The Animal Charmer

Behold, my final large piece for my senior thesis, illustrating Francis Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden! Here we see Mary's new friend Dickon in his natural state, entertaining two rabbits, a cock pheasant, and a squirrel while resting in his beloved moor on a late winter's day.

My thesis has been a lot of fun but it has also been very challenging. This medium can be tricky and very time-consuming, and as a result this past semester has been one of my hardest at MICA. Still, I believe that I've learned a lot from this process and next time I start a similar project I will be smarter. In the future I hope to experiment with loosening up my technique and maybe incorporating some painting and drawing to add even more texture and to hopefully make things move a little faster. For now, though, I'm very proud of the work I've done and I look forward to showing it at commencement in May. I plan on making a book jacket for this project over this break and maybe adding in a few more spot-type things in my spare time to round out the series. It's actually quite nice to carry a bit of sewing around with you when you don't feel like your life's blood is on the line.

Meatball Head

For my Narrative Color final we had to choose a hero's journey to illustrate. For my hero I chose 1990s anime superhero sensation, Sailor Moon, and her journey is the show's first episode. Each piece is keyed to a different color. It was a fairly open-ended assignment so I decided to use it as an excuse to practice hand-lettering.

Oh, Darien!

The Dead Man in Indian Creek

Hi, everyone! I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and/or alternative winter holiday of your choosing! The semester finally ended about a week ago and I've only just recovered! Here's a piece from a little while back, a book cover design for my Narrative Color class.



The Dead Man in India Creek was one of my favorite books as a kid. It involves two tween-age boys finding a dead body and attempting to unravel the mystery, uncovering a drug trafficking ring along the way.

Good times!

MICA T-Shirt Contest Entry - PLEASE VOTE!

I designed a submission for the MICA T-shirt contest! If you are one of my fellow MICAns I would love it if you would PLEASE VOTE for my design at the ballot box IN THE MEYERHOFF by 5:00PM THIS FRIDAY, Dec 3rd.

Thanks!

Are You a Ghost?

3rd piece for my Secret Garden thesis! This is for the chapter "I Am Colin" In which Mary finds out that all this time she's been living in the same house with a mysterious cousin she never knew she had.

Practical Accidents

Here are two pieces for my Narrative Color class. The first one is for a primary color scheme assignment with the prompt "Practical Jokes."

The second is for a warm & cool assignment with the prompt "Accident Waiting to Happen"

The idea being that for some people thinking is an accident waiting to happen.

The outfit on the girl in the middle is Marc Jacobs and the girl on the bottom left is in an Anna Sui dress. The rest is of my own invention.

I know lightbulbs are a cliché but I figured at least some of these are energy efficient.

Young Playwrights

This is a sketch done a few weeks back for a contest to design this year's Young Playwrights Festival poster for Baltimore's Centerstage Theater. It didn't win (congrats, Becca!) but I like it a lot so I'd like to try turning it into something I could add to my portfolio. Any ideas?

Portraits

Here is my second piece for thesis, a spot illustration for one of the chapters in the book. This is from the part when Mary explores Misselthwaite on a rainy day and discovers a lot of dusty old portraits spanning the house's past, including one of a parrot and a little girl who reminds Mary of herself.

Finished!

Here, finally, is the first finished garden piece, which I just found out has been accepted into MICA's juried undergraduate show! If you're in the area come see it on view from October 28th-through the beginning of November (I'll get the closing date up soon. They don't have it on the website).

Progress Shot

Sorry I've been so bad about documenting my thesis! Here's a photo of the first piece about 1/3 of the way through, taken a few weeks back.

Oh, how simple things were back then!

I actually just finished this piece today (finally! omg...) and scanned it but I want to try photographing it too before I post it online.

Italy Art Part 2

I also have sketchbook pages I'd like to post from this trip but I haven't even started formatting those so I'm not sure when I'll get those up. Hopefully this weekend.

Finally! Italy Art Part 1

Some of the bigger pieces have annoying lines down one side because the scanner I was using had a glitch. I'll try to rescan those soon but I figured I'd better just put them up now since it's taken so long already.

These are basically in chronological order. You can see how I loosened up as times went on.

Header

The blog has a new header! So if you're viewing this in Google Reader you should check it out and look up!

Also, it's Fall Break and one of my goals is to finally get all my Italy work up so look for that this weekend!

Turn that frown upside-down!

"A-A-GA-THA, THIS IS MAGNUS...."

Hey all! We finally started using color in my Narrative Color class! Here is a movie poster-type-thing for one of my favorite movies growing up, 1996's Matilda.

We were limited to a "ketchup and mustard" pallet of cadmium red, yellow ochre, black, and white. Here are all the basic colors and shades you can get with only these four pigments.

Pretty cool, huh? (It looks like Thanksgiving!)

For fun, though, I did a version of the background a little bit more blue, just to get the real old-fashioned chalkboard color feel into it.