"neo-crunches have a great respect for dolphins and think we should be more like them."

so it's been a little while, what with the whole 'no classes' thing, there hasn't been much in the way of updates. i did do all the work for my solo show coming up next month (more on that later) but i can't go and post it all over the web before it hangs in all its glory in the filling station, now can i? i gotta be at least a little sneaky.

so in the meantime, we have hipsters. specifically, "neo-crunch" hipsters as explained by robert lanham in the hipster handbook, which really is an actual book. Neo-crunches are essentially modern hippies who love recycling and marijuana, hate big corporations and showering, and wear tattered old clothing to hide the fact that they are financially secure, meaning basically, everyone that lives in boulder, co. the assignment was a full-page, half-page, and quarter-page, seen below in gouache and ink. it was pointed out to me that the middle lotus-pose zen-hipster looks like she really, really loves pot (and sort of loves wheatgrass juice), the baggie of granola kind of looks like pot, and the apple she's accessorizing with could easily be an apple bong. not so much the goal there, but it's still pretty accurate. the bottom neo-crunch is cutting holes in her jeans to discourage anyone from thinking she values worldy possessions, and the top hipster, my favorite, is since playing his banjo not for spare change, but to recycle your starbucks cups.

who says finals can't be full of love?

hooray for hugs and love and plush and joy! this was the final version of the sketches for my "hug-a-city friend" that i posted a bit ago for my "character designed for a site-specific outdoor environment." final. she is almost all fleece, with felt mary-janes, hair, and facial features. her shoes are even removable yay.

the first photo is the "aw, look how cute!" one, so you can actually see her. the series of five photographs below that are the actual documentation of her serving her purpose - to go hug sad metal things in the city and cheer them up. she has super-strong magnets in her hands (underneath the hearts!), so she sticks to all manner of city objects. she also has one in the back of her right hand, so that she can hug around non-metal things and stick to herself.

photographing her proved to be hilarious, as cars were slowing to a crawl, pedestrians were talking to me (and her), and one guy even came and took a picture of me taking a picture of her. the weather was perfectly sad and overcast. and brian loved it. and so do i. also, for never having made anything 3d, and for *never* having made anything plush, or even sewn beyond like, a hole in my clothes, i was pretty damn pleased with myself.

"grand-slam-home-run-slam-dunk"

so today in class, much to my "oh man i hope we get out early"-shaped chagrin, we had a surprisingly great in-class exercise in character development. it won over my lazy butt real fast. it was a collaborative assignment, to design a toy line that worked singularly and as a set, that somehow combined (think voltron or power rangers) into a more exciting new toy if you bought the whole set. so my group developed the tentatively named "friend-versibles", a series of plush dolls that flip inside out to form parts of a larger animal, corresponding to the environment from which they come. here, we see the safari photographer, part of the "jungle" series, who combined with her other two counterparts (a hawaiian-shirt-and-sunglasses-donning tourist and a khaki-and-combat-boots safari guide) who all flip inside out and attach to one another to form an elephant. other proposed series included a cow/farm series, a bear/forest series, a dragon/fantasy series, and a whale/ocean series (with flippers and scuba gear!). better yet, each individual animal part could be velcroed to the other animal parts to form crazy new animal friends like the cow-lephant-ragon, or whatever. and each human character would have removable accessories to mix and match with other human or animal characters. cool! now please don't go be a douchebag and go market our brilliance and make our millions. copyright, patent pending, blah blah leave us alone. anyway, super fun.

also firmly entrenched in the three-dimensional world is my final for that class, since it, well, has to be 3-d anyway. my super-well-received proposal was for another plush doll, this one with super long arms with magnets in the hands so she can hug the sad metal city things. hug-a-lamp-post! hug-a-fire-hydrant! hug-a-street-sign! hug-a-mailbox! awwww, right? everything needs a hug. she would also wear a mustard yellow jumper, which is also great. brian loved this, and i was super-glad because i love it too. i'm excited. excited enough to teach myself to make plush dolls for this class, and go gallivant around town photographing her hugging every sad metal city thing.

can i also put out there as a side note how much i hate formatting multiple image blog posts? they never work and the images go all crazy and align themselves willy-nilly with nothing in particular and throw off the nice aesthetics and no matter how hard i try they won't go where i want. pout.

done and done.

this is it: the culmination of all my work on the pitch package for my animated television show. in order, we have the title page (or potential opening credits still frame), a "screenshot" from the show, with all characters in their environment, and the synopsis for the show and character bios. these, combined with all the other full-size characters, costume changes, turnarounds, facial expressions, etc., make the entirety of the packet. it went over well enough in our quasi-crit, which was us basically playing show and tell, passing the packets around and writing commentary.

i felt like a toolbox because i completely spaced the whole, "hey, you need a synopsis/character info" part of the packet, so if people hadn't heard my original pitch, they were basically lost. but the aesthetic response was mostly positive, so that was nice. ultimately, i like my solution for the character bios, a solution born out of the unfortunate issue of having already printed the character designs at a rather steep price, i could not afford to reprint them all with their bios attached, nor did i like the idea of sticking/taping on an bio addendum sloppily to each page, so, instead we have plan c, seen below, which i rather like.

for your eyes only.

so i know, lame, lame, just a sketch. but i had double-sketch week last week for concepts and character development, and this sketch got a big, fat, emphatic thumbs-up from brian in the context of a slew of "eh, c-minus" hand-wavering sketches. i was both shocked and ecstatic. full color final is finished but TOP SECRET, for no particular reason other than i haven't turned it in or printed it yet. mild changes to nigel in the front (his fatty arm is out of the frame and he's leaning on his other regular-sized one instead). otherwise, it's essentially the same, and digitally colored to keep it consistent with the rest of the packet. i'll post the finish on tuesday-ish. whoo bravo-sketch crit! that never happens to me in that class.

who needs subtlety anyway?

just a little quick post for you, with the facial expressions of my main character for my animated tv show pitch package. we have, clockwise from the top left:

1. grimace-y unpleasant situation face
2. lovelorn sheepish smile face
3. "i just said something awkward" face
4. surprised and possibly distressed face
5. sad and lonely isolation face

not a real optimistic bunch, nor are they very disparate from one another. but luke is not a "wild-and-crazy rollercoaster of emotions" kind of kid. so i feel like his face shouldn't look like it's made out of jello, jiggling and jostling in all directions at once to show how crazy everything is. i guess it's back to that subtlety thing that i so desperately seek, but is not so much congratulated.

the elusive profile view, or the magnetic three-quarter view.

more animated tv show pitch package material for you, this time, a costume change for luke, in winter-wear, and three rotations each of nigel, olivia, and ashley, aka, fatty mcfat-fat. hilariously enough, i stole his sweater from tyler's wardrobe (and changed the colors) and then coincidentally used a tyler-ish button-up underneath, so as to inspire a wave of curiosity about why luke stole tyler's clothes. oops. i guess he just had the urge to dress like a snappy graphic design nerd.

these went over well in crit, and i was really happy with them as well, since i am generally, um, not real strong when it comes to technical anatomy with my characters. the fact that they were specifically noted to have interesting but well-rendered poses was a big victory for me, a rarity in this class. the only glitch in the system was that, try as i might to put these guys in profile for the center drawings, i always ended up with a smidge of three-quarter view in there, so they end up in like, i don't know, seven-sixteenth view, or some such nonsense. nigel's big arm now prominently featured as a means of causing him some serious anxiety and also giving him a bad-ass left hook.

working title.

so here are the initial character designs for my animated tv show, "the not-so-secret diaries of luke merriweather". from left to right in the group shot, we have miss ray, the mentor; olivia, the love interest; luke, the hero; nigel, the best friend; and ashley, the bully/nemesis. i would give you more show details, but i'm short on time and will have more posts on this later this week, so for now, stick with "malcolm in the middle" meets "x-men: evolution" and see where your imagination takes these guys.

it's "malcolm in the middle" meets "x-men evolution".

so i know it's been quite some time since i've shown my face in this joint, for which i express my most sincere apologies. it just so happens that fall break, in conjunction with a couple longer-term assignments has stretched out the availability of final products for me to put on display for your viewing pleasure.

i have here my last on-going sketchbook contribution, a cover design for this book on octopi. my word to include was cyclone, as exhibited by the scared octopus running away from a water-tornado of some kind.

in other news, i am attempting to scan my bad-ass (translation: really really big) illustration map from last week's concepts class. once i do that, it will be uploaded, but a few things have come up and pushed that to the back-burner for now. also keep your eyes peeled for the first of my character design for my tv show pitch, "the not-so-secret diaries of luke merriweather". it's about high school and nerds and magical powers and angst and video diaries. you can barely contain your excitement, i can just tell.

the sears side.

the final for my roller girl poster came out pretty okay, i think. i am slightly full of rage about how i managed to mis-proportion her shoulders as i did, but other than that, i am pretty pleased with this one. it went over well enough in crit, as a welcome change to the zombie-fighting, blood-spewing, spine-smashing alternatives that littered the wall. it made me feel sort of lame, to be all, "awww, whimsy and childhood and preciousness abound!" but whatever, i am not the one you call when you want blood and gore. it was a pretty successful venture in digital work, but i've concluded that minus the time constraint, i would have preferred to do this piece traditionally.

i discovered, while working on the previous post's piece, that my inking is much stronger when i loosen up and care less, like on, for instance, these continuing narrative sketchbooks we've been doing. if you compare the inking of my initial roller girl character designs to that book and to this final, the differences are startling, with, sadly enough, the ultimately unimportant book spread taking the throne as most successful, with this final clipping at its heels, and the sad, sad rollergirl from last week barely limping across the finish line. i tried to approach this one with the same vigor and momentum as the sketchbooks. my plan is to try and revisit my "default technique" of acrylic and brush ink to see if i can't better control my hand with ink. i'd also still like to better expand the language of my characterization to include more stretched out (read: normally proportioned) figures in the context of the squatty folk, so, tall people can actually be tall instead of just marginally less squatty than their present company. i'm working on it.

also (sorry to be so text-laden today), i am not a slacker and have been working on my "everything happens for a reason" map in concepts which is why i have nothing to show this week for that class, since the final's not due until after fall break, which is really just a four-day weekend. it's going to likely be large, like 22x30, so we'll see if i can manage to scan the beastly finish to upload on here. also, i will maybe--and this is a really big maybe--be posting my screenprint final for fibers and my writing samples for creative non-fiction on here soon. ish. maybe. we'll see. i love love love my non-fiction class. right now i'm writing about harriet the spy. amazing.

arthur was supposed to be an aardvark too? bullshit.

i forgot we did these animal mascot sketches for the zoo this week too. we were assigned aardvarks, anteaters, or sloths, and had to make them appealing and one (in my case, the bottom one) had to fit the side of a bus. imagine wheels beneath his belly and tail. cute, simple. brian said he liked that is wasn't a straightforward cartoon anthropomorphic animal like a lot of the others. way to go me? i also learned that things look cuter, more innocent, and way less creepy with no mouth. who would've guessed?

i am not a sexy vampire robot from outer space.

so this week in character development marked the first half of a two-week assignment involving roller girls. we had a model, julia, who was actually a roller girl in the charm city roller derby, come in last week. the first part of the assignment was to characterize her in a resting and an action pose, to be used in a larger , fully rendered poster design (due next week). we had to keep it grounded as the specific roller girl who modeled for us (her derby name? "essie ecks". get it, get it?) , and communicate the essence of her. i was trying some things with total simplification of shape, line, and palette (since i'm usually such a fan of detail and
clutter), as well as digital coloring. also, i decided she was going to be ready to hit you in the face with a folding chair, and i planned to move forward with a final poster design of the badass roller girl in a rink of tiny little girls skating around joyously (hence the pink).

my crit proved to be a little frustrating when, taken out of context, my characterization of essie appears boring and starightforward, expecially compared to other student work that featured "essie the slutty amazonian goddess" , "essie as tank girl", or a sweet "essie the communist". simple looks like crap pinned next to the hyper-detail-oriented. anyway, so i was getting sort of frustrated at the notion that every character design in that class had to be insane and ridiculous (see above, re: title), because i really hoped to be able to use that class to inform my work (which is not at all flashy armor and explosions) and render subtle differences in body type and facial expression as a means of differentiation. of course you can tell that a brute is a brute when he is four times the height of the other characters and he has four arms whose biceps are as big around as the other characters' waists. i wanted to learn to communicate those differences without screaming them at the top of my lungs. and i also didn't want to abandon the goals i had or the work i wanted to be making to make a less successful version of what everyone else was doing, because i was catering to what i thought brian wanted to see. so i explained to him that i thought i would die a slow, painful, character development-related death if i did such a thing, and he was really understanding, and when i spoke to him toward the end of class about my sketches, he seemed jazzed about my final poster concept, even if it didn't feature zombie warriors riding giant porpoises that breathe green smoke. this week's legitimately mediocre work notwithstanding, i hope that i can prove i don't suck during the course of the rest of this class, and also not accept defeat and draw the fantasies of twelve year-old boys.
*NOTE: all superlative character ideas were actually, seriously, discussed during crit yesterday.

mild self- and other-proclaimed victory.

so here it is, the much-anticipated re-design of a childhood staple: mr. yuk. now apparently, mr. yuk was not as far-reaching with his influence as i thought, and i had to explain to a lot of people the whole deal: poisonous substances used to have the skull-and-crossbones image on them to ward children away from them, but then kids began to associate that symbol with pirates, and everybody loves pirates, so they'd see the symbol and think, "pirate juice!!" and drink it, but it would be drano and then they'd die. so they developed mr. yuk to be extra-unappealing and not at all pirate-y so that kids wouldn't drink deadly things thinking that they'd wake up with a peg-leg and an eyepatch. anyway, so we had to redesign him to make him both disgusting and terrifying, and extra child-unfriendly. and i know that when you think of my work, that those are *definitely* the first two things that come to mind, right? right? yeah, not so much. so in short? really hard assignment for me. also, i'm using this as my first venture into digital coloring, at long last, and umm, it's hard. and this was only two colors. i'm sure i'll get better at it as i go, but man, annoying. blah, blah, important skills, blah blah, get with the times, whatevs. okay, so enough whining because-- brian thought as far as impact and actually deterring kids from drinking death in a bottle, that mine would work best, as far as the simplicity of the graphic and the menace of his angry pointy eyeball sockets. hooray! plus, i mean, he's all gangsta and bad-ass, and what kid's not afraid of a bad-ass slimy skeleton? or something to that effect.
i'm glad there was at least a little payout on this one, because it was a really hard assignment for me, since i'm trying so hard to not be all stubborn and "well, i don't *do* gross art, so i'm just gonna not and be lame and cross my arms tight against my chest and pout."

she's shaped like a banana, get it?

another piece from last week, since a) i'm busy, and b) i'm lazy. ish. this was my "redesign an advertising character" assignment. i think a lot of us misunderstood the goal of the assignment, since we were supposed to honor the character and the product/company intention, but at the same time update the look. i took this to mean both "don't make an lsd trix bunny or a lard-ass obese ronald mcdonald" (the obvious kind of subversion) but also don't reinvent her purpose or anything, so my design left some innovation to be desired. anyway, i did miss chiquita banana, after much deliberation and the sunmaid raisin girl and cheesasaurus rex losing out to the carmen miranda wannabe. the chiquita banana chick was itching to be redone, and her previous design pre-1987 revamp was even more terrifying, as a sultry flamenco-banana with sexy-lady arms and legs. frea-ky. me and another girl both re-designed her, and we both flip-flopped her original costume colors (blue dress, yellow detailing) and gave her a hair-wrap-turban thing instead of a giant bowl on her head. with such similar designs, we were deemed "classy" (me) and "trashy" (her). awesome.

leave it to me to make agriculture romantic.

so this was a class exercise from character development and the first piece that i've really been happy with from that class. the class is a little intense because we have homework assignments and in-class start-to-finishes as well, so the turnaround is really quick. but i like the problem-solving aspect of stretching your style to suit the exercise, which in this case was to make two complimentary but opposing body types interacting in some way. i pulled the starting points "plaid", "overalls", and "wok" (we scramble bits of paper with suggestions on them to start the cogs a-turnin' in your brain for these assignments), and had to use two of the three. so imagine his shirt is plaid, since i never got around to inking that. farmer and milkmaid in love. precious. i really hope to get a lot out of this class, but in the meantime it is kicking my butt, but good.