Tag Archives: Illustration

15 day draw, part 2

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Drawings 6-9 of my art sprint. I’ve been developing my analog/digital mixed workflow, and developing material for my personal wiki project.

Prompt 6: “Sheltering in Mt Vit”

This is not the first time I’ve been fascinated with tafoni. Then a recent trip to Utah rekindled the passion.

Materials

  • Faber-Castell pens on water color paper (Punjab 270 gsm)

Reference materials

  • Photos of tafoni erosion

Prompt 7: “Bubbles”

This one I had hours of struggle for inspiration, and then ended up doing something a little tangential to the prompt. Pleased with this one. I used the “ripple” filter in photoshop, and I’m pleased with the effect. I’ll be using this again.

Materials

  • Faber-Castell pens on Canson Mi Teintes colored paper

Reference materials

  • “M.C. Escher: the graphic work”

Prompt 8: “Second Founding”

A sequel to prompt 2, “First Founding”.

Materials

  • Faber-Castell pens on Canson Mi Teintes colored paper

Reference materials

  • “Walter Anderson: Birds”
  • “The Carved Line: Block Printmaking in New Mexico”

Prompt 9: Hammer

Materials

  • Prismacolor color pencils and Faber-Castell pens on Canson Mi Teintes colored paper

Reference materials

  • “Walter Anderson: Birds”
  • “Cutting Edge: Modernist British Printmaking” (a pretty direct homage to Sybil Andrews here)
  • “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists”
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Days 1-5 of the 15 day draw

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I’ve made it through the first 5 days of my 15 day drawing–or as someone pointed out, a drawing development sprint. So far, so good, and using a lot of reference books to help fuel the creative flames.

  • Day 1: Monster
  • Day 2: First Founding
  • Day 3: Flow
  • Day 4: Going to Mt. Vit
  • Day 5: Balance

Day 1: Monster

Depicting the “World Wyrm”, a mythological monster with significance to Digurtians and humans and represented in several ways at various points of time and in various subcultures.

Materials

Prismacolor color pencils on black Canson Mi Teintes paper.

Reference Books

  • The Night Life of Trees
  • A Journey in the Phantasmagorical Garden of Apparitio Albinus
  • Ernst Haeckel Art Forms in Nature

Day 2: First Founding

Trying not to belabor building materials here—trying to capture how First Founding might have been remembered by later Vironevaehns as a fleeting idyllic time between crises, a time when the community came together. Referencing an old drawing of the Vironevaehn mountains.

Materials

Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens on colored Canson Mi Teintes paper.

Reference Books

  • The Carved Line: Block Printmaking in New Mexico (especially the work of Willard Clark)

Day 3: Flow

Looking toward the city and a storm tower during a storm.

Materials

Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens and Prismacolor color pencils on Canson Mi Teintes paper.

Reference Books

  • California’s Wild Edge
  • Oscar Dröge: Landschaft Witz und Reiselust
  • The Complete Graphics of Eyvind Earle

Day 4: Going to Mt. Vit

Showing the flight to the mountains after the start of the Great Rains. I wanted to show it in a storybook style, the people leaving one life forever and going to something new and a bit ominous, but nonnegotiable.

I want to re-do this one after the sprint. I want to preserve the silhouette of the mountains that is broken by the clouds in this version. Before I added the rain, it wasn’t too bad, but the rain and the clouds make the image too muddy. I think I’ll take the lightning out too. Maybe try the people in a light color too. This should be fun to redo.

Materials

Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens and Prismacolor color pencils on Canson Mi Teintes paper.

Reference Books

  • California’s Wild Edge
  • The Horn Island Logs of Walter Inglis Anderson

Day 5: Balance

I’ve been really obsessed with the idea of Vironevaehn identity and how it spans two humanoid cultures and their intersection. The city they build together spans above and below, and spans night and day. As night and day balance in a rhythm that defines our hormonal and cellular processes, human and Digurtian form an emergent people and culture.

Materials

Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens on Canson Mi Teintes paper.

Reference Materials

The city of Derinkuyu.

Reference Books

  • Sanna Annukka illustrated “Snow Queen”
  • Visions Underground: Carlsbad Caverns Through the Artist’s Eye

Inktober Days 5-11

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Happy Inktober!

Here are my drawings for the week. Day 5, chicken, I started on my iPad in AutoDesk Graphic, and finished later in Adobe illustrator. The vector tools in Graphic made importing the started work a lot easier than the Adobe vector tool for iPad. The tools can be a little cumbersome, and don’t feel natively designed for a tablet, but if I want to use work from the iPad later, Graphic is better than its Adobe equivalent. This is mostly because I love Bezier curves. All the other drawings were done in Adobe Sketch.

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And for Day 10: flow, I decided to learn one of Adobe’s animation programs, Adobe Animate. I’m still a bit clunky with it, but not bad for a first stab! I made my own Gif!

zoiderg

Playing with patterns

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In materials science class, we examined wallpaper patterns for symmetries. Atoms and molecules can pack according to a variety of crystal structures. Mathematics obviously loves patterns too. There are fractal tilings and tessellations. Who doesn’t love Escher? There are probably practical applications to tiling, but more importantly they are great fun that tickles the brain. Recently I took my first stab at pattern making depicting (what else?) water polo.

Inspired by Escher’s lizards
Following a hexagonal pattern
Square packed ladies
Diamond packed ladies

Let’s make awesome women’s sports posters!

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I love illustrated sports posters. Most of today’s sports posters are photographic; as a photographer, I appreciate the phenomenal sports photography that is possible with today’s equipment. But illustration can capture how a sport feels in addition to how it looks. Additionally, photos are of specific people; illustrations are often of generic athletes.

Women’s sports especially lack poster art. If we are to infer how women feel when they are playing sports from the existing posters, one would learn that (1) women are playing sports to flirt with men, (2) women are playing sports to be sexy, and (3) women are playing sports to show off clothing. There are some notable exceptions, but these categories dominated my search for distinctive women’s posters. Men’s posters (and good women’s posters) show the joy of movement and conflict and success. They show admirable members of a team effort. That’s how I feel when I play.

Fun sports poster design!

Motion, motion, motion! The people in these posters are joyful and powerful, people that the viewer looks up to or wants to be.

Bizarre women’s poster design

Many of these posters are pleasing enough in isolation, but these kinds of posters make up the majority of women’s sports posters. They model clothes, they sell bicycles, they show women doing elegant jumps that have no relation to motion that happens in the sport. They’re women as decoration, objects to admire rather than people to relate to.

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Posters today

Many of my example posters are decades old. As I said, modern design hews toward photography, so these outdated images of women’s sport remain the few illustrated examples. As a lady athlete, I want beautiful art of my sport and other ladies sports.

Over the years, I’ve done several posters and t-shirts for my women’s water polo teams. Sometimes it’s as simple as a strap over the shoulder. It’s not a huge thing, but I like to feel like I’m included in the representation of the sport. I want to find art where people that look like me are moving with joy, rather than posing cutely. I want to see images of women in action, images that invite girls to imagine that it could be a poster of them.

Moments in Research: A Poster Series

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I love poster design. I love decorating my house with See America and WPA posters; I love designing posters about my passions. I haven’t posted any science designs because I find science hard to illustrate. I see lots of designs with beakers and test tubes, atoms, lab coats, and petri dishes. The challenge is that these are the tools of science, but they aren’t what makes science exciting. Science occurs between the ears, and the standards symbols are just tools of the craft. But how do you make posters of people thinking? Even the WPA posters promoting math-related careers are pretty listless, and that is a series of posters that used dinosaurs to promote syphilis treatment.

It occurred to me that the unifying thread of scientific inquiry are the highs, lows, and puzzlements of research. My friends in mechanical engineering have little need for beakers or lab coats, while my friends in biology aren’t (usually) immersed in coding. Different disciplines use different tools, but every discipline knows the elation of a published paper or the frustration of explaining what the heck it is you research to granny.

So, this inspiration broke my science poster designer’s block. I have three designs, but ideas for many more. For the style, I was inspired by World War I illustrator Lucien Laforge. There will be more, but I’m pleased with the start!

first_presentation_signedscience_in_the_wild_signedvictory_in_solitude_signed

Beautiful poster books

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I love colorblock poster art. My living room is decorated with National Parks travel posters and my bathroom bears WPA hygiene posters (which are available free online from the Library of Congress!). In my guest room, I display JPL’s Exoplanet Travel Bureau posters. What can I say, I have a passion!

So I also collect books of such posters. In recent travels, I’ve found two great specimens!

Intergalactic Travel Bureau Vacation Guide to the Solar System

Great art and great science! Each planet has a poster, and often one or two extras. Each section also has info on atmosphere, year length, and more. Great for kids and adults!

poster books

A few of my favorite illustrations:

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See America

A collection of posters for National Parks and historic sites, with posters of places like Big Bend National Park and the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (i.e., the Gateway Arch in St. Louis). Check out the Creative Action Network website, too, which has posters on all kinds of cool topics and projects.

poster books5

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A little joyful nonsense

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I’ve been joyfully distracted for the last few weeks. After years of digestive distress, my new meds are helping so much that the rhythms of my life are new and spontaneous. Without the burden of constant discomfort, I’m more curious, quicker witted, and less anxious.

One of the great joys this summer is playing water polo and knowing that I won’t spend two days being dysfunctional from the exertion. That joy and my obsession with art deco posters cross-polinated and the result is….

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The Art of the Park

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I’ve posted many times before about my love for WPA-era travel posters and some of my own tribute work. I have a wall of stylized postcards that I have collected along my travels. Like the parks passport stamps I described a few months ago, the WPA postcards became an exciting item to collect. Every time I have a visitor in my home, we talk about the parks. Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, county open spaces, state parks, they are all wonders of the west and worthy of a place on the wall. Not all of these places have postcards, which I am slowly working to remedy. But today’s post is about the great parks’ art that I have accrued and slathered upon my walls.

The wall in all its glory!

Below I include a few of my favorites from the wall. Some of the cards I like the depiction of the specific piece of scenery, others I like the color palette or the stylization. We all have stories about our visits to parks. These cards tell stories; the stories of these cards have augmented my stories. They let me dream for weeks and months after a trip about the animals, the scenery, the history, and the cultures of the parks I visited.

New Mexico has 14 National Monuments, extensive Bureau of Land Management sites,  wildlife reserves, open spaces, state parks, and more. In a future post, I’ll talk about my work to create posters for the New Mexican sites that lack them today.

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Pop-ups: Water Polo

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I recently resumed my fascination with pop-up art. It’s fun to abstract the world to a system of interacting planes. I’ve created cats at play, architecture, and hot air balloons. It was inevitable that my play would turn to water polo, and so it has. I wondered how I would depict a goalie blocking a ball or a player swimming down the pool. I cannibalized some poster designs from a few months ago and was off to the races.

Below is my water polo pop-up book! I’m already scheming on new ideas, but I’m very proud of my first foray.

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