book sleuth: the higher power of lucky (2 of 6)

a super-speedy (and procrastination-friendly) post to share the next spread in my book sleuth series. it's on the higher power of lucky by susan patron. it's a pretty new book, and so scandalous because she uses the word 'scrotum' in the first paragraph. crazytown! click to read slash, see the big version.

in other non-relevant news, i had a lovely pair of thanksgivings this year, one of which involved thanksgiving pizza, and one that involved dutch apple pie made by someone who's actually dutch, and both of which involved an outrageously huge vat of cranberry sauce, which is already gone. i hope you all celebrated accordingly, too.

practically-almost-nearly-virtually a real, grown-up human.

the posting of this illustration comes with a huge sigh of relief since OH YEAH IT'S THE END OF MY THESIS. the last what-if? in the series (for the meantime...?) is "what if... you could bring your stories to life?" because what collection of children's illustrations would be complete without an adorable, tiny nerd in horn-rimmed glasses, really?

after the guilt-ridden sketch post of last week, i powered through and knocked out this one just in time for my final review board on monday, and mica's illustration showcase on thursday. showcase is a delightful event in which the illustration seniors are essentially pimped out to art directors in the hopes that they like what they see and want to pay to see more of it in their publications. this is definitely, probably referring to our illustrations, and not our sexy sexy selves.

too bad it is mega-disgusting outside, i will soon be braving a slimy trip to the print lab to get hard copies of this and all my other what-ifs to prepare for my installation which is WOW REALLY SOON. totally feeling the 'being done right now' thing.

you've got a little guilt on your face.

dear blog,
i promise i don't hate you.
love, alissandra

i can't lie, this is a guilt-ridden sketch post. it should be finished, and provide you with a far juicier payoff for your devoted days waiting patiently by your google reader, but as you can see, not so much. in real life, it is a little farther along than this, fully inked and itching to be gouached, but alas, i've been swamped by meetings and review panels, forms to fill out and documents to turn in. soon i will lock myself in my studio to give her the technicolor treatment, otherwise i will go batty from the art-free existence i'm currently living.

once it's all grown up, it will become "what if... you could bring your stories to life?". in color, it'll make more sense and make your eyes bleed less, i swear.

it just takes practice.

i have totally been doing more things than it seems like i have been doing, they just aren't nearly pretty or exhilarating enough to warrant blogging about them. nothing says "WOW AMAZING" quite like html house-cleaning and digital image-tidying... so i apologize for the posts being few and far between, there are all sorts of tiny tasks required so that i can properly commence in like, less than a month. i have managed to stay on track-ish (for now) with my what-ifs, so here is "what if... you could fly?" a classic, i suppose, but a very seriously entertained childhood goal:

did anyone else run down hills constantly, convinced that leaping at just the right time would render you airborne? no? just me? well, all right.

in other news, i finally stocked my etsy shop with a few things. not many to start, but modest collection of silkscreens and digital prints. take a look at it if you please. it's nice, and matches every other tiny web presence i hold. it's also perma-linked to the left now, so you can come and go as you please. i'll be slowly building up a larger variety of items, so stop back frequently!

too busy to come up with a reasonable title.

it's been far too long, i'm so very sorry. here is my latest illustration, "what if... we could live in the clouds?" thoughts?

phew, it's been a busy busy time as of late. i thought my thesis professor whitney sherman was joking and/or crazy when she told us we would accomplish next to no work on our thesis following spring break. turns out? way correct. i have two sketches that are supposed to be in the pipeline that are in fact just chilling out in my brain. sort of. i'm doing my best to stay current over here on the blog, so thanks for being patient.

in other news, i was told that my "what if... flowers bloomed with your every step?" will be the cover of the juxtapositions publication for mica's exhibitions in may-july, aka, the commencement catalog. that is neat.

in which digital coloring corrupts alissandra's soul.

spring break afforded me the luxury of attempting this piece both in gouache, as per normal, and as a fully digital adventure. i prefer the gouache piece (super apparently the second image) both aesthetically and because working entirely digitally made me want to die a little bit. but! here they both are, "what if... you were friends with the monsters under our bed?"
while there are a few magic things that only digital techniques can truly accomplish, my loyalties lie with paint. and brushes. and pushing them around on real paper in real life. i am trying to build up an arsenal of digital skills to incorporate in my manipulation of my final illustrations even when using gouache (like, for example, the colored ink lines and the unifying "nighttime" layer i added after the fact) to maximize the potential digital color has to offer, and to at least be reasonably competent, should something particularly lend itself to being digital. but really, i just don't enjoy it much. bummer, because it is way cost effective, and man it's fun being poor.

also, it features a boy! hooray.

oh hey, flying cupcakes.

...that's pretty much what we've got here. officially, this is "what if you could move things with your mind?" but i lovingly refer to it as "telekinetic cupcake party." the "lovingly" part is only true when i'm not thinking about what a pain in the butt those sprinkles were.

this is another gouache painting layered with an ink drawing that has been digitally colored, like the last few. i will be, however, venturing into full digital for the next piece in the series, as yet to be determined. maybe something about dopplegangers, because the idea of a carbon copy you somewhere is sufficiently weird and terrifying.

also, thanks to all of you who came out to my opening on friday night! it was real swell, and a lovely departure from the crazy crazy week i had leading up to it.

dailies week OH NO, or, flowers for everyone.

it's finally happened for real. while i did manage to churn out another two weeks of dailies after the initial I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS panic session, they are for real on hiatus. february appears to the month in which everything ever happens, so i am swamped. they are good things, but there are just so, so many. so many. the dailies will just have to wait. but i love them, so they will be back, i promise.

so that this post isn't entirely void of substance, here's my second 'what if' piece, "what if... flowers bloomed with your every step?"

it's a little desaturated, story of my (and everyone's) blogger-related life. next up is "what if... you could move things with your mind?" and i will give you just one clue: TELEKINETIC CUPCAKES. make of that what you will. fun fact: row houses are the greatest kind of houses.

lastly, my 2008 dailies in their entirety are currently installed in the gateway here at mica. while it was a rough time getting them all ready and installed, it is really exciting to see them all together, fancy style. the opening will be on friday from 5-7pm, and the lovely marika mccoola will be having her opening simultaneous to mine in gateway too, so you can come love on us both!

in which the dailies take an indefinite hiatus.

hello, everyone. it's a bit of a melancholy day here in the studio, since my beloved dailies project, well, how to say this, um, tanked this week. i completed half the week as normal, and then, boom, catastrophe. not in the form of something dramatic, like chernobyl and the hindenberg combined, but in a quiet, sneaky way. before i knew it, my ever-growing list of things to do (like that weird fact that if the population of china marched past you in a single-file line, the line would never end due to the rate of population increase? if that's the case, china and my list have that in common) had grown out of control and my dailies were the sad casualty.

especially since this year's dailies are designed with a "be better" sort of purpose in mind, i wish i had the time to treat them that way. instead, they feel like an afterthought. so... until i get out of the "oh (expletive deleted) i'm (expletive deleted) graduating (expletive deleted) (expletive deleted)(EXPLETIVE DELETED)" woods, the dailies will have to wait quietly on my desk to be resumed. tentative plan? my birthday is in may. birthday day will be the day.

well, now that all that unpleasantness is out on the table, here's the first of my thesis pieces in the what if? series, "what if we could talk to animals?"

apparently, if she could talk to animals, she would have forest-storytime. wouldn't you? while i was thinking of these strictly as a series of adorable for kids that would allow me to work with whimsy and narrative, whitney sherman suggested they might accompany a fictitious monthly short-story installment in a kids literary magazine. I THINK THAT'S A GREAT IDEA, CRICKET/LADYBUG/SPIDER ART DIRECTORS.

i'm trying a couple new things with this series, so this one is an ink drawing with a gouache painting layered in photoshop. i'm pretty okay with the process, it's doesn't feel/look too too digital for me, almost. stay tuned to see how things progress! i should have two sketches this week, and since my dailies took a nose-dive, i think i'm going to start posting some of my sketch-phase work (pencils? color studies? something?) so as to not completely neglect the blog here. i'm working on the next one, a "what if flowers sprouted with your every step?" i'm not 100% sold on the language for the title, but you get the gist of it, like the king midas effect, but with flowers and your feet.

turns out that kids speak in all caps.

this is it: my final pre-final comic (i.e., the one i did right before the ones i posted earlier, which was my actual final for the class). it was supposed to be a kids comic (right up my adorable alley, mentioned here), so my solution was a classic closet monster scenario. presented both in glorious full-color and classy black and white, for class and for my art-market mini-comic, respectively. i think i prefer the black and white, honestly. still getting the hang of the whole digital color situation. SPRING GOAL!

they are presented as two-page spreads, so arguably, the tentacle-friend propping the comic up for your reading pleasure could jump the gutter in the center between the pages and connect them like a fun maze - hooray.

crypto-fun for everyone.

what says "finals hooray!" more than cryptozoology? nothing. here is my sequential final, a series of mildly educational comics for kids to learn about geography slash cryptozoology while befriending nice monsters like the yeti or nessie. digital! limited color! complementary palettes! ish! i'm still working out the digital kinks as i'm getting more and more comfortable working this way. they are designed to be a serial comic in the back of some kids magazine that would run geography comics. like national geographic kids, i guess.
in other news, i forgot to ever post my last comic before this one so that it on it's way... later. it's in color too! also, i dropped my computer today (can you say OH BALLS? because i sure can. and did. especially if "balls" is spelled with many more expletives.) so my keyboard's been a little wonky, typing unecessarily frequent and unwanted e's. THIS IS MY DISCLAIMER IN THE EVENT THAT THIS POST IS RIDDLED WITH E-RELATED TYPOS.

platonic, entirely appropriate, and not at all scandalous.

so a bit overdue, here is my two! two! two!-page comic, "hide and seek" (the first of its kind!). it's slightly less suspensful when you can see both pages at once, but since i still can't do anything but adorable anyway, it's not that suspenseful to start with. be prepared for a full-on "awww" at least once, maybe more, depending on how susceptible to cute you are.
it's hanging in the illustration department's show here at mica right now, alongside one hundred thousand other cool kids taking classes with b.ralph (linked constantly, so i'll shut up about him already. his site's over on the left if you've been out of the loop since forever). if you're a baltimorean (baltimoreon? baltimoron?) then you can check it out for real, slightly more tangible and bigger! also on display is my hug-a-city friend, downstairs in the juried undergrad exhibition. she was my final from brian's class last year, so it's basically just a brian lovefest. minus the awkward implications that statement probably has.

end of a really short era.

okay, i did the best i could to get these up in a timely manner, but since i suck a little and held out for so long already, it did not seem fair to draw out their debut even more by posting separately. so, all at once, here are the last of my screenprints, "just in case", "take me away", and "not in the closet or under the bed", respectively. the last one was in the print exchange that we did in combination with the letterpress class next door to us. it was pretty okay, i got a couple pieces that i liked a whole lot, so that was a win.

now that the class is over, i'm thinking about how to go about my work for the rest of the summer, and how maybe, just maybe, to incorporate screenprinting (or some of the things that i learned through the process) into my upcoming work. i liked it a lot, like a lot a lot, but practicality is nearly non-existent with the pursuit of screenprinting as a method of illustration. also, my screen was snatched before the class even ended, another lovely hiccup in the road to becoming "alissandra the screenprinter." so i'm considering other applications of the breakdown of shape (ahem, *coughcollagecough*) and line, to go about things a little differently than i have been. hello, experimentation phase. stay tuned for some inevitably bad illustrative tangents coming soon.

and, as a last ditch effort to recover some of the costs of wooing my new friend screenprinting: since i have a whole lot of duplicates of these bad boys (and my postcards, and my misleading second grade instructional resource poster about things that may or may not fly), if any of you are dying to have, say, a giant toothy monster shadow on your wall, let me know and i'd be happy to hook you up. they're cheap! okay, shameless and marginally convincing sales pitch over.

brought to you by the dolphin building.

i've spent the better part of the last eleven days of my life in the dolphin building (which, as it turns out, is named for the street it lives on, not for any other highly unlikely but far more exciting reason involving a mica patron that just happens to be a friendly water-dwelling mammal. i mention this only because i went to - and gave tours at - this school for two and a half years before i figured out why the hell the printmaking building was called the dolphin building, apparently because i'm very dumb.) moral of the story is that i have only not been there when eating (actually only sometimes true, as my morning yogurt and coffee is consumed daily in class), sleeping, or spending money on screenprinting things that i can't so much afford. there was also a highly fruitful trip to the book thing (baltimore's free book store slash best thing ever) in there somewhere, which yielded many a book that i had been eyeballing and/or longing desperately for, though it definitely did not help the "downsize your life to move next week" plan i have been trying to put into action. but enough about that.

the class is actually really great, as is the professor, whose face is screenprinted onto his apron (but in a good way, i promise). his music collection has remarkable overlap with mine, so the cds played in class sound like my ipod on shuffle. or what my ipod on shuffle would sound like if it weren't way busted. who knew ipods made the sad mr.yuk, x-ed out eyeball, tongue-lolling face when they were dead? not me until right now. anyway, the only "assignment" for the class was a four-plus color 11x14 traditionally editioned print of fifteen. following that we have two open assignments and an optional print exchange. it sounded more terrifying to do that much work in two and a half weeks before i, well, did some of it. here's my editioned print, "some things that can fly." at first it seemed like a weird instructional resource poster for second graders. so i added some things that in fact CANNOT fly, so the smart kids will know better and the awesome kids will throw their toasters out the window and see if it sprouts wings.

i've actually finished my second project as well (see above, re: every waking hour), a set of postcards with well-wishing inanimate objects on them, but i just finished xacto-ing all 28 times 6 of them apart, and am now too tired to find the nice ones for scanning and editing and uploading and etc. so later. plus, there's more suspense that way, right?

also, june 1st marked the first day of my weekly daily upload goal, which is to say that i plan on uploading my daily illustrations once a week, instead of just drawing them for five months and now knowing what to do with them after the fact *coughmerightnowcough*. i'm still working on what i might do with said five months. any brilliant ideas?

final final project! starring: my hands.

the semester is done. summer is here. and making its big debut: the last of my final projects, officially titled "A KID'S GUIDE (or for anyone who's curious) TO THE REALLY cool, not-taught-in-schools but totally super-mega IMPORTANT skills, strategies, and other THINGS IN LIFE." complicated, to say the least.

first up is a (shoddily compiled) image of several views of the actual book itself. then the nice spreads from inside. then the book all open and crazy looking. it's bound in a modified squash style, for any of you book-making nerds out there, and closes with a jazzy purple slip band (seen below). the actual illustrations and text were all hand-done in ink and gouache, then scanned and cleaned up a little and printed (so i could arguably make millions! or not) to make the final specimen you see before you.




the end! i start my screenprinting class on thursday, so there should be something fruitful from that, AND i am using the summer as a testing ground for my "oh god i have so many things to do, can i slash will i choose to, and actually follow-through with, making some semblance of art too?!" fear that my unavoidably official senior-status has forced to the surface. so i'm working on some things to that end as well. i'm also holding down about twelve different jobs this summer, sticking around in baltimore, and hopefully taking some semblance of a vacation to nyc at some point. and trying to iron out my thesis. and i have about 5 months' worth of daily illustrations scanned into my computer, waiting to be... something more exciting. so, the moral of the story is hopefully my blog will remain active with proof of these lofty goals taking place throughout the summer. so stay tuned!

what is your childhood trauma?

um, i so fail at the consistent blogging thing this time around. like a lot. i could go on with the "blah, blah, lots of work, blah, blah, not enough sleep", but really, it's the same story for everyone, so i won't make excuses. me=the suck, i'm aware. but here's words on wheels. !!

words on wheels is an "illustrate a selected middle-schooler's poem and have it juried to be maybe printed for public transit in maryland" project. my poem is (as you can deduce, i imagine) about a little girl being told she's bad at art. how could i not illustrate a poem for a little girl who's sad because she's told she's bad at art? there were a lot of troublesome restrictions to the assignment like particular font size, color, placement, orientation, etc., etc., but overall it was a surprisingly enjoyable experience. also, i found out mine will for real be printed to go on buses and light rails and other public-type vehicles, so that makes it all the more agreeable. other peculiar trivia associated with this project: the poem i was originally given was plagiarized from a pretty terrible internet chain letter. by a sixth grader. how many different sorts of depressing is that?

i would close with the optimistic implication that i would post more later, but that would likely be a vicious lie. there are things to be shown, i promise, i just have to get around to actually, you know, showing them. don't judge. also, i have hit the "all my projects are independent" part of the semester, so things are less exciting to display anyway.

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.