Pickled Pictures premiere!!

My friend and fellow illustrator, Catherine Moore, and I started a joint blog to keep our illustration skills well sharpened and ready for big things. The blog is called Pickled Pictures and can be found here. We would love for you to check it out!

Reductive Lino print

This is my first post as a graduate student! The assignment for my Illustration Techniques class was a double self portrait, one portrait shown as how my friend would see me, and the other the way through the eyes of an enemy/stranger. After much agonizing over my original idea, I came up with my final idea. So this is the cool me (drinking champagne straight from the bottle) and the awkward me (me as one of maybe 6 people in Savannah who wears a bike helmet and gets weird looks).

The project required us to use the reductive lino printing method or the gouache-india ink method that yield similar results as the reductive printing. Basically, I had my lino block and carved away everything I wanted to be left white, then inked and printed the first color, blue. Then I carved away everything I wanted to remain blue, inked and printed the second color - green. Repeated the process until all I had left to print were the black outlines.

bull-doh-zer

While watching Pintu today, I gave him some red play-doh to play with to keep him occupied. He asked me to make him a car, so I made it. A few minutes later he asked me to make him a bulldozer. Now he's sitting at the table saying "the little car goes in the bulldozer". Here is my play-doh masterpiece...it's bulldozer-ish. :)


His next demand was a rabbit.

From long ago

These three lovely specimens are a few of the original ink monsters. I started making ink monsters in early 2008 and I've used them in combination with various other styles of drawing.

All three were done on Illustration board, 15 x 20 inches, black ink, pen and compressed air cans.

Click on the image to enlarge if you want to see the details.

inspiration comes from strange places

I try to brush my hair over the sink so that any falling hairs get stuck there then i wipe the sink clean when I'm done and put the hair in the trash (not down the drain). A few days ago while I was swirling all the hair into a collection I thought the strands made fun shapes. So I drew some curvy, loopy lines and filled them in with watercolor, a kind of paint by number deal.

untitled
watercolor and pen on paper
5 x 5.5 inches

Experiements with ink

I was curious to see how compressed air and ink would look on different surfaces. The previous post, Ink + Compressed Air = , was on coldpress water color paper and the ink just glided along and didn't absorb quickly. Last night I tried out canvas board and rough watercolor paper. The rough paper absorbed the ink so fast that the air really only gave the edges a softer edge, no hard line. Ink on the canvas board spread around easily, similar to the coldpress paper, except that there's the texture of the board.

The paper had its own texture too like the canvas board. I particularly like the feeler/arms of the big central fish. And the expression of the fish at the very top right corner.


Creatures of the Deep
ink, watercolor and pen on paper
7 x 10 inches

I also did a bit of layering with the canvas board. First laid down some ink, then went over some parts of it with acrylic paint, and went back in with ink again. The piddly little limbs crack me up.


And He Waved His Arms Angrily
ink and acrylic on canvas board
12 x 9 inches

Ink + Compressed Air =

Ink, pen, watercolor on paper
12 x 9

About a year ago I came across an artist, Stephen Bucher, who used ink and compressed air cans to create monsters. He would put a few drops of ink on paper then spray it with the air and let the ink splatter and trail all over. Then he would turn the spontaneous ink into creatures. He usually went back in to rework the image with markers.

I thought it was a cool way of starting pieces so I tried it out and over the summer of 2008, made a lot of drawings (about 10 or 15) using this style (at some point I'll get around to posting a few up here). After the summer, the compressed air was retired up until a few weeks ago. I threw down some ink and sprayed away. I let it dry for about a month, mainly because I forgot I had even done it. I found the pad of paper on Sunday afternoon at the bottom of my desk drawer. After a few hours of working at it, the above is what resulted.

Rotting Gnome Community Newspaper Company

While job searching in the past few months I realized I'd need to know how to use Adobe InDesign. I finally got around to opening the program and playing around with it in December. I don't know what goes on in my head, but I thought it would be brilliant to make a newspaper/magazine for the Rotting Gnomes (in butt). Thus began my experimenting with InDesign. I made up articles and ads for this Rotting Gnome community in the digestive region of the human body. It was good fun making but i had to keep down sizing the number of pages cause I couldn't fill them all! So it went from being a 3 page paper to 1 page. But I plan to keep making the one-sheets. Happy reading.