING REFERENCING FILM NOIR”, but the kids wouldn’t have gotten it haha, so we just made something cute. Which was more appropriate because the camp was more about investigating an environment (Urban, Garden, Zoo, Ocean) than crime. BUT DANG, I had such a great burgler planned... 

He's burgling the garden!

What a Twit(pic)!

The beginning of the summer was spent trying to make a 5 year old understand the nuances of space travel and "the force" and the third pic I think is a sketch of the boyfriend from the show GIRLS. Or just someone with a mustache? I don't think I was looking at anyone so who knows.

Travel Blues

Something I drew the night before flying to New York. Also the debut of the blue twins!

Frida

 A portrait of Frida Kahlo. I love her work as well as the myth-like way her story is told. 

Trying to utilize what all my print making classes have taught me and combining it with the infinite possibilities of working digitally. A long time ago I had a huge prejudice against digital work because most of what I saw looked very cheap, but the more I work with it the more I appreciate what it can do.  There's something very invigorating about a medium that responds almost instantaneously to your thought process, it feels almost like writing in a journal. Plus because it doesn't require the same temporal linear nature of sketch-refine-color done it bypasses some of the beaurocracy of what it means to make a "finished work". I can have everything going on at once and change any part of the process to my hearts content. 

playing with the colors, really loving the effect of the glowing blue in the middle blossom

It's time travel.

Hansel and Gretel E-Book

I illustrated an E-Book for the children's story app Farfaria. They're a pretty new start up so it will be interesting to see where they go with it. This was really the first proper illustration project I've worked on so it was good in that I came up against a lot of my weaknesses immediately. Learning to balance the practicality of time and energy with your own conceptual idea of what it should be is surprisingly rewarding. It broke the bit of me that was like "this has to be perfect" and instead it became "just give em' what you got!"

First version of the cover. Also the best version of the characters. Because I had to work on this between my classes I felt like I'd make leaps in ability between each illustration (I'm sure to the dismay of the folks reviewing) and so when it got to the cover the characters had evolved quite a bit from the first page.

My mom said that she liked his "haxen" (spelled Hachsen) which means both very large burly hands OR (I think) slabs of meat in German. Or at least when she says it I visualize very large meat hands.

The Story of Hansel and Gretel is kind of brutal and scary. On the one hand it's  a great story because you see a female lead that defy's her own learned nature to save those she loves BUT on the other hand it reinforces societal fears of aging women all while challenging children's trust in their elders. Did your brain just explode? Fairy tales are UNHINGED. It's unfortunate that now they get watered down through either removing the threatening elements, or over indulging the horror elements for adult film. These don't really act as a bridge from child hood to the serious issues of adulthood. I guess I like to straddle that inbetween in my work, just because it seems to reflect more accurately how people are pushed and pulled through the world. No matter how old we get, I don't think we should ever lose our sense of astonishment at the didactic range of human possibility. Cruel and loving all rolled up into one. We crazy.

Check the story out at Farfaria.com!

Bimbl 0

The Bimbl story for the show:

Alley Art Walk

So much to catch up on! There's been a lot of shifting around these past few weeks so updating has been the farthest from my mind. But long story short, I just graduated from the university of Washington, moved and am about to move again but hopefully everything will fall into place soon. I've only been out of school a little more than a week and I'm already wondering how being "in the real world" will effect my work. Though I won't have the same guidance, I can't wait to be self motivated when it comes to my art. Sink or swim right?

Anyway! Might as well start with my final project for my senior studio class. Our class collaborated with some students from I think the architecture department (urban planning?) who wanted to host an alley art walk with our class' work featured. I made zines and created a space where I would sit with people and trade my zine for some sort of creative payment, mostly doodles on their part. It was really fun, and though it was designed to make others understand some of the pressure artists feel in creating, I ended up being the one learning how taxing, physically and psychological something as under credited as drawing could be. I was there for three hours and by the end I was so exhausted! But it was so fun to talk to people. There was someone at my table the entire 3 hours but I only made 30 trades. Another interesting aspect of the experience. That it took 3 hours to make a mild connection with 30 people was surprising and highlighted how valuable real human connection is? 

Which is funny, because in the end it turned into a performance piece, and in my first meeting with my teacher Timea Tihanyi I was like "I'm not a performer" :/ walked into that one! 

I would draw goofy stuff like this:

And then get awsome stuff like this is return (Thanks guys!!):

Kind of an unfair trade in my favor right?

Done in the light of the television.

Embroidery for winding down and thinking. It really does feel like this process makes me more concientious in other aspects of my drawing. Probably because when you draw with thread you have to go so slow, and think of every stitch and how it will effect the overall impact of the object you're creating.

Side Doodle Central

thinkin' about girl talk at the beach

thinkin' about adventures and family

thinkin' about Bimbl and the believability of his design. Should cartoons focus on the mark making/ drawing or the creation of a completely believable world? What do the rest of his people look like, yada yada yada

Zinetopia

I devised a plan to make a zine so that I could explore this sketchy playful ink drawing thing I had gotten into. And so I showed my instructor all these half baked stream of conciousness drawings and was told that I was being lazy and that I shouldn't rely on my ability to make quaint charming imagery. Now, you can call me a lot of things, but lazy or un genuine is not one of them. Needless to say I'm now doing a linear comic/ story board  and all these drawings were kind of abandoned. 

Putting them together now, I can see that It was going somewhere really great.

Throughout the 4 years of attending art school, I'm repeatedly struck by the lack of patience teachers have or their flexibility when it comes to approaching their students different learning styles. There's no joy in the process and there's an overarching paranoia that makes some (I know, I know, NOT ALL) instructors jump in and try and save their students to just place them on a safe and recognizable path. I can see it in myself when I'm helping in the after school programs at SAGA, it's hard to see those put in your charge struggle. But dang, you just gotta grit your teeth sometimes and let them sweat and figure stuff out on their own. Especially in art where ones survival depends on finding a completely personalized visual language that bridges artist and viewer.

Yeah, So I like this.

I wanna see you big.

An Installation piece for the senior Interdisciplinary Visual Art's Honors/ Juried exhibition. I'm not particularly fond of the gallery experience so I threw a visual fit and made a very large awkward man for the show. He wants to be there and be imposing, but then on the other hand doesn't want to let you in. Also, I'd been playing with the idea of embroidery on a much larger and industrial scale so it acted as a small materials study for that. 

Since this piece attempted to be made for this event, photographing it wasn't of too much importance. Obviously now I'm kicking myself for not using a better camera though haha, especially to get the texture of the head covering. But alas, the idea that he would only exist for a couple of weeks, then disappear felt very important to me. The dismal quality of the photo's makes you wish you had seen it in person, huh?

Mark making.

Friends in Suits

I had the opportunity to work with Angela Jaquith, friend and classmate, on a stop motion collaboration. She does way more ambitious stuff than this, but I'm so glad that she approached me and was willing to scale back her creative potential to work with a numb-skull like me. She brought so much knowledge to the table, and floored me with her technical abilities as well as professional set up. Just the equipment and editing alone that goes into something like this was eye opening and I'm glad that my introduction to the world of film was so well chaperoned.

My contribution was just creation of the painting and harrassing a friend to come in for awhile and put up with us dressing him up and bossing him around. He by the way did an awsome job. Thanks Casey Hart!

Together Angela and I discussed and rationalized how to build out with each tiny movement, and it was fun to discover what strange things happen when you come together with someone else. On the one hand it doesn't fit exactly with what you would ever make, but then there's this kind of magic in knowing that whatever comes of the collaboration, you could never ever have concieved it by yourself. So in that sense,  building something that required a collision of practices makes it very precious.

Here are some detail shots to give a better idea of what was actually happening to the painting since in the final version some details were lost.

I didn't mean to, but the woman in the painting ended up looking like Angela!

Even though I think we were driven a lot more by the idea of our processes working together, there's a definite discussion of the cultural dilineation between fine art and craft, the male gaze and the gendering of materials.

MUTANT EYE BALLS. 

Blue Speak

  
A very short blog project. I wanted to make this ambiguous secret space on the internet but I didn't like where it was leading me so it was abandoned after a weekend. I really wouldn't mind returning to some imagery in the third piece though.

His name is Bimble.

What I did today:

Virtual Sketchbook?

 Here are some photos that I've uploaded onto twitter of doodles that for whatever reason normally get thrown out or forgotten somewhere. Taking photos seems like the best immediate way to take them with me so I thought I'd start a virtual sketchbook that will file stuff that exist only in a digital medium i.e photography, photoshop etc. away into one place. What better place than my blog :)

Spring Camp T-Shirt Design

was asked to do some T-shirt Designs for the SAGA School here in Seattle. Their theme is Die Vogelhochzeit which I guess would translate to the bird wedding. Enjoy.

Submission for CURIOzine

      I figured it wouldn't hurt to show you what I made for this. It's a zine that is open to everyone to submit to so if anyone has some time make sure to check out the due date for the next one. So far it looks like a lot of cartoonist folks are submitting and hopefully there's enough people so that it can come out next month! The theme is Tiny Worlds and it's kind of exciting how each person is taking it. Some are referencing literature, some recent films and the styles are so different that the final product should be kind of great. So make sure to check the link in a week or two!

became sort of obsessed with cactus' and liked the idea of destitute cowboys living in them. Dreamy Destitute Cowboys. 

but I forgot to read the required dimensions so I frankensteined it together with the tiny original sketch to kind of point directly to how I collage in my work.

There were quite a few incarnations and goofing around with colors and this subdued cropped down version was kind of nice. For that background image I cut out a small piece of an old postcard. I think I'm going to start collecting postcards.

(Oh. And I started a twitter so if you want in on that hot mess come on over!)

For Chris

Oh no! Yeah... and that cat hair was intentional to show you the scale mmmhmmm

Embroidery tends to look pretty insignificant and small in person, so I love blown up cropped shots that show off the work. Am thinking of submitting this to an online publication called CURIO for their Small Worlds theme if I can't come up with anything else.

     And For Chris: GRACE JONES! I know that all those who were formally taught to do embroidery would be horrified by the backs of what I make, but the jumps in fiber and chaos is something that I look forward to when I turn the final product over. That something develops unintentionally definitely reinforces the concept of portraiture by alluding to something that can't be gleaned from surface characteristics. But then if I'm aware can it even be called chaos?

Make sure to Visit Chris' Blog as well!