Janna and the World of Wonderful Shoes

My second Maps assignment was to make an entry to submit to Adam Hayes Make Maps blog. For the project artists have to respond to the task of making a map of somewhere that they feel they belong. Here is the description I submitted along with my piece:

It is hard for me to be sure at this time in my life where I belong geographically and/or emotionally, but one thing I can be certain of is the fact that I belong in wonderful shoes! With an 11 wide shoe size, thick calves, a tiny budget, and a penchant for the bright and unusually obnoxious, I have a lot of difficulty finding agreeable footwear. Everything is either too tight or too loose or too boring or too sporty! In my dreams, however, I walk in forests of De Stijl flats, breakfast-themed high tops, and kitten heels (adorned with actual kittens!) and every shoe fits me better than Cinderella’s glass slipper.

[All of the shoes included in this piece are based on real shoes from various designers who are not me. You can see the real ones here, in a collection I’ve compiled on the fashion site Polyvore]

Hopefully Adam will like my piece enough to put it up on the blog! I suppose I should hear back in a few days. At any rate, it was a fun project and I'm happy with the way it turned out!

Getting Where You're Going

A couple of sketchbook assignments for my Maps class!

A compass rose:

And some hand lettering/hierarchy of type practice!

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!

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!

It's All Connected

Yes! I am finally done with this monster project!
For the past three weeks or so all of the Illustration Concepts classes have been working on posters or TV spots for the an outside client, the Baltimore Office of Sustainability. The top five pieces will be printed huge and go up in Batltimore metro stations. I kept the size in mind while I worked on mine so I made it very detailed. The piece was created by making lots of little acrylic paintings and then scanning them into Photoshop and collaging them digitally. This probably wasn't the best technique considering how many layers I had to make and how big the file had to be (it was 4 gigabites before I flattened it!) but I think it all worked out in the end.


I mainly like the final product but it's kind of hard to tell, I've been working it for so long.

Here are some of the contributing paintings that I like well enough to show on their own:
I'm particularly fond of the Oriole. I actually think I saw one today while I was walking around campus. I tried to get closer but of course he flew away.