day 7: shadowbox-dimensional artists

Magda Trzaski
I love her pieces. They make me wish my brain came up with this style. Hopefully someday I'll at least own one.

Joseph Cornell
One of the pioneers of assemblage. 

 

Rednose Studio - Chris Sickels
Love this style, the detail and mix of sculpting and found objects.

Yulia Brodskaya

Beautiful typography and clever elevation of the art of quilling.

Graceann Warn
Encaustic and found objects. I just found this while looking for a different encaustic assemblage artist whose name I can't remember. I'm a sucker for any astronomical type pieces like these.

Alex CF
Makes really cool realistic cryptozoological boxes and specimens. I'd love to make stuff like this.

day 6: neil gaiman graduation speech

Neil Gaiman Addresses the University of the Arts Class of 2012 from The University of the Arts (Phl) on Vimeo.



A must-see.

day 5: freelance v. inhouse

Imagine Learning inhouse flyer for trip to Soldier's Hollow.

Today is my seven year anniversary working at Imagine Learning. It's a good gig and I work with some great people. The art team has doubled in the past year and a half. For the longest time it just just me, Jim Madsen and Nate Baertsch. Then Jed Henry came along to spice things up. And last fall we hired Hollie Hibbert and Jake Parker. All very talented folk. Check 'em out, they've all got really interesting things going on.

Illustration for The Friend Magazine.

One thing we all have in common besides working at Imagine Learning is that we all do freelance. Students like to ask which is better: freelance or inhouse? I guess ultimately it comes down to opportunity and personality. I prefer having to get up and go somewhere else to work. I like having the security of the paycheck and health insurance. But some people prefer to be their own boss and like the flexibility that comes with the freelance life. I, personally, was terrible at it. I was bad at dealing with the financial side and was always broke. And was maybe going a little stir crazy being by myself all day every day.

Anyway, not much going on today. I've been flat on my back most of the day, which was annoying as I have a lot to do. At least the cat was being cuddly and made for a nice heating pad on my side.

day 4: puppet theaters and pinterest

Pinterest is pretty cool, but I kind of forget it exists. But I have made a few boards, and they tend towards being a reference collection for my shadowbox projects I haven't gotten around to. And even though I haven't made an actual physical miniature puppet theater yet, I find excuses to make them in my Imagine Learning projects.

 

This is a screenshot from the opening bit of the Pin Pón animation.  I'm guessing it will be online soon and I'll post a link then. This is maybe more retablo than puppet theater, but it's all part of the same family to me.

 

This is from an unfinished activity that has some stacking dolls show up on the stage. The cool thing about this one is I used after effects to have lighting and set pieces move around in 2.5D space.

 Screenshot from After Effects to kind of show how the file is set up. Fun stuff.

So that's it for me today. Lots due tomorrow. Busy busy bee!

day 3: happy july 4th!

 

Happy Fourth of July to those of the American persuasion. Hope you are enjoying a lovely holiday! Here was my take on the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I illustrated a little book about Ben Franklin at Imagine Learning a few years ago. I am crap at caricatures and likenesses, so this is the style I came up with to help me fake it. :) And since it's a holiday, a brief step-by-step for your perusing pleasure.

Thumbnail: I work very hard at accuracy at this stage... heh. This is the thinking stage, and this is what my thumbnails generally look like. Lots of smiley faces.

 

Here's the finished sketch. Already you can see I keep the background separate from the foreground elements.

 

Finished line drawing. I have a brush that makes a more pencilly line I made from the default spatter brushes. Background and foreground lines on separate layers. I grabbed a copy of the Declaration of Independence form online and used the Transform/Warp tool to make it fit into my drawing. I set that layer to Mulitply so whatever color underneath will show through.

 

Color fills and some simple shading. I use lots of layers at this point. There's a layer for hair, a layer for skin, layer for coats, layer for vests, etc etc. I fill in a flat color for the area and then can set the layer to Preserve Transparency. Then the shading is super fast, and it's easy to select areas or adjust individual colors.

Getting closer to done. The foreground color layers and lines have all been merged together. I used the Blending Options to add a Drop Shadow. Then I went in with my rough pencilly brush and added more scribbly lines and details.

 

And here's the final with text. I added a few old paper textures over the top set to Overlay and Soft Light, and there you go!

day 2: recent Amazon impulse buys

 Encaustic is painting with melted beeswax. I've done some entries about it in the past so click on the encaustic tag if you'd like to see more of it. But suffice to say, I'm maybe a bit obsessed with it, and must have any and all things encaustic. It's not too overwhelming of a feat though. When I started there were maybe three books available. Now it's up to eight. 

This book above is the latest by Daniella Woolf. I've taken two week-long workshops from her through R&F Encaustics. She is a fabulous teacher. She puts together beautiful books and DVDs.

 

 

 This next batch all have to do with building shadowboxes. Which I have not done for years. I have a project in mind that combines a shadowbox with automata. So far it has been stuck at the sketch stage for months and I avoid taking it any further by buying books tangentially related. Guess I need to get on that.

I love folk art. The latest batch has been more early Christianity-related but I also really love Mexican folk art, especially Day of the Dead. Lately I've been loving the large statues made for Semana Santa (Holy Week) and I've started working on a large (for me) encaustic painting of the Virgen Dolorosa. A couple weeks ago I had the face just about finally looking alright, and I overfused it! One eye melted down to her cheek. D'oh. Scraped the whole thing off.

Not sure what the endgame is with any of this, but this is reminding me to stop buying books and just sit down and paint.

day 1: 30 day blogging challenge

Hello vast tubes of the internets! I'm going to try something new. I am going to post a new entry every day for the next 30 days. The posts will be art/illustration-related, but that's about as far as I'm going to worry about structure. I figure I'll post what I'm working on, what I'm thinking about, things I find interesting or inspiring. We'll see where it goes.

Why do this? Mostly I think it's to help me get into a routine of making time for inspiration and personal projects. I get so busy with the full-time job and freelance projects that I don't make time to just be creative.

How'd this come about, you wonder? It started over the weekend. A friend of mine is heading off to grad school in few weeks, so we decided to have a tiki party before she left. I was in charge of decorations. And if I was having a tiki party at my house, I of course needed a giant tiki head with glowing eyes and smoke that billowed from its nostrils.

 It was a busy week, so I didn't get started until Saturday morning. Lots of trial and error, but I love the process of troubleshooting and making it up as I go. Sadly the dry ice billowing smoke part did not work on first try, and I ran out of time to fiddle with it, but I think it turned out pretty fun nonetheless. Best happy accident: the spray paint disintegrated the top layer of foam and gave it a cool rough rocky texture. Sweet!
 

I spend the majority of my time sitting at a computer. All of my illustration is digital. Half the time I can't even find paper or pencils. While I enjoy Photoshop and Flash and After Effects, I do miss the act of making a mess and actually creating a physical object. Things like this tiki project get me re-energized and excited to create more stuff! So I've got all this energy, but was not sure how best to channel it.

I've been working on animating the song Pin Pón (a traditional Spanish kid's song.)  This morning I had to make a couple fixes and was re-rendering the intro. The render ended up taking about an hour, so while waiting I read Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon. Great little book full of inspiring ideas. One of the suggestions is to keep a logbook, which I'm planning to do analog-style. But many of Kleon's ideas synthesized for me with another...

Last year, good pal illustrator Jim Madsen told me about this Ted Talk by Matt Cutts. It's a quick 3 minute talk about trying new things for 30 days. That concept has been floating around in the back of my head for a while, but until today I didn't have a strong conviction of anything I wanted to try. So for whatever reason this 30 day blog idea hit, so that's what I'm gonna do for the rest of the month.

Wish me luck!

MrJakeParker does Kickstarter

 I finally got mine, have you ordered yours? If you've never heard of Kickstarter, it's a pretty awesome vehicle for getting creative projects funded and produced. It's been fun to follow Jake's project and watch the dollars add up. He's a super talented guy, so order your copy of The Antler Boy and Other Stories now: only six days left!


This concludes tonight's public service announcement.

Imagine Learning Pic Spam

It's a Friday afternoon and I just finished a big project, so how about an Imagine Learning Pic Spam (tm)? I haven't posted any IL stuff for awhile, so this should be swell. A couple months ago we did a whole pile of illustrations for some little books. These were all about how to do them as fast as possible, so lots of shortcut experiments were done. Below are some of the less horrible results...

And then one of the books is a biography of ME. Actually there are two books about me. One is an example of a memoir, which I then illustrated. The other is the biography, but uses photos so won't bother posting that one.

Me making crafty things at the foot of my mother's sewing machine.

 

Visiting Disney Feature Animation and deciding I don't really want to be an animator.

At my desk at Imagine Learning! Please note I have since quite drinking Diet Coke. Really. It'll stick this time, I swear! Also, I now have a lovely 27" iMac. So pretty.

Have a great weekend! I am off to Park City for a two-day encaustic painting workshop with Jeff Juhlin. Good times.

Wax Show this weekend!

A few weeks ago I submitted two encaustic paintings to this juried show (see postcard above), and both were accepted! The opening reception is this weekend, so if you are in the Santa Cruz, CA area, you should drop by. I'll be going on a whirlwind California trip so I can be there. I'm quite looking forward to it!

New Year's Check-In

Happy New Year Internets!

Was thinking I should post some artwork, but don't really have anything I feel like showing, or am allowed to show, or have access to at the moment, so here is a drawing I did when maybe I was, oh, four? That's the last time I had long blond hair, so thinking then. Though one doesn't write with cursive at four and I don't remember being a genius so... hmmm. Mystery.

And here is my New Year's weekend project. I rearranged and organized my studio for a better workflow. Put up those shelves, and my encaustic space is ready to go. Just need to catch up on some other things, and then I will be a paintin' fool!

And finally, I was going to include a screenshot from Maryn's Laser Adventure, but looks like the DVD won't let me. So here is a drawing of what it looks like. Oh man did I stare hard at that little red light. My Merry Christmas gift to myself: Lasik Eye Surgery! It's been a week and a half, and it's fantastic! At last check-in my right eye was 20/20 and my left was 20/25. I do not for one second miss my glasses. Hooray for shooting laser beams into my face!

And that's it for now. I have a few projects percolating, work at Imagine Learning as usual, and my sweet encaustic set-up calling my name. Things to do, things to do!

Here's to a busy year!

feliz dia de los muertos!

Hope y'all had a fabulous Halloween! I took a couples hours off from freelance to paint a happy skull. This is my latest encaustic painting, an experiment with accretion: basically lots of layers of drybrushing.

I've been taking an online encaustic course from the lovely and talented Judy Wise, which has been fabulous. We're in the middle of four weeks of daily lessons, which makes me super excited to go home from work and paint every night. Unfortunately the freelance has to come first, so haven't done much for the class. Hopefully I will have some more time to paint soon.

Here's another I did last week for the class. The assignment was color mixing and carbon transfer. I only had white saral paper, which didn't show up well, so I tried a bunch of other things... blobby lines as a result, but it's fun. I quite enjoy the idea of Gary the Chicken Whisperer.

Feliz dia de los muertos and a happy november to you all!

Booster's Costume Creator

I better post this before it's actually Halloween! I did the artwork for this fun little ecard deal at Imagine Learning. Pick from two of the Imagine Learning characters, then click to change their costume and background. Then send it to a friend! Or lots of friends! Or casual acquaintances!

I always love doing these flipbook sorts of things. It's a fun challenge to get all the pieces to work together properly, plus, gotta love making costumes. We decided to make it a little "educational" - each character got three historical figure costumes plus one halloween-style costume, plus one Imagine Learning character costume. So much fun to make.

The rest of the Marketing team did a great job with the opening sequence, the site design, music, programming, writing, they are a great bunch to work with. Thanks guys!

halloween sneak peak

Six years in a row I had a super out-of-control Halloween Party. Last year I was too swamped with work and still recovering from gallbladder surgery that I decided to take a year off. This year, the schedule is still full, I recently moved and have no time to even think about excavating all the Halloween decor from the depths of unpacked boxes... so another year off. I will be in some serious Halloween withdrawal by next year. So plan for quite the extravaganza in 2012. Unless the world ends first. Then we'll all be enjoying the Zombie Apocalypse together.

But I got a pretty good Halloween fix this year. I got to work on a super fun Halloween-themed project at Imagine Learning. Here's a little sneak peek. Stay tuned, the rest should be out next week.



ps: for pics of Halloween parties past, check out The Two-Headed Goose blog.

TIKI KABOOOOM!

Tiki Kaboom! It's live! My first iPhone game is now available on iTunes. Some genius friends of mine designed and programmed this super addictive game and asked me to help them with the artwork. So I got to draw some tikis. Never a hardship.

So if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, click HERE for the free version.

Or click HERE for the full version with more levels and features.

Still not sure? Here's the Facebook page to check out.

Have fun!

summer vacation over

Hello friends out there in the internets! How have you been? I've been swell, thanks for asking.

So what have I been up to lately? Oh lots. Moved, tried to take a break from freelance while I got settled into the new place. That didn't last very long, and I am once again up to the eyeballs in work. Always a good thing, especially since now I think about things like: I need a new fence! Got to save money for a new garage door opener!

Above is an illustration I did for The Friend Magazine. Always happy when they call with an assignment. They are great to work with. Mostly what I remember about this illustration though, was hurrying to get it finished and sent off before heading out to see U2. Awesome concert!

Currently working on lots of different things, two of which are new types of projects for me. One is an interactive book for ipad, iphone, etc. I'll post a link when it is released. Another is an actual game for the iphone. Also will plug the heck out of it when it goes live.

Speaking of promoting stuff... new book to be released Sept 29:

new house!

Oh yeah, I have a blog. So I've been a little busy lately. I bought a house! My first ever house. It's fabulous. It's a simple little 1961 brick rambler, with a walk-out basement. The basement is essentially a crafty arty wonderland. I have a great office space with an adjacent patio, a workshop, and a room for encaustic painting. Oh the projects I can make! Will update as spaces become functional.