Little Boy Blue

Every time I want to experiment with a new form of painting or drawing I find myself going through all the Ryan McGinley photographs online and in old Vice Magazines i have. The one picture out of them all that I am drawn to is "Brennen (Blue)". The shape of his posture, the look on his face and the amount of shadowing is something incredibly interesting to me. So here is the original.

Now here are the two pieces i have done off this pic.

I did this one in April in preparation for my figure drawing final. I had just gotten some new colour inks and wanted to play around with them. No matter how permanent the bottle says the ink is, blue runs like a bitch on fire. Blue and Green are the two most difficult coloured inks to work with. Anywho, this was done on watercolour paper and is 20in x 15in.

This piece was done for my painting practices class last month. the assignment was to use a chance system to determine how i would paint an image. My system was to create a 20 count colour pallet, then i would roll a 20-sided dice to determine what colour would be placed in each shape i had sketched out on the canvas. I also rolled a 4-sided dice that would dictate if i would use walnut oil, turpenoid, linseed oil or no solvents. I decied to work with this image again because it has so many shadows and interesting shapes to it. This piece is 18in x 13in.

First Times, Part I

This semester I was in a class called "Working In Comics" which taught how comics are produced and the impact they have on society. The class was split into groups and each group was told to produce a comic book that would count as our final project. The group I was in decided to work off the idea of "first times". For the first installment we were talking about working with the "first time I fell in love" or the "first time I rode a bike" etc. In the end we agreed to work with theme of first time but not necessarily anything specific for the whole group. I liked the idea of doing a comic involving the first time i was in love. After contemplation, I decided to split my two page into the "first time I thought I was in love" and the "first time I knew I was in love". The time I thought I was in love would chronicle my relationship with Adam while when I knew I was in love would follow my relationship with Sharad. I settled on showing each event or moment in a Polaroid because they are just fragments of time and usually photographs are used to remember certain events.

"The First Time I Thought I was In Love"

"The First Time I Knew I was In Love"

Life in Cartoon Form

Last semester i started thinking about portraiture and using the aesthetics of comic book illustration to push the idea of traditional figure drawing. The following are images that i worked on through the semester. All are ink done on watercolour paper.

"Donya", 15in x 20in

"Lizzy", 15in x 20in

"Mo", 5in x 7in

"Jasmine", 7in x 5in

"Sarah", 5in x 7in

"Bree", 7in x 5in

"Me and Serman", 5in x 7in

Knitting Obsession Project

For the sculpture class I took last semester, our second project was to pick something to become obsessional about and then just go to town. I chose to work with knitting because it had endless possibilities. I originally started with the idea of knit graffiti but then i became obsessed with the idea of apocalypse and being ready for such an event. I borrowed a bb gun and machete from Fran, bought a riot baton at an army surplus store and made a sheath for a part of the stairway at the 162 building. The following images are from that series.

Long time coming...

it has been a very long time since i posted anything and i am sorry for that. it is has been a crazy past 6 months and i am going to try to get caught up on everything as fast as i can.

Figure Drawing - Marathon to Final Part 3

This weeks piece was based off a photograph by Ari Marcopoulos that was on the new issue of ANP Quarterly. It is of Harmony Korine, the guy who wrote Kids and wrote and directed Gummo. I picked up this issue at Quimbey's and had the same thought as i did last week with the image of the kid in front of the bushes, "i have to draw this". Unfortunately, the image of my piece is not that good because i had to take it with PhotoBooth since i don't have a camera. But, the image is done in ink and an ink wash and Yoda is done with ink and watercolour pencil. Sorry that the image isn't better but once i get a camera i will post a better image.

Figure Drawing - Marathon to Final Part 2

So last week i found this awesome picture on the Vice Magazine archives site under their photo issue. It was a photograph done by Jonnie Craig. There were all these amazing pictures of these 20-something kids running through the english countryside. So i was flipping through the images and this one of a guy standing in front of a bush with a spotlight on him seemed so powerful to me and i just really wanted to draw him. So i took the image and put my own "comic book style" on it and here he is. This was done on watercolour paper with ink and an ink wash. (Reminder: to see the details, click on the image)

Birdhouse Initiative - Final Piece

Below is the final piece that i turned in for critique last week. It is a Quicktime Movie (i hope it works) that i put together and it was my first ever stab at editing any film. The shots of me working on the birdhouses were taken by my iSight on my laptop and all the stills were taken by my roommate, Lissie. The music is by Her Space Holiday. Pictures will be up soon, i just need to resize and lay them out, so for now enjoy the video.

Figure Drawing - Marathon to Final Project

This semester i am taking figure drawing from the wonderfully talented Karen Azarnia. For final project we are going to be exploring the idea of narrative in a piece of work. In preparation for the final she has had us pick an artist or artistic style we like and either copy directly from that artist's work or copy that style into a piece of our own. Her rational behind this exercise is for us to take an artists/artistic movement we like and break it down and kind of discover it hands on. We had to produce one piece a week and it could be any size, but she did specify that she wanted the final piece to be on a large scale. So what i chose was the artistic style of comic books, in particular the simplified shapes and forms of Seth, Craig Thompson, Daniel Clowse and others from the D&Q posse. I decided to start off doing direct copies so i chose to work with Seth's graphic novel Clyde Fans No. 1. Since i missed a week due to my grandmother's funeral i ended up turning in the following two pieces. One is a copy of the cover and the other is a copy of i believe page 5 in the book. I chose these two piece because 1) i really wanted to work on portraiture which is my biggest weakness and 2) i really liked the flow of movement in the second piece and the lack of dialogue.

Birdhouse Initiative - Proposal

This proposal was for my Intro to Sculpture: Unconventional Practices. The project was to create a site-specific piece that was to be constructed under $10. We were taken out to this abandoned field near Chinatown here in Chicago and were given the choice of using that space or any other that we deem appropriate for our project. I chose to use the space and create birdhouses for the birds that migrated through in the spring. The original idea was for each house to be constructed from a wood base and have a wire cage that would then be covered with brightly coloured rafia paper. Also, each house was to sit on a pole or stake that would be planted into a elevated area of the field that had downtown Chicago as its backdrop. (just a reminder, if you click on the image it will take you to the actual size of the picture)

Below is an "architectural" sketch of the individual birdhouses. Many things about the design and size changed in the end, but the one constant was the rolling cage and the rafia that covered it. The heart behind the whole piece was not only to give the birds a place to live in an area that the homeless had made their camp, but to have a very primitive looking yet brightly coloured structure that contrasts to the dull Chicago skyline.

line/dot/shape

The problem behind this series is to make 10 compositions each of lines, dot, and shapes. Each comp had to show either contrast, interesting use of space, repetition, orientation or all together. In total there were 30 compositions; some of them turned out great while others were failed experiments.

Each study was done using a 9 square grid system, which i ditched in the later studies. Also, each was done on Vellum with either permanent marker, PrismaColor marker or a .01 or .03 Micron pen.