Random thought: shopping

Went to the art store today. One thing I miss about being a student is definitely the art store situation. I guess that really doesn't have as much to do with being a student as it does with where I live... I go to A.I. Friedman, which is about a 20 minute drive away and HUGE. It has a perfectly good selection of supplies, but that part is surrounded by an even larger selection of scrapbooking materials and photo albums and pre-framed paintings of flowers for your kitchen or bathroom. I guess it really makes no difference, but I used to feel like a kid in a candy store when I went supply shopping, and now I feel more like a bored mom or something.

ANYWAY, I had to get some new watercolor brushes and Princeton now makes Velvetouch handles. HAS ANYONE EVER TOUCHED A VELVETOUCH HANDLE?! I'm pretty sure it's the most superfluous thing ever, especially because I'd probably do something like drop it in my gesso 5 minutes after taking it home, but it feels like petting a chinchilla. I wouldn't get anything done; I'd just sit there listening to music and stroking my brush handle. Didn't buy one. Just thought I'd mention it. That's what blogs are for, right?

Inspiration of the week

Maybe this will become a thing? Who knows. Anyway, this morning Design*Sponge had a post about Jon Klassen and I fell in love. The site is kind of annoying to navigate, but I don't suppose there is a much better way to present very long horizontal images. Worth checking out-- I can't really re-post them because of the format.

I remember asking Doug Chayka after his presentation at the Illustration Academy in '08 if he ever missed painting in detail, because I couldn't imagine letting go of it to an extent. Now, almost everything I'm attracted to is simplified somehow. I definitely get the appeal!

Tadahiro Uesugi

I am OBSESSED right now.

Link

Sketch post

My urge to ramble is so great that I've considered making a second blog for rambling (no one would read it, of course). Instead, I've decided to try briefly sketching what I want to ramble about so I can keep it all here. I've also been wanting to work a bit on my portraiture, since my likenesses need work.

That's Joe Flacco, the Ravens' quarterback. I've spent almost my whole life hating football, but last year fellow New Rochelle High School alum and friend-of-friend Ray Rice became a Raven, and I decided to attempt to follow his progress. This was pretty easy because my boyfriend happens to be a big Ravens fan. Now I guess I'm a pretty big Ravens fan. I've found I rather enjoy watching football. Plus, incidentally, Ray Ray is TEARING IT UP.

Anyway, back to Flacco. I find him very endearing, with his quiet demeanor and his unibrow and his underwhelming passer rating and his silly local Pizza Hut commercials. I think I'm on the brink of likeness. My lines are probably fractions of millimeters off but I missed his essence. This is why good caricaturists blow my mind. How do you draw essence?

Some inspiring things

I've noticed my inspiration changing a lot lately. I had a pretty solid group of artists that I looked at in school, but now I'm finding myself inspired by a wider range of illustration styles, graphic design, and a lot of completely random images and things. A big reason for that is probably that I've been exposed to a lot of things in my job that a year ago I thought I'd never be doing. Anyway, here are some things I find inspiring nowadays:

Poly Bernatene. My children's book aspirations are on hold right now, but it's still something I'd like to try in the future. I adore this man's work. It's so whimsical and the textures are delicious.

Mary Blair. She speaks for herself.

Matthew Lyons. Love the simple color schemes, retro style, and integration of type. I've been super interested in integrating more type into my work, especially hand-drawn type. That's why I'm also crazy about this stuff right now:

Grady McFerrin, who I met sort of recently at the AI-AP party. Love love love love letterpress-inspired things.

Louise Fili Ltd and Jessica Hische. Completely in love with their design styles.

Wayne Brezinka. More appealing type integration with a hand-drawn look.

Stuff made out of type. This one is by e. emoo.

Vintage poster art

... by Toulouse-Lautrec in particular

Fashion photography. I've been pulling a lot of my color schemes from fashion photography lately. These are from the wonderful Lace & Tea blog.

Heavily textured web layouts. I've always worked traditionally, and since the outlet for my work has switched to entirely web-based media for the time being, I've been looking for ways to bring traditional to the web. I really admire web designs that remain clean and easy to use but look like you could hold them in your hand and play with the stuff. In addition to having a really cool layout, Design Sponge has really cool stuff on it too.

Stuff that looks like it's been cut out. I know that's a really weird and specific category of things to be inspired by, but I've had to do a lot of Flash animation lately and I've been trying to add a traditional-looking element to that too. The cutout look gives me a little flexibility for animating. Also, owls. I still have a thing for owls. My boss once asked me "what's with young designers and owls these days?" And even though I have a thing for owls, I was completely at a loss. Above: something I pulled off ffffound and put in my inspiration folder (sorry, I don't know the artist... that's really terrible of me), Jessica Hische again, and a blog divider thingy from Shabby Blogs.

Finally, this animation I saw on Drawn! It's so simple and beautiful and I love it.

I also rarely make it through a day without listening to Pink Martini and A Fine Frenzy.

Holiday haul

Taken with my new digital camera that actually TAKES PICTURES INDOORS! And on the default snapshot setting, too. This is a major improvement. I got a Rockwell book as well (it's about time), but it's all the way downstairs. I'm very excited about the typography books; my job has gotten me much more interested in type and design. I wish I had a little bit of training in it.

Happy new year! I'm going to try to start sneaking personal work into my daily schedule to help my stagnating portfolio, even if it takes me a month or more to finish one thing. We'll see how that goes.

Christmas ornaments

I had a free day so I made these ornaments as gifts. Fun and relaxing, except for the berries. I seem to be the world's worst photographer; in reality these are glossy and textured and colorful and have silver and gold on them.

I'm hoping to do another Christmas card, though it will be a Christmas miracle if that actually happens. We'll see!

Dr. Sketchy's

Apparently I've been SO holed up in my bedroom (uh, office) that it took me until last week to realize that Dr. Sketchy's isn't unique to Baltimore, but rather exists all over the place and ORIGINATED in NYC (in retrospect, duh).

So yesterday I went and it was so much fun. I just wish a session there didn't cost me entry plus train fare. The wonderful and gorgeous model was dressed as a sea witch.

I really enjoyed this pose but I'm just so damn slow. Maybe I'll go back to it. I'll add it to my only growing, never shrinking list of things to work on if I ever have free time again.

A sketchbook post in which I ramble a great deal more than I sketch

Welcome to another chapter in my continuing quest to psychoanalyze my aversion to keeping a sketchbook. My last sketchbook post, which occurred after the familiar declaration "I'm going to force myself to draw something every day," was in May. So clearly that didn't work, not even with the help of my pretty and musky-smelling Italian leather sketchbook. I felt guilty for about 3 days and then gave up easily.

On Labor Day I went to the renaissance faire for the first time in my life. I walked into Under the Mango Tree and, in spite of all the evidence I've collected that the sketchbook itself, no matter how awesome, does NOT in fact make me want to sketch, I purchased an obnoxiously expensive little (like maybe 4") journal with cotton paper in it. The rationale was it could probably take watercolor, and maybe the thumbnail size of it would be less intimidating. So not only was I ignoring all former evidence, I was also assuming that this little book was not only going to make me draw stuff in it, but also GO BACK to it later and hit it with watercolor. What was I thinking? Of course it's been sitting empty in my bedroom since Labor Day.

Last weekend I went up to visit Rochester. While I was walking from my car back to my boyfriend's apartment, I had a Moment (Moment, with a capital M, is the term I use to define a stupid ordinary occurrence that for some reason sparks an emotion followed by a long rambling train of thought in my head. I have lots of them). It was twilight and the sky was blue and lavender and everything against it was almost black, and right as I was approaching this rickety old telephone pole I happened to look up just as a flock of crows flew by the open space between the top of the pole and some bare trees. It was cool. And I stood there for a second just kind of thinking about how cool it was and trying to burn it in my memory. And I thought about how I wished I had a photo of it, except a photo totally would have made it look cheesy. Then I realized what I really wished was that I had my sketchbook and a pocket set of watercolors so I could paint it quickly.

That was the beginning of my long train of thought. At the end of it I realized that I've had this really twisted backward outlook on keeping a sketchbook. It sounds weird, even to me, but I never thought of it as a means to capture these little moments in the world, like a more permanent version of a mental snapshot. And that's like a huge DUH. I think if you asked any random person on the street, artist or not, to define sketching, that would more or less be the gist of their definition. I think I always tried to capture the sketchbook page rather than whatever it was I was sketching. I've seen so many wonderful sketchbooks, and I've just wanted so badly to HAVE one of them, that I've been obsessed with the end and completely ignored the means. Of course, my lack of means has produced me no end, which I suppose is why I keep giving up.

Yesterday my eyes needed a few minutes' break from Flash, and this new thought, which has been sort of nagging me for the past few days, actually made me want to sketch. I'd say it was the first time, except I think the same thing happened when I went to go draw that barn in the woods a couple of months ago; I just hadn't realized it yet. I went to my bedroom window and just drew the light in my backyard:

So, as it turns out, the paper in this lovely little journal I bought does not AT ALL take watercolor. Now I don't know what I'm going to do with it. I really like the size...

Then, returning to my old friend smelly Italian sketchbook, I did something I NEVER do: I tried to sketch the crow scene from memory. Drawing from memory, just barely squeaking by caricature, is my biggest artistic weakness. I'm upset I can't do the scene justice, but nonetheless I felt it ought to be in my sketchbook. I had a little help from a different telephone pole...

That sketchbook doesn't take watercolor much better. It just kind of sits on the surface and doesn't get dark. Maybe I need a watercolor sketchbook.

Bernie Fuchs

What kind of student of Bob Dorsey would I be if I didn't acknowledge Bernie Fuchs? Bernie was a tremendous influence on Bob, and Bob was certainly a tremendous influence on me. I've seen his slideshow entitled "Why I think Bernie Fuchs is the best ever, even better than Norman Rockwell (or something like that)" multiple times, and I'm glad, because it opened my eyes to some extraordinary artwork.

It's so difficult to pick a favorite of Bernie's pieces, but this one has left a lasting impression on me since the first time I saw it:

We lost a legend. Made me a little miffed that the front page story on Yahoo last night was that Drew Barrymore dyed the tips of her hair black...

Website the second

Many of you probably know that my (not so) secret identity is a softball coach. My dad and I actually have a business together, and we travel to different communities running skills camps, and we also host pitching clinics in my home town. After 10 years of business, we finally have a website!

Sound Shore Sports

This is the second website I've designed and made on my own, and my first Flash website. There were a lot of things I liked and a lot of things I reeeeeally didn't like about using Flash, but I'm glad I've come far enough with the program to at least be able to function in it. Anyway, since this is my first try with it, I'd appreciate any feedback from those who know more about web design in Flash!

sketch-in-the-woods day

I haven't posted art in a while! I hope everyone else has been blessed with the same weather we've had here in the NYC area for the past week or so. A couple of days ago it was just too heartbreaking to sit in front of my computer, so I blew off my work and went to draw in the woods, something I've been meaning to do since I thought of it back in June.

There is a pretty sweet giant dilapidated old barn up on a hill in the woods that they used to use for a haunted house at Halloween when I was a kid. Now it's just kind of sitting there. So I sketched that:

I like sketching with vine charcoal on gessoed paper when I'm observing from life. It's practically like a whiteboard, it erases to nothing. So you can sort of mold it as you go instead of layering slowly, which I like. Only drawback is it also smudges to practically nothing if you rub it by accident.

I got a visit from a giant schnauzer in the middle of it. He put his face right on my paper. But he was so adorable I forgave him. He ran away before I could draw him though.