day 24: old-school 3d illustration

Look what I found! This is the kind of stuff I was doing when I graduated from BYU. I love the constellations, well...the mythology of them. I actually took Astronomy at University thinking we would learn the stories and how to identify the constellations. Luckily I did alright with the physics, but all that math was definitely not what I was envisioning. I sometimes have these weird lapses of logic.

On a side note, I also just found the sketches I did of a revised more accurate constellation sky. I had started building a second more elaborate version of the above but never finished. Hmmmm.

Butterball and the Troll Hag. One of those gruesome old tales where cherubic children get eaten for wandering into the forest. For some reason the Troll Hag would carry her head under her arm and stuff her neck with twigs. Why? Who knows why Troll Hags do the troll hag things they do.

 

From 1998 to 2002 I worked at Lucas Learning. Such a great little place to work, I loved it. One of our producers was expecting her first baby and ended up on bedrest for a good portion of her pregnancy. I was charged with making a we-miss-you-best-wishes-etc gift. Since Julie was a Shoe-a-holic and we were working on an Episode One game, this is what I came up with.

So there are some samples of my old illustration style before totally switching to digital. I'm happy to have found these, it's reminding me of ideas I still want to execute. They are definitely back on the To-Do list... after the latest batch of deadlines is done. And maybe a trip to Vegas.

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 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 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.