a single man

A Single Man
I saw this movie Friday...it was GREAT. Really great. I always appreciate a movie where there's more to enjoy than just the acting/writing/story...this is one that's just a total joy to see. What would you call that...cinematography? I usually call it the movie's "aesthetic"...It's something that's true of many of my favorite movies, like Lost in Translation, and The Royal Tenenbaums.
This isn't really my usual style. I'm not sure how I feel about this...I mean, I could make one billion of these, and I think it's a pretty popular sort of style, but it doesn't feel very unique, and I'm certainly not pulling it off as well as a lot of great illustrators with a similar style. I need to give this more thought and do more experimenting.
Also, I've been working mostly on Illustrator recently, but I did this one totally in Photoshop. That means giving up a lot of things I've been doing in Illustrator with texture, but it means a whole host of other great things, like getting to keep pencil-y-ness without pulling out all of my hair. Always a good thing, right?

Update

Ok! Here are the things I've been doing lately to promote myself, directly or indirectly.

1. Joined illustration mundo. You can view my little page-y here.
2. Started linking to my portfolio site whenever I comment on other people's blog posts.
3. Sent out my first query letters. (Then, became super depressed when I realized that in a letter to a magazine I totally want to work with, I included a horrific mistake in the letter. LAME.)
4. Sent out my first few emails to magazines.
5. Submitted my info to 15+ different agents. Then, learned about rejection from most of their responses. (Probably best to learn that feeling sooner rather than later, right?)
6. Ordered/received postcards and new business cards from moo. They're gorgeous. Some of them have been addressed, and are ready to go once I buy postcard stamps. Some of the postcards will just get dropped into new query letters once I verify addresses/names tomorrow.
7. Designed half of the response postcards that will get stamped, addressed, and put into query letters so editors can send them back, letting me know if they're interested. (I still have to design the front of the postcards.)
8. Scoped out some projects that will let me practice design/illustration work for free. I have an idea in mind for the Haiti Poster Project...screenprinting! Whoo!
9. Read an extra thousand advice/FAQ pages on various illustration-related blogs. Then got depressed over chances of success. Then came back slightly, remembering that success is linked to how hard I work...right?
10. Created 2 complete pages from the book I'm working on with my friend Lizzie, who wrote all the text and is giving me lots of help illustrating it. We even got a really positive response from an illustration agent! So hopefully over the next month or two, we can put together a dummy book etc etc etc...
11. Printed out a ton of copies of pdf's of my work, for sending to various magazines/publishers, depending on what they specialize in. I have an Education sheet, a Childrens sheet, and a general Editorial sheet.
12. Printed out a nice full sheet of each image I've made, and put it in a portfolio.

I'm also doing lots of indirect work, creating a huge document with all sorts of contact info, mostly gleaned from the Artist and Designer Handbook, but somewhat from some of my own research as well. Still to do:
1. Generate a list of blogs to write to about my work.
2. Make those calls to magazines to verify contact info.
3. Work on Haiti Poster.
4. BE MORE PRODUCTIVE. I haven't created anything in what feels like aaages. I need to make more new images and improve my portfolio.

it's here!

Hello! My portfolio is here!!!

There are not enough exclamation points in the world to declare how excited I am about this. It was not a pleasant journey. I made some pages from scratch, using dreamweaver, and got them all uploaded, painfully, to my hosting site. Some of the pictures wouldn't load - namely, a pretty sidebar I had made with clickable pictures that took the user to various parts of the site. I didn't know what to do. Plus, in general I just wasn't loving how it looked. So I gave in to the far-off whisper of indexhibit, the CMS (?) responsible for some of my favorite artist porfolios (namely, meg hunt and Lizzy Stewart). I love the clean, white spaces and kept reading how easy it is to set up one of these accounts. And IT IS.

Ok: Disclaimer. It was super stressful/scary/hair-pulling-out for like an hour or two there, but not because of indexhibit. Rather, because I couldn't follow directions. Once I sorted out my issues and spoke to a lovely godaddy.com representative, and waited a little bit for my site to be moved to a linux server, all was right with the world.

And now! I'm up and running! Come check it out! Let me know what you think!!!

portfolio coming soon!

I'm hard at work on portfolio-related activities. I made the self-portrait above to put on my contact page. Yay! It's very exciting/scary.

happy new year!

An illustration inspired by a recent article in the New York Times about a collection of essays all about The Big Lebowski. (Look! A background!)

As it's New Years Day, some goal-writing for the new year is in order...
1. Take more risks - ie, start working freelance.
2. Get more organized - particularly when it comes to finances.
3. Make more thoughtful purchases - no more clothes hanging around for months in the closet with the tags still on!
4. Have my artwork displayed somewhere...A coffee shop, a gallery, a book store, whatever.
5. De-clutter - I have a move coming up in the summer, my first in 4 years, and I've amassed waaay too many belongings. Some things will be donated, some will be sold, but I need to start moving on that, because the clutter is weighing me down!

And I am not calling these "resolutions." The word makes me shudder. I don't resolve to do these things. I aim to do them. It's an important difference!

avatar

I don't think this is the most original idea I ever had for an illustration, and not the best execution ever either. But I am trying to produce more, and trying to stick with certain techniques and within a certain style, and that is working out well. I'm off all week so let's see what else I can make happen!

Playing with Textures

Playing with texture = tons of fun. Today I had a bit of an epiphany in Illustrator, realizing the enormous potential of the Brush tool. Somehow, though, adding these textures makes my computer/Illustrator enormously tired...I mean, not that that will stop me or anything, but it sure is a pain!

Meanwhile, in life, I have a big break coming up and plan on going all out producing illustrations so I have enough that I'm proud of to put together an online portfolio in January. I currently own cleverviolet.com, but it forwards to my etsy site...I wonder - should I use that as my portfolio site, or look into buying my full name? Or both??? What do you think?

winter wonderland

I'm working on lots of projects all over the place, trying to build up the number of pieces I can put in an online portfolio later this month...eek! I am happy with this new one but there's so little time left till my Christmas/New Year's deadline, and so few pieces that I'm happy enough with! I gotta keep moving.

on the up and up

It makes me happy when I create a new illustration and promptly hate everything else I've done. It indicates progress, right? Here I was trying to do something that's mainly digital, but without any fake textures...I don't know, when I add textures, it's so clearly, "Hello! Look! She dropped in color, pasted in a texture, and played around with some options! Whee!" Bleh.

This feels better, somehow.

feeling better

The style is coming along more. Kind of. Yes. I'm experimenting more with photoshop, putting illustrator work on hold for now. I read a tutorial on how to isolate pencil sketchings, and have been a lot more successful with it than I expected at first. I love all the smudges that are visible!

hard at work

I've been feeling frustrated over this whole no-coherent-style thing...It's really much more than the style. It's kind of...well, I can make an illustration. And it can be fine, and my friends/family are happy with it and impressed, but there is a clear sense that it's nothing more than just a cute little picture. There's no particular originality or style. It's just whatever I felt like doing that week. It's more than just whether or not all of the stuff I'm creating fits together - it's that none of it is particularly good. Good, yes, maybe, but not particularly so.

I'm not sure if/when this will be resolved but for now I suppose it's a matter of making a billion more illustrations and waiting for magic to happen.

illustration progress

Taking a class makes producing artwork a necessity, rather than an added luxury, every day. I love it. I am totally accomplishing things - and not just stuff for class, but personal projects - on a regular basis. I've been forced to figure out all sorts of tools on Illustrator and Photoshop that I usually try to get around, because "getting around" these issues would normally hinder my progress or take away from the quality of the work. Which is not to say my work's quality is improving dramatically...at the very least, being so productive means getting closer to finalizing my style, and hasn't that been the goal all along?

And today! I have been painting. For fun. Which I haven't done in ages (weeks). Hurray!

getting things done

I had a huge to do list to work through this weekend and surprisingly, I've made a lot of progress. Yesterday I did schoolwork, then in the evening I tried to do some illustrating, and it was a TRAINWRECK. I was miserable. But I woke up with some fresh ideas, and completed three different illustrations that I'm very happy with. And started one other one that may or may not get finished, depending on how much time I want to spend learning about textures on photoshop. But today...Today. I have made some new buddies. One of them I will call Illustrator, one I will call Cut Out McFilter, and one I will call My Printer. I am getting them to help me in new exciting ways and I couldn't be happier about it!

Above: The first illustration assignment for my class, based on an article from the New York Times about parents letting their children run around without clothes on, and other adults finding it inappropriate. Well, something to that effect I believe. 5x10" acrylic/pencil on wood.

Richard and Leonard have the same favorite color

Acrylic on wood, 10x10"

It's so nice to be able to do a teeny bit of painting while school is in full swing and super crazed. It's also soooo nice that my illustration class is happening, and starting Tuesday!!!

My scanner does some excellent scanning of little drawings when I put it in the "Magazine (Color)" mode. I feel like it's revolutionized how I'll be able to get my drawings into my computer, and how I'll be able to edit them or add color in Illustrator. I'm thrilled!

This one came out a little silly because the colors are way more intense in the scan than in real life. I'm ok with that. The plus side is that the figures are also better defined now.

is this an illustration?

It must be, right? It's illustrative. Right?

It's been extremely challenging to find time to paint/create now that the school year has started up again. I've been a bit disappointed by it. I've found a little time over the past week or so though - there's a weekly meeting where my drawing little pictures isn't yet frowned upon, and a few days ago I started trying to create little silly illustrations like the one above, on a hopefully daily basis. I hope to paint a bit over the coming three day weekend. Also, I'm signed up for an Editorial Illustration class in Manhattan that starts in a few weeks - here's hoping it doesn't get cancelled! (Currently I'm the only person registered. Whoops.)

Ted

Ted, acylic/pencil on wood, 6x6"

This is my first self-driven "assignment" - a portrait of the dear departed Ted Kennedy. So many well-known figures have died this summer, and often after reading news of another death, I am temporarily fixated. Do other people do this? After Michael Jackson's death I spent way too much time on the internet reading up on him, not to mention watching all the youtube music videos - including Thriller, multiple times. Something similar has happened in the past few days with Ted Kennedy. Obviously, there are way fewer music videos to watch on youtube, but I'm so intrigued by everything I've read about him. I don't know a lot about politics, but I've watched enough news parody programs/Saturday Night Live skits to know a few things. I read through Kennedy's obituary on nytimes.com last night, though, trying to get a sense of why people speak so fondly of him, and I found out quite a lot! Here is my favorite quote they posted of his, from after he lost the 1980 Democratic presidential primary.

“For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die.”

zebras and going back to school

"Jason and Peanut dress alike on Wednesdays"

I finished this one a week ago. Now I have four kids + animals paintings! It's very exciting to see them all together. It's also confusing...I want the paintings to all have a similar "look" but I don't think they really do. They all have a child, and an unusual pet, and that's all well and good, but the way they're painted isn't similar enough for me. I'm not sure.

Meanwhile, I start teaching again in two weeks, and I need to start strategizing about how I'm going to keep myself motivated to create when I'm not at school. Last year I did pretty well painting on week nights, but I didn't complete anything too big or exciting...mostly it was just little exercises at abstract stuff, which is still so hard for me. I plan on taking an Editorial Illustration class starting in October, that meets once a week for two months, which will help.

Bears and Goldfish

"John Trains Victor to Stand on Command" Acrylic on cradled wood panel, 8x8".

Victor will do anything for a goldfish.

Painting vs Illustration

Donna and Herman Start a Puzzle, acrylic on wood panel, 9x12".

I'm very pleased with how this one turned out. I have this idea of several paintings where children have unusual pets. (It's mostly because I myself am constantly wanting to take all the animals from the zoo home with me.) So first I had Joan in the Kitchen with her pet bear, and now I have Donna with her pet giraffe, Herman.

What is it that makes something an Illustration? This painting feels like an illustration, and I'm not totally sure why. Perhaps it's the fact that it's a complete scene, instead of just a character and a plain background, like so much of what I've been doing lately. I could see it in a children's book. It's not a bad thing, per se, but it's not what I was going for. What is the difference between Fine Art and an Illustration? Obviously, what an illustrator creates is art, in itself, but still. Why do some creations get called "illustrations" while others are just "artwork" or "paintings"?