-  Conversation between a tuba and a flute
-  Clock
-  Car crash
-  Empty stomach
-  Jazz band
-  Bumblebees making love
-  Death
-  Typewriter
-  Conversation between an angry father and shy child

9 panels, 9″x9″ each.

Still having issues with my spray adhesive. I seem to have gotten it everywhere else in my apartment except where I want it, because the panels sure as hell don’t feel like sticking to the board. Still fun though. Got more inking practice in and played with watercolor.

Part one:

We had to take a map, any kind of map, and destroy it somehow. The objective was to make it unusable as a map basically. I saw an opportunity to play with paint. I took a giant road map of Portland Oregon and drew all over it with a black marker, then slapped some acrylic paint on pretty hastily to make this really gritty messy looking image:

Part two:

We had to take something we liked about what we made and turn that into something completely different. There was a lot of really cool stuff going on with my classmates’ projects! There were 3D sculptures and spray-paint illustrations and all sorts of really awesome work! I was kind of reminded by my picture of comic books. It looked to me like something that would come out of a really gritty graphic novel, so comics was the theme I went with. I liked the idea of a map being used as a texture. So here I got to play around with the whole reason I’m going to this school anyway: sequential art. My inking still needs a lot of work.

It was fun, I decided to do a really cliche romance scene and play around with the old school comic dot thing. New map is of Northern Florida, around the Jacksonville area. Google Maps ftw. I’m pretty pleased with the way it came out. Ha, I certainly had one of the smallest products for this assignment, being about the average comic page size.

I pretty much just sat in my apartment and listened to the noise coming from outside. There were sirens and car horns and people singing and all sorts of stuff. I live in a pretty active place apparently. I won’t lie though, I fell asleep toward the end of my listening session. I gathered a good bit of material though. Then I drew it all together on one illustration, arranged from left to right according to the direction I heard the sound. The right-most parts were behind me, coming from the stairwell.

Yay for ink practice! This one’s pretty messy though.

We had to carry a camera everywhere for about a week straight and look for anything we could interpret as either a letter or a number 1-9. Then once we found the whole list, arrange them in some way that we would have something to present in class.

These were actually my second batch of photos (in no particular order). I was doing pretty ok with the first round, but they were pretty random in content. When I heard people were doing themes I decided I needed to step up my game. I went with a mechanical/electrical theme. Spent a good while under my own truck, then in my neighbor’s car. When I still couldn’t find the last few I opened up a bunch of my old phones and cameras, and an old black-light that had just died on me. Then I cooked up this snazzy robot chick drawing to complete the poster.

And here’s the final product:

When we started Miss Waldvogel told us to consider the old Jack and Jill rhyme and to create a concept inspired by it. This was the individual critical thinking stage. Solo act, for now.

Jack and Jill
Went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water
Jack fell down
And broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after

All of my ideas were morbid crime drama style stories of drug deals gone wrong or organizations crumbling in on themselves. I had one slightly more simple concept of two birds in love, then one(Jack) gets eaten by a cat. Jill couldn’t just leave him, so she sacrificed herself to the cat in a Shakespearean sort of attempt to reunite with Jack in the afterlife.

Jack and Jill

Then we were put into groups of four, given this sheet(above) and told that we would be demonstrating our stories in a six panel sequence using nothing but these motifs. Our minds were blown. But after some debate, we decided to create the bird story. We all started by drawing out our ideas of how the sequence should be laid out. This is my story board sketch:

Jack and Jill 2
After deciding on a layout, we divided up the work and rolled with it. Things moved surprisingly quickly and easily! William Ball took the motifs and sequence plan and arranged panels in Illustrator for us. After that it was only transfer and inking for the rest of us. We came together last weekend and glued it all together. I wish one of our teammates had participated a little more with us, but aside from that, I was really satisfied with our team and our final presentation!

William Ball – Overall Composition
Mackinley Farmer – Panels 1 and 5
Elee Holtermann – Panels 3 and 6
C. Matthew Jackson – Panels 2 and 4

Critique: It was super fun seeing the other groups’ stories for the first time. Response and feedback on our final product was awesome. I thought it was funny how Mackinley’s panels and mine were indistinguishable as far as who did what. Good teamwork guys! I look forward to doing more group projects.

Let me start this off by saying that I would have loved to spruce up my blog here with some images from the following artists. But even with giving credit, and links under the photos, copyright infringement is still a complicated issue and I didn’t want to step on toes. No pics this time folks, but there are plenty of links to click on! Click away Clicky Clickers!

This weekend’s assignment was to dig into some blogs around the web that we found interesting. Ms. Waldvogel encouraged us to seek out artists in a related field to each of our studies. That was cool with me, my favorite artists are comic illustrators! I knew exactly where to head first: my friends list on Deviantart.com. Queue the shameless self endorsement: My page.

The first artist I was hoping to find a blog by was my absolute favorite artist, for now, Greg Capullo. I first found out about Mr. Capullo through his work in the Spawn comics. The man is an outstanding penciler, inker, and painter. His digital paintings, in my opinion, are reminiscent of the work of Boris Vallejo and Frank Frazetta. He now does pencils for Scott Snyder’s stories in DC’s Batman. But alas, I was unable to find a blog by Mr. Capullo. I’ll just have to settle with seeing his work in his Deviantart gallery(The Greg Capullo) and comics.

Next stop: my other favorite artist, and former SCAD student, Mr. Sean Murphy. Murphy has done work in comics such as Hellblazer, American Vampire, and Joe the Barbarian. He’s recently finished writing and illustrating his own personal comic entitled Punk Rock Jesus. Fortunately for me, he had a link straight from his DA page to his blog site: seangordonmurphy.com.
What I love about Mr. Murphy’s blog is that he gives genuine advice to other aspiring artists. In his blog he uncovers some of the struggles he’s had along the way and the lessons he’s learned in order to push through them. He gives real insight into the complexities of the comic industry and helpful hints on how to become successful. I couldn’t ask for more in a blog.

After being thoroughly satisfied with Sean Murphy’s blog I basically just picked through some other DA pages in search of links to blogs that stuck out to me. One artist that I’ve been interested in for a while, one who has a style all of his own, is Mexico based artist Hector Sevilla Lujan: elsevilla.net.
Mr. Lujan’s blog is an interesting read because, despite him being wildly talented in both pencils and digital painting, he comes across as just another average artist dealing with the same struggles that all of us encounter. He’s very real and speaks to those of us who haven’t quite made it yet. His topics often deal with subjects like art blocks and medium exploration. He gives an energy that inspires you to become a better artist. He’s working hard, so why don’t I? Lately he hasn’t posted much, but I’m sure it’s because he’s busy drawing comics.

After roaming around from one blog to another, it occurred to me that I’m very easily satisfied when it comes to blogs. As long as a writing has something that I can take away from it to better myself, I’m satisfied. And I always find something to take away. So then I tried to take it in a new direction. Instead of reading blogs by comic artists, I kind of felt like exploring street/graffiti artists. And of course the first name that came to mind was Banksy. Banksy is indisputably the most famous graffiti artist in the world, and one of the most talented. Unfortunately, I only found galleries and fan sites dedicated to him. Still, I’d encourage you to check out his website, banksy.co.uk, or watch his movie, Exit Through the Gift Shop.

Then I remembered a street artist that I’d followed online in the past by the name of Poster Child. He had a blog set up entitled PosterChild’s Blade Diary. In his blog he would post pictures and stories of his night-time adventures beautifying the streets of Toronto, Ontario and New York City. He was a graffiti artist who specialized in poster art. He’d make posters with stenciled paintings and stick them on walls using a special homemade paste, also experimenting in layers. He also did random good deeds around the cities he visited, like fixing umbrellas and building bridges over icy runoffs from leaking pipes, in order to call attention to the problem and have it professionally repaired. Sort of a vigilante in a way. He got even more attention with his “guerrilla gardening,” in which he’d build special wooden boxes, often painted like Super Mario Blocks, plant flowers in them, and place them throughout the cities. A quirky, fun fellow to read about I can assure you. Sadly his blog has since been taken down, and you can only catch his work through past interviews(torontoist.com) and old galleries(us.fotolog.com). Disappearance seems to be a trend with many bloggers.

So yeah, I’m pretty well satisfied with blogs in general. They can be inspirational, helpful, and flat out entertaining! I’d say that my one complaint is how easy they are to just vanish. Like anything on the internet, no matter how big, they can abruptly disappear without a hint that they had ever existed. But for those that do still exist, I will continue to read, admire, and grow, as long as you continue to post.

http://blog.scad.edu/awaldvog/2013/02/04/exploration-black-square-problem/

By trying to find the method that made the idea behind each image the most readable as quickly as possible to the viewer, my designs came out admittedly simple.

Order:

Congested:

Increase:

Playful:

Bold:

Tension:

I had a little trouble transferring these to my home computer. I had to redo the Playful design from scratch. Oh well.
I hope they represent their respective words as well as I intended!

Ms. Ashley Waldvodel’s assignment this time was to “Combine principles of form and repetition on complex grids.”

http://blog.scad.edu/awaldvog/2013/01/23/repetition-grid-5/

First thing to do was to create 75 motifs that were regular, repeatable forms piercing other larger forms.

Then we had to select one motif, draw it out as perfectly as we could in the desired position on a 1″ square panel and photocopy it for a total of either 25 or 100 identical tiles. We were to arrange those tiles on either a 5″x5″ or 10″x10″ grid in at least 5 different patterns. I chose my martini glass motif.

We were to select our favorite of the 5 patterns and glue it down on tracing paper. Then, with more tracing paper, we had to create several ink plans using that pattern. No outlines allowed, no borders, just shapes, positive or negative, to create a design. I decided to go with a cemetery idea complete with bats and a moon.

Then we had to transfer our final design idea onto a piece of cold pressed illustration board and ink it as precise as possible. Follow that up by cleaning up any pencil lines left over and size and shape the board itself as desired. This is my final product.

Critique: My border is a little off, in relation to the image itself. Also, I was told that my product was a little too objective, both in motif and pattern, though there isn’t anything in the instructions that say it shouldn’t be. So I only hope I don’t have a deduction in points for that. All in all though, response to my final piece was positive. My idea came across clearly, so I’m pleased.

In the first image you can see my rather shoddy attempt at bringing attention to the center of the image by way of isolation. The flowers seem a little out of place in the “brush” if you can call it that. Hopefully it caught your attention.

Now, using the same stencil I tried to create a focal point by creating a dense cluster of flowers on one side, a concentration, to pull your vision in that direction. I payed a little more attention to neatness in this one compared to the first—spent more time on the lines and got some ink practice in.

Here’s something I found in my parking lot I thought represented Isolation pretty well.

Here I tried another go at Isolation. My idea was that the comic book would stick out like a sore thumb among the novels. I suppose it would have worked better if Tim Dorsey’s and Neil Gaiman’s book covers weren’t so comical and Sean Murphey’s comic had been more cartoony. Oh well.

I tried to find an example of Concentration occurring naturally somewhere around my apartment, but I didn’t come across anything that really stuck out. The search was pretty interesting though!

Alright. So in this exercise we had to pick the image from our last assignment we felt was the weakest of the four and redesign it. I chose number two, the “diagonal lines only” piece. It just didn’t seem to me to have the life that the other three had. Also, I spent a little more time in the making of the final pic. I payed closer detail to craftsmanship, and sized the image appropriately this time. I feel my redesign is a success, as it does seem to have more character than the previous idea.

I believe ink would have been a much easier medium for this sort of work than construction paper.