Finally. Fashion done!

As the title implies, here is the complete and acceptable fashion Illustration for Thiel's class:

I like any number of my other fashion illustrations better and Thiel said he was flipping through a fashion magazine at the gym and was surprised at how much nudity there was. I think this makes my second attempt acceptable but Pfft. I'm just waiting for him to realize the 80's are coming back so he can see that the second (better) drawing like this one should have been fine too.

Love and Coffee,
~Anne

Portraits.

We had to do 30 12x12 portraits in 30 days for painting. In order to complete the task I limited myself to one hour per portrait and mixed mass quantities of fleshy colors at a time. The results are not great but I had all 30 done and only my five favorites are being posted here so you don't have to suffer through the worst of them:

If you'd like to see all but the bad ones, check out my LJ: http://ankatheartcat.livejournal.com/41653.html

Yeah, so, that's it.
Love and Coffee,
~Anne

The fine results of a productive night :)

Let's start with Kid's book... No wait, let me back up a touch. So, working at Joe's house has been hard. We have this big studio space in the back room but it was just not a good workspace. I don't know why but any time I came back here I lost the desire to work. So this weekend I came back here to work while Joe was playing games and I got that "Ugh, I don't want to do this" feeling and decided the room must be tended to. So I poked my head out the door to the living room and asked Joe if I might make the room a proper studio space. He said I could go to town on it. So I moved almost everything. I cleaned and cleared and removed. There was a big corner sofa set in a corner with a TV stand in it, there were about a million chairs... generally there was too much stuff and it wasn't in places that made any sense. So, the whiteboard went up on the wall, the sofa went in the corner, the art supplies went in the cabinet. Everything got swept and dusted and now the space feels like a work environment. It feels comfortable and intentional. I'm proud of my work. All of that said, I started working this afternoon and have only stopped for occassional breaks. I sat down with a paper and a pencil and wrote out an extensive to-do list. I have accomplished a respectable portion of that list in the past hours. Now, let's start with Kid's book:

Most of the people in my children's book class chose stories that involve one character or a few characters, but I am working with Justin. This means two things as near as I can tell. First, it will be awesome when it's done, if it gets done. Second, it cannot be easy. I have to design at least one new character for every page of the book except maybe the last page, depending on the final format of the book. So it's been slow going. The class before last we had a review and I showed the following page of character designs:
It contains the out-of-date version of Sandwich and Kibble (lower left) and the six prototype people that I made to figure the style out (lower right). Between that class and this evening I figured out that all the info I need is in my sketchbook so if I had my sketchbook I could work on designs. The third, fourth and fifth characters on this next page were designed at odd intervals when I had my sketchbook with me:
The rest were designed tonight. I'm sure that doesn't sound like much to my non-art people, but I had to look at each of the page descriptions consider what the characters needed to communicate and who they needed to interact with... Okay, so maybe it isn't all that much work, but it took a long time and it's hard to make this many characters look unique in black and white. The bottom characters are Vanilla Latte (the mother in the story), Kibble (the dog) and Sandwich. They had to be re-designed. In addition to these character designs I have prepared the thumbnails for all but the last 4 pages. This was also a lot of work. I am happy I will have something serious to show in class tomorrow.

So, aside from Kid's book I found all of the reference for my next computer Ill project and primed the god-bird for the next Sculpture assignment.

And then there's Ill II... In which my past two assignments have BOMBED. So, I have to work on re-doing everything from the past several weeks. I finally re-drew the fashion drawing that Thiel liked:
I'll be tossing some digital color behind the drawing and crossing my fingers, I still like the second on like this better.

So then there's the next assignment, which is a double-page spread for a children's book. I decided to do the fable of the farmer and the rattlesnake. I want to do the final scene, wherein the snake has bitten the old man and he is dying and the snake leaves. I did thumbnails and then the thumbnail that I am planning to go with:
Wish me luck! It would be really nice if Thiel actually liked something I do again. I also composed the reference photos for the revision of the book cover. {yawn}.

Love and coffee!
~Anne

Ill II does not go well

So, if you saw my previous post about the fashion illustration for Ill II you know that it was kind of a rough week. Well... that is sort of how this latest assignment has gone too. We had to do a cover for a book. I decided to do a full jacket for "The Year of Living Biblically" by A.J. Jacobs. I did thumbnails, I worked it out, all was well... then I came in on Monday with this half-complete image and Thiel hated it. Just hated it. He said to start over, he wants me to do it the way I did the Greenspan/Bernanke piece. Okay but it's due Wednesday. AGAIN. So I went and checked out a camera and a tripod but I couldn't get the tripod until the next day and I couldn't get anyone who I could shoot reference of in the daylight... Ugh. Needless to say I did not complete the assignment by Wednesday. But here's the incomplete of what the cover was going to look like with some text thrown in:
And the drawing a little clearer, I don't know why he hates it, he said it didn't look like anything else I had ever done... I'll have to figure it out.

Working hard. Love and coffee,
~Anne

Figure work 2/2

More figure: (this first one is my favorite so far!)

All for now! Love and coffee,
~Anne

Figure work 1/2

Figure work from my figure painting class, some of it's older, I'm trying to post it in order as best I remember. These first two were from a class in which I developed a much better sense of how to go about things:

Fawshun.

Oh god the fashion illustration assignment. Thiel gave us this one and I just couldn't seem to get it going. I did some sketches and settled on this one idea that I have played with in my head a great deal. There is something unsettling about amputation, there is also something poetic and beautiful about it and I thought about it and the fashion industry breaks (primarily) women up into component parts as needed. So I fell into this idea, I wanted to have the woman on the floor, limbless with that same fashion stare, dead eyes, she had to look cold, but at the same time she needed to be sexualized. I had to include the hands and feet as disembodied seperate fashion images partly because it helped the point and partly because I didn't want to be accused of hand/foot avoidance:
So Iworked this idea, I took a long time compiling photos and I made this photo-collage sketch for Thiel and he hated it. He finally just said, "No, absolutely not, you can't do this." I spent that class working on it anyhow because I had no other ideas. I ended up with something I could work with and turn into something nice, but that's as far as it got. All told I miss the above-view of the initial sketch and I think I need to get someone to model for a couple of photos so I can complete the image as I really wanted to.

After he finally decided that my idea was too... I dunno, I actually have no idea what his objection was aside from the fact that he just didn't like it. If that's the case then he should have decided it was not okay right away because there was no way he was going to suddenly be less disturbed by amputees. Anyway, after he said no to this idea he decided that the project was due the next class. This wouldn't be such a problem if it was the wednesday session of our class. But it was the monday session, which meant I had a day to do a complete illustration from start to finish. I asked Thiel if he found nipples offensive but the discusion quickly became one of "do they publish nipples in magazines like Vogue?" The answer is yes. Anyhow I found some photos that I liked, edited them cropped them and made them into something I could draw from and maybe make a nice image out of. I am certain I made sufficient changes for my own legal protection. Anyway, here is what I came up with in a day:
Thiel liked the second one for technical reasons (I shouldn't have used the salt on the first one, I didn't have anything to block the skin with) but he still said they weren't acceptable and that I should do it again. So I sat down and got out pencil and a paper and drew a super-skinny gross fashion girl with no breasts and that dead fashion stare. Thiel liked it, he said I should ink it. I wanted to put down ballpoint on it, I thought it would work nice, alas, my ballpoint pen had died in my bag so I used this clunky brush-marker, then I put down some watercolor and then some gouache, Thiel says that I murdered it: (I will replace this image once I re-scan the picture, the file got lost)
Eli felt it might have been okay if the colors hadn't gotten so muddy, but they're muddy on purpose, I don't want this grotesque creature to be mistaken for an attempt at creating something appealing, which he got but he still suggested making it look like it's trying to be something nice and I think he's right. He also had some good advice about inking, I need to work on that. Regardless Thiel wanted me to re-do it, and not ink it or color it, so I have:

A little different but the same general idea... and that's where the fashion illustration project stands!

Love and coffee,
Anne