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.

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.