senior: hero

for this project we were asked to do a portrait of our "hero". what an awful word. but i thought about someone who influenced me and who i look up to and had to jump on the cliche bandwagon and settle for my momma. what can i say!? she's the best ;) her work was my entire understanding of art growing up, and it's admittedly been a challenge to bypass my admiration for her self-taught style in developing my own. but finally i think that's happening, and i am so grateful for what i've learned from her. you can check out her work at janroy.com!

ANYWAY growing up she was a silk screen artist and that's really where it all started for me, so i did my own play on the traditional printing method by using watercolor and gouache to print with, meaning they all come out totally different! the face is a digitally printed pencil drawing i did based off the photo my dad keeps on his dresser. then with the screen i used two different methods. one i learned from my friend calvin using watercolor. you paint onto the screen and let it dry. then you run clear base over it, to "re-awaken" the pigment. i've seen his prints using this method and they're gorgeous, but honestly, it didn't work out for me. my colors came out too unsaturated. instead i resorted to using gouache, something i did in london when the print studio had closed for the season and i still had prints to do! it's pretty simple: just paint over the area and quickly squeegee. the results vary a lot. some come out really raw in texture, and some are more painterly. it's all to do, i'm sure, with how much paint is used, where it may have dried before being printed, and how much water is used. i only printed five and i posted all of them so you can see the differences. i've put them in order of success (the top being my favorite)

senior: six word memoir

hemingway was once wrote a six word story for a bet: "for sale: baby shoes, never worn." smith magazine took this and came up with a project called six word memoir. it's become their most popular concept, and there are people who submit multiple memoirs a day. people have even taken it upon themselves to include artwork or video, and books are now being published. check out the site at: http://www.smithmag.net/sixwords/

senior: thesis illustration1

so for my thesis i'll be illustrating CS Lewis' first two novels from the chronicles of narnia: the magician's nephew and the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe. this is my first finish, however it seems inevitable that i'll be redoing it. this is the scene when susan and lucy are walking with aslan, not knowing that he's on his way to the stone table where he will be sacrificing himself to the queen in exchange for edmund's freedom. what i'm working on now is vectorizing the shapes to be sent to the laser-cutters. this will make more complex shapes possible, and in the future, when i WON'T be doing doubles of everything, it will hopefully eliminate tedious tracing, transfers and cuttings, and speed the process up a little. i'd also like to try using more textures and papers in the finishes. these will all be 8x12 in their original format, brought down to 6x9 for the book.

senior: curly man

hard-ground 8x6 zinc etching. the eyebrow was made using my finger and a little solvent.