I know I haven’t kept up with my posting lately, but I’m gonna try and get caught up here pretty soon. First up is some line work for another of the quirky collections.

 Pendulum Cat Clock Collection.

Hope everyone had a good Christmas and New Years. Its been a while since my last post but I’m starting to get going again. Here are a few sketches of my sister the other day as she relaxed and messed with her phone. Unsuspecting models are always good for when you want to practice sketching quickly.

More exploring with monoprint texture/patterns.

Hair Barrier 

Experimenting using some monoprints for texture.

Sorry I haven’t really updated recently. The semester is coming to an end so I’ve been super busy finishing things up. 

These are a few of the monoprints that I made the other day in lab. I thought I’d just experiment a bit with creating different textures and patterns to scan in. 

Recently we had Libby Clarke as a visiting artist at CSUN. While she was here Libby held a set of two day workshops to create screen printed protest/support posters that I went to. We did these in groups with the first day used for sketches, planning and getting the screens ready while on the second day we did all of the transfers and printing.

I’ve been interested in screen printing for a while so this was a nice intro. Each group printed about 20 posters and when they were fairly dry we got to go around trading with the other groups.

The top picture is the poster that my group came up with and the bottom is a group photo of all the posters I came home with.

Quirky Collections- Change Purses

This is a new change purse collection I am working on. Line work done with brush and ink then cleaned up in photoshop. I hope to have this done either later today or tomorrow. 

I am still working on the mini food collection and portrait but its been dragging on for a while so I need to take a little break from it.  

So I started to collect water in my apartment this afternoon starting around 2:40, here is a little drawing of how this went down. I’m not gonna lie I have been waiting for my first real apartment mishap. That’s why I fanatically check my locks and make sure my sister doesn’t leave on her straightener or curling iron. I was not prepared for a 3rd floor flooding hence the random assortment of containers.

Apparently there was a busted pipe on the third floor. They had to rip up a section of our carpet and now we have a machine drying the floor.

On a bit of the bright side they said that once they have that part of the floor fixed  they will clean all of the carpet in the apartment.

I am starting to regret choosing miniature food as my next quirky collection. Originally I was inspired by really simple mini food but then I saw the detailed ones and was all “ooooh aaaaah”. And now the food is in a weird in between place. Sigh. 

Still in the moving stuff around and adding items phase. I am also trying different ways to portray the size difference, a hand, something else on the wall or on top of the shadowbox. We’ll see. 

Here are more of my prints from class. I posted a few of my jean prints a while back but  thought I would put up a quick photo of the rest. The same jeans block print is used for both series with the line work done with trace monotype.

I also did some collage in the top ones with some Japanese paper (mulberry to be exact) that I glued on with some matte medium. A few different adhesives were suggested to me but had the matte medium at hand it worked out just fine.

By the way please ignore the mess on my table in the first picture. It is slowly being taken over by the materials of my next project.

So here is the real final of my terrarium collector portrait. I posted this guy a few days ago but I made a few changes and didn’t see any reason to have two versions so similar posted so I deleted the other one.

Also despite my nervousness and a few hiccups in the setup my grad committee meeting went well yesterday. Its always nice to see how people from different disciplines view your work. I got a lot of good critique/feedback and a list of artists to take a look at in relation to my work. Overall a positive experience.

These are options for my picture frame collection with portrait. The girl is still not quirky enough but I’ve got grad review tomorrow so I think I’m gonna just stop here. I’m having a hard time deciding which one of these to show tomorrow so opinions are welcome.

I just noticed I haven’t posted anything from my printmaking class this semester so here is bit of what I’ve been working on. My theme is street fashion, specifically prints of everyday real women and their fashion (good and bad). 

These are small 4x5 prints. I carved the pants out of a lino block and the line work is trace monotype. 

These are the finished portraits for my terrarium collection. I ended up doing two different portraits because I was having second thoughts about the sweater guy and I liked the sketch I had for this girl.

I like both of them but I’m leaning more towards the guy I think.

Also even though I said I was going to fix his wonky hand it has grown on me so its staying as is. 

Hmmm. Further ideas for the portrait. 

1. At his worktable with his terrariums around him.

2. Surrounded by various terrarium plants 

3. Or instead he collects dinosaurs (or godzilla items because for some reason I drew mothra in there)

Still thinking.

Terrarium beard guy portrait coloring -take two.

So I’ve decided to do portraits of the people that own the quirky collections.

I ended up drawing this guy on a whim. I saw a man wearing a sweater like this one the other day and it stuck in my mind. There are still things that I need to work on like the hand and some other stuff but I’ll get to it.

Does he look like someone who would collect terrariums? Is the sweater too busy?  Does his style fit with the terrariums, should he be more realistic looking? So much to still work out. We’ll see.

Quirky Collections-Terrariums

Originally it was suggested to me that I scan in my original sketches and color them rather then redraw them. I tried that and it wasn’t bad but something about something was just bugging me. In the end it was the lack of line variation that made me start over and redraw everything with a brush and some ink. Much happier with the results. 

So here are my scanned in brush and ink drawings (and after being arranged and rearranged numerous time) ready to be colored in.