Designing Characters

My first two character design projects! Our first was to do three portraits of a celebrity of our choosing in three different styles. One only in line, one only in shape, and one rendered as realistically as we could manage. My line one came out like crap, but here's the rendered and shape versions, of my favorite, Jo Calderone.

Our second project was to design a character based on an animal we were assigned. I got the Irish Wolfhound, and so this gentleman was born. 

Advanced Follow Your Heart

My first piece for my advanced digital illustration class, based on the prompt "getting it straight".

Another advanced digital project, with the prompt being simply to make a tileable pattern of things that you like. I'm quite pleased with this, actually.

Coming Soon: Design your own supervillian project, revamped! (psst Sam Bosma literally gives the best projects).

Dark Matter - Type 1 Final

Typography specimen book for Bodoni. The book has a monsters/spirits theme - the majority of the internal text is quotes taken from Bram Stoker's Dracula. 

Tattooed Love Goddess

Final project for Lifestyle illustration, a class I was really sad to see end. We had to choose a mixed drink and do two illustrations - one just based on the drink itself/its name and one with the recipe for the drink. I have sort of mixed feelings about these pieces in general I also discovered that tattoos are EXTREMELY time-consuming to design and draw, but the lettering one was incredibly fun - the whole thing was hand-painted in gouache and then tweaked a bit in photoshop. I love doing tiny intricate things with gouache. 

DollsDollsDolls

A selection of my favorite dolls from my lifestyle illustration class. These eventually just turned into "drawing outfits I wish I owned."

This last set was a collaboration I did with my friend Karli - we switched doll bases for the week, which ended up being really fun! 

Art Market

I've been pretty busy getting ready for Art Market for the last few weeks, which starts tomorrow here at MICA. (Art Market is basically a sort of craft-show-esque event for students, faculty, and alumni to sell their work. Its a pretty big deal and brings in a lot of people from the community - if you're in the Baltimore area this weekend, you should definitely come and check it out. ) Coincidentally, all of the prints I'll be selling are new work that I haven't posted here yet!

A Princess of Mars - Fashion Illustration based on the upcoming movie "John Carter of Mars".

May Fairies - Fashion Illustration calendar assignment.

Generation Sell - Editorial Illustration for the recent NYT article "Generation Sell".

I'll also be selling cute bug toys that I've been making - I'm hoping to post some pictures of them on here later tonight, so stay tuned!

Type Trouble

And, finally, my Typography work from the last few weeks. The first is a composition based on a 3 by 4 grid layout, and the second is a poster design for a series of typography talks. We were given the body copy for each.

Jr. Illustration

Assorted pieces for Junior Illustration - The first is a matching T-shirt and poster set for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

This piece was an 11 by 20 (newspaper-sized) advertisement for Converse. I chose specifically to promote their line of leather chuck taylor shoes. 

Everybody's Lookin' For Something

To those for you who regularly check this blog - sorry for the lack of posts, I've had a crazy busy month (apparently. It doesn't feel like its been that long since I last posted.) Since there's rather a lot for me to post, I'm gonna break it into a few posts by class. This is what I've been up to in Lifestyles! The first two pieces are from an assignment that was to make pieces that incorporated an actual photograph or scan of an accessory. I chose all Alexander McQueen pieces and incorporated them into an icy alien amazon battle scene. These are gouache + digital. 

And also more dolls! All three of these guys are wearing stuff from the Versace for H&M collection which comes out next week.

Fashion + Movies

Style dolls for the last two weeks  - I've been having a lot of fun discovering new designers to dress them in.

Also, last week for my Jr. Illustration class, we had to re-design a movie poster from a list of "classic" movies given to us my our teacher. I chose to do Blade Runner - I'm pretty happy with the result, I tried a couple of new techniques when I was coloring this, and I think the majority of them were really successful. It was a really fun project to work on, even if it prevented me from sleeping for most of the week. 

Typography Jam

I hope I don't bore too many of you with this, but I always appreciate some good typography, and I've been pretty pleased with the work I've been making for my type 1 class. So here's a compilation of almost every project we've done for the class so far. 

Amen Fashion

A collective dump of nearly everything I've done for my Lifestyle illustration class so far this semester. Exhibit A) Style Dolls, which are essentially "paper" (or in this case, digital) dolls which we dress/accessorize every week. Here they are naked:

And here they are dressed for the first week:

I believe the main designers are Ralph Lauren, D&G and Yves St Laurent, with some mixed for the shoes and acessories.

This is a portion from the first project we did, which was to choose an environment and then select outfits that matched and create a piece with them - my environment was a freak show. There was actually a second piece with a mermaid in a tank, but I'm pretty unhappy with it, so you only get to see the one. 

The designers for this are Vivian Westwood (the jumpsuit) and Mugler. 

And then finally, my assignment for this week, which was a sequential piece for a two-page spread that displayed "a night out". I chose to utilize the 800+ photos I took this summer and do a night out in Kyoto, Japan. 

I have a great lust for those jeffrey campbell shoes I drew (the white ones). I really really really want them.

Sketchy Things

Just some sketchbook stuff I did before homework actually started and sort of ruined my life. Only a little bit. I'm thinking of revamping the blog layout again, if I ever get some time... expect projects to start flowing again soon!