day 11: quackers

From today's Vision Conference event...

day 10: field trip

Every July at Imagine Learning, we have a week-long Vision Conference. There are motivational speakers, company updates, training, teamy togetherness, fun-time activities and lots of food. Today the Art Department went on a field trip up to Salt Lake. We spent the morning at the new Rio Tinto Natural History Museum at the University of Utah. It was fabulous! It just opened in November. Beautiful architecture and engaging well-designed exhibits made it a great trip. I'm not a natural history or dinosaur buff, so while it was interesting, I didn't looooooove it. But it was a nice visit. I'd definitely recommend taking the fam to it.

After lunch we headed over to The Leonardo, a new contemporary art museum in downtown Salt Lake. We met up with the Writers and split up into teams to go on a scavenger hunt through the exhibits. We were a slacker team, and ultimately gave up and did a multi-tasking experiment. We each spit into our own cup for about 5 minutes and then memorized letters while doing math problems. The idea is to see if multi-tasking is a genetic trait. We'll have to wait until October to find out the results. Btw, I am not an excellent multi-tasker.

The museum was lovely. There were some neat exhibits. But I kinda don't really care all that much about contemporary installation art. So no big rush to go back, but I'd be interested to see what new exhibits pass through.

day 9: kites

I just realized I've never posted this. I did this earlier this year for a cover for The Friend Magazine. Always a good gig. Looking at this again, I'm amazed at myself for drawing so many individual blades of grass. Must have been in a grassy mood that day.

Also, this is another good example of a Photoshop cheat that I like: gaussian blur the heck out of the background so you don't have to spend so much time on details (when it's not important). Saves a lot of time.

day 8: sneak peak - santa dolorosa

Here's a little something I've been working on here and there. This is the digital painting/sketch for a big encaustic painting. I've transferred the face to the wax to use as an underpainting for pastels and then the rest will be a built up monochromatic wax texture. Well, that's the plan anyway. I'm hoping to have time this weekend to work on it some more.

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.