ChiBurger

Scribble + Doodle = Scroodle?

2011-05-05T12:05:00.000-07:00

Just a rough idea that I've been knocking around. Apparently, the mechanical idea didn't get too far. The thought process somehow went: Mechanical --> Wires ---> OMG CURLIQUES.

Whoops.

"No More Dreaming Like a Girl So in Love"

2011-04-16T10:41:00.000-07:00

A gift for a friend's finals care package (man, I feel old just saying that). We were talking a bit about dreams and our goals and inspirations, so I figured this image was somewhat appropriate.

Detail shot.

Now I'm just hoping it'll make it through the mail in one piece, haha.

Whoops

2011-03-01T19:52:00.000-08:00

Sort of forgot I had this lying around.

Have some other stuff lying around, but I'd upload something to prove I'm actually being productive. Ish.

Halloween Post and Self-Portrait

2010-11-01T23:41:00.000-07:00

My version of American McGee's Alice. Outside of the apron, I wanted to make something I could wear more than once. And the shade of blue on the actual dress just doesn't work for me ;)

Also today was self-portrait today! So here's my quick contribution.

A Bit of Nerdy Fun

2010-10-24T12:43:00.000-07:00

So I'm part of an online community of people who enjoy lolita fashion and also enjoy Harry Potter. We declare which house we would be in and sorts of silly things; each month we have a "competition" of sorts, and this month was to modify the house crests to be more lolita.

Rather than just slapping bows and ribbons on the crests and calling it good, I wanted to redesign the whole thing altogether, and eventually I came up with the stained glass windows idea after some sketching and playing around with different shapes. There was also an idea to do a cameo sort of effect, but that eventually fell through because me + working in circle compositions = disaster.

Watercolor, ink, and layers of paper. I'm not particularly happy with the result of this, generally because the contrast pretty much died as soon as it got to the scanner; which means there wasn't enough contrast to begin with. Also weird tangenty things going on with the gate and the snake's head.

Second try's a charm? I messed around with using underlying washes, and it seemed to turn out in my favor.

I'm fairly sure I didn't meet the requirements of making it "more lolita." But whatever. It was still pretty fun. AND it fills up the bare walls in my room.

Now to come up with ones for Gryffindor and ~~Jigglypuff~~ Hufflepuff.

/nerd

Sketch Dump: Updateish

2010-09-27T22:28:00.000-07:00

The first assignment from Illustration Academy with composition and shapes

Assignment 2 is missing because it's too dang big to scan. Poor.

Chris Payne's assignment involving "The Conversation"

Anita Kunz's assignment for a "celebrity portrait."

I'm also realizing I totally forgot to properly crop these before uploading them. Ah well. I was planning on going back and revising these anyhow.

In any case, a couple of random sketches from camp/these past few weeks.

A quick sketch of Tyler and Bomi listening to her iPod. Here I learned pretty quickly that I can't sketch while I'm on a bus.

A lot of the sketches had to be pretty quick, considering I was actually supposed to be uh...teaching. Haha.

Been playing around with nib and ink lately. Life's been pretty good. I'm currently in Seattle interning for Fantagraphics, and it's pretty sweet. I'm always so tired lately though. :/ This is obnoxious.

Yeongam Camp: Day 5?

2010-07-30T19:36:00.000-07:00

Everything's been super busy, I'm not really sure where to start. I've been in Korea really for about ten to eleven days, but it just feels like months. We arrived on the 20th of July and spent 4 hours on the bus getting from Incheon to Mokpo, where we were staying at the International Football Center for orientation. There we got a crash course on teaching and met our Korean co-teachers as well as getting assigned into different camps and just getting to know everyone.

We started teaching our classes Monday, and being assigned the art booth, I'm fairly sure I have the best homeroom ever. The kids are really sweet and crazy off the wall especially during break time.

There's so much more post, but I'm actually supposed to be teaching class right now (whoops), so all you're getting right now is a sketchdump.

People from orientation

One of my students, Bella. :)

No photos just yet, but I love my kids. <333

Post-Academy

2010-07-12T16:24:00.000-07:00

Not much has been going on since Academy ended. A friend and her family have been amazing and have been letting me stay at their house for these past couple weeks before Korea. Been sketching and sewing (and catching up on sleep).

My friend showed me this really awesome place that stocks quilting fabrics. Found some gorgeous and crazy stuff. Like this multi-story building print.

Pleats! Seemed simple enough, then I realized that some math was needed because I ended up adding two extra pleats, which gave me nearly three-four inches extra space around the waistband.

Tada!

Next Monday, I'm off to Korea for a month to teach English. I'm super excited for both the kids and (hopefully) sketching fodder.

Blue!

2010-06-13T14:21:00.000-07:00

I really don't think I've gone through so many thumbnails as I have in my life and yet somehow I still finished ahead of time.

Week 2 of IA and Gary Kelley's been here for the past week helping us with the project he assigned: Blue. Vague as you can get, right?

Wordlist. Initially, there were a lot of ideas I needed to weed through, but I found that I wanted to do something related to folktales/Chinese culture. Also fossegrims sounded pretty awesome.

During the first crit, we needed to have three thumbnails, and I chose to do one for the fossegrim, Duanwu Festival, and Pan's Labyrinth, all of which I ended up scrapping because I wasn't nearly as interested.

During Gary Kelley's presentation, I doodled some more and randomly doodled a dragon head, which I actually found really cool, hilariously mostly because I liked the way the ear turned out. :x

About 10 pages of thumbnails later, I came up with two general ideas. One was more design-based and focused on the dragon as a symbol in Chinese culture and their association with water; additionally, the color blue is also associated with immortality/rebirth and spring. The second was more narrative involving zongzi, which is rice and other stuffing wrapped in bamboo eaten during the Duanwu Festival. One version of the story of how they came about is that people would drop rice into the river to placate a dragon that lived in there.

Gary suggested I go with the first idea, partially because the narrative was a bit of a stretch for "blue." Plus I got to work with pattern 8DDD

First rough sketch. The shape of the dragon is working, but the waves and flowers weren't integrating enough.

A few more ideas. I considered cropping the dragon really close like on the left, but Gary shot that one down, lawl.

Final sketch!

I knew from the beginning I wanted to work with cut paper, but I decided I wanted to try a new technique outside of the usual layering to make a scene. Thanks to Kristen, I was led to Patrick Gannon's blog, and looking through there, I found this artist Tim Budden, whose work is absolutely amazing and a jumping point of this project.

I forget what paper this actually is (banana paper, I think?), but yeah. Projected the sketch onto this and began the inevitable cutting process.

WOO. FOUR HOURS LATER. Due to some poor pre-planning on my part, I didn't realize that the image wouldn't stand on its own if I just hung it up. Additionally, I wasn't totally satisifed with just that desaturated blue color. I wanted to add a bit of blue green and cream. SOLUTION: undercolors :D

I'm pretty sure the gluing process took just as long if not longer than cutting the pieces out. But tada! :D I'm pretty pleased with it, though I'm definitely going to have to try out some new things with this approach.

Project 2: Blue

2010-06-10T22:09:00.000-07:00

As vague as you can get. For reals.

Teaser 8D

Illustration Academy!

2010-06-08T12:20:00.000-07:00

So, I'm spending these next few weeks of June in Kansas City for the Illustration Academy. I'm surrounded by such awesome people, both student and instructor, that my brain is blown.

Photos will come later, but for now, I've got my first project.

"A Slice of Life in Kansas City" The project's requirements were 8x8 minimum and the focus was on composition through shape and value, and coincidentally, color. I've still got a bit of work to do, but I really enjoyed this exercise.

Across The Wall

2010-05-02T09:54:00.000-07:00

Done and done. I'm feeling excited/sad/relieved/terrified now that graduation is quite literally around the corner. I presented my thesis April 14, and I can say I'm glad the presentation part of it is over.

In any case, here's the work I did for thesis. I ended up illustrating Garth Nix's short story collection "Across the Wall."

"Nick Sayre and the Creature in the Case"

"Under the Lake"

"Charlie Rabbit"

"From the Lighthouse"

"Lightning Bringer"

"Intro to Scum Quarter"

"Heart's Desire"

"Hansel's Eyes"

"Hope Chest"

Cover

I wasn't able to create an image for all of the stories, but I may go back and do so over the summer. We'll see.

Book Cover Project and Textiles

2010-04-19T06:50:00.000-07:00

Been somewhat productive post-thesis (extremely so if catching up on sleep counts). Here's a book cover for an imaginary title "The Sinking of the Memory" by Richard Frank. This project more or less gave us the opportunity to draw whatever we wanted.

So I chose gears 8D

Fun textile patterns I got to make/play around with. I need to adjust the colors for the first one, but the second I might end up using for something...else. Haha.

Teasers

2010-03-30T07:29:00.000-07:00

Finish line, I'm almost there!

Something Non-Thesis Related!

2010-03-26T14:39:00.000-07:00

I'm really bad with the posting once per week thing. More or less, I'm not sure.

In any case, I've been working on this really awesome character design project in John Hendrix's Narrative Sketchbook class for the past two weeks (on top of thesis, gah! e_e). We had to pick a character from a list of literary characters and first make 2D character studies.

I chose the Sheriff of Nottingham.

I don't have any of the prior sketches, but I found this part surprisingly challenging; partially because we more or less had to reinvent a character that already has a ton of reincarnations. THAT, and I had a really hard time thinking outside of "Alan Rickman, Alan Rickman, Alan Rickman!" (even if the movie was horrible, it was Alan Rickman). I kept wanting to make something more realistic, somewhat stylized, but that wasn't really going anywhere. So I ended up with the character above~

Next step: SCULPEY!

Not gonna lie, I was really not looking forward to this part. Mostly because I've never used Sculpey and the last time I really made anything out of clay was....oh...8th grade? Yeah.

Surprisingly, I found it really easy. Possibly because the sheriff was so stylized that I just had to think in shapes...of clay. It was also way more fun than I expected it to be.

The initial sculpted head. Wee! I went in and added a bit of detail in the facial hair and eyebrows before baking him.

I can't remember if the head here is baked or not, but I was trying to figure out the logistics of the rest of the body. Since he's so plump, it was a total excuse to make him a plush as much as possible. I actually ended up ditching the sculpey arms and keeping the hands.

TADA! :D He's a bit lopsided and his arms are a bit too short to cross...so he pretty much looks like a pimpin' sheriff with scoliosis. But it's okay, I love him anyway.

Best part! I have a new deskmate in studio <3

There's a lot of things I would have done differently now that I know, but definitely a fun project. :D

Spring Break and Such

2010-03-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

Had a blast in Philly and Seattle. Basically, I had a massive illustration nerd-out week, and I'm still feeling the aftereffects. But they're good ones, mostly. Except for the part where I need to have thesis done in two weeks. Meep!

One of my newer pieces. It's still missing in the bottom right corner (left on the photo). I'm thinking I might also add something to activate all that empty space on the other side of the candle.

Seven down, five more to go!

Thesis Update

2010-03-01T09:22:00.000-08:00

This is close to what the final image will look like. Not entirely convinced about the type or its placement at this point. I'll probably mess around with it during break.

Title 3

2010-02-23T22:08:00.001-08:00

Just a quickie.

The Lighthouse

2010-02-15T10:38:00.000-08:00

Wee, cut paper! One of the first images for my thesis. Like a lot of my recent work, I decided to go the cut paper route in order to play with layers and shadows. There's still some work left to do (what on the earth happened to the lighthouse, I need to go back into it with a straightedge), but overall, I think I'm nearly done with this one.

One down, eleven to go!

Alice D.

2010-02-06T19:55:00.000-08:00

Exciting news! A couple friends and I started our own clothing brand, Cirque de Jeu, over the summer, and for the past couple months, we've been working on getting our first item ready to be released for the spring!

Look familiar?

We were aware that Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" was coming out in the spring, so we figured, why not make our first print inspired by Alice in Wonderland?

The concept for the print was to make it "psychedelic," unusual, and very fun to look at. We eventually decided the print should be one of those "all-over patterns," which I'm pretty sure is the wrong term (someone knowledgeable in fashion design enlighten me, please? :)).

Since the final product of a print was to be a kind of pattern, I started out by figuring out what characters/objects we wanted on the fabric: Alice, Cheshire Cat, Caterpillar, hookahs, and mushrooms! Some initial sketches:

After I made each image separately, I would take them into Photoshop and arrange them digitally into a kind of "tile" so that the print could repeat over and over. I actually ended up making two "sets" of images, because the first didn't feel very cohesive. The colors of each object, while fine on their own, looked akin to a really off-kilter nursery print.
The tile with the first set of images. ...ick.

The second tile. I decided to keep with a very limited palette of pinks, blues, and browns and also included linework. This was a test on how well the tiling would work. Still has a couple kinks in this version.

End product! We ended up designing a skirt and jumperskirt version as well as a matching hairbow. This is an image from a promotional video/photoshoot over winter break where Christy and Valerie modeled the garments.

This was definitely a new experience for me in that it forced me to think differently about how I was going to make the images and put them together. Rather than think about how I was going to design a scene, I was designing a pattern, a flat space. I didn't have to worry so much about depth, just the arrangement of all of the objects to make the print busy, but not cluttered. Fun times all around!

Whew, this post turned out longer than I expected, at least, more text than images. Anyway, thanks for looking!

Update!

2010-02-03T08:49:00.000-08:00

I'm horrible at these things. I told myself I'd try to post at least once a week when 2010 started.

...ANYWAY. Classes have been pretty good. Pretty intense. I'm still working on media studies for my thesis project, so I'll have those and the first illustration up soon, hopefully. I'm also taking a Narrative Sketchbook course taught by none other than John Hendrix.

Our first project: A Man, A Woman, A Dog, (Insert Muse, mine was a Praying Mantis), A Banana

Watercolor on bristol; I gave a shot at using Koi Watercolors, which was an interesting switch from trays to tubes. Might do some more experimenting later on to get a better handle of the color.

Final Projects

2009-12-10T18:41:00.000-08:00

Originally I was going to wait until I could post my whole process....buuuut that meant waiting.

Much like last year, this semester has been mostly a lot about experimentation. I took Douglas Dowd's Visual Worlds course this fall, which was about that: experimentation in order to find/fine tune a visual language I could call my own. Looking at the semester overall, I think it's interesting where I've come from, and I've definitely stumbled through these past couple months, but long story short, it was so worth it.

Again, I'm way too impatient, so I'm going to post basically, the final projects from both courses this semester.

From my "Illustrating Texts" course; this project was to create a poster for a play. I chose to depict "Buried Child" more or less in a collage-y form similar to the Alice D print, but try it in a 3D sense.

These three are the final project for "Visual Worlds." There weren't any particular guidelines; again just more experimentation on my end on how to make the things, what materials to use. I've still got a ways to go, but I'm happy with the foundation.

Long Time No Post

2009-12-07T09:51:00.000-08:00

So MAYBE I'm a little early for Christmas

2009-10-31T08:07:00.000-07:00

I tried some cut paper collage this past week, and I'm kind of liking it. Everything is watercolor with exception to the snowflake paper; that was picked up at Hobby Lobby.

"Like a Circus, Like a Circus"

2009-10-29T16:20:00.000-07:00

Snippets of some things I've been messing with~

Doodley

2009-10-21T16:29:00.001-07:00

A Good Man is Hard to Find

2009-10-11T21:17:00.000-07:00

One of the spots from my Illustrating Texts project.

Feud!

2009-10-07T10:02:00.000-07:00

Note to self: Use darker ink washes, otherwise the scanner totally obliterates them.

Alice D.

2009-10-05T19:02:00.000-07:00

So mushrooms are fun to draw. Cheshire Cat.....I can't stop making him super creepy.

Something More Substantial?

2009-10-01T14:55:00.000-07:00

Some sketches and things from the summer.

Intro and...Stuff

2009-09-30T10:11:00.000-07:00

So I caved and snagged myself a blog mainly for the purpose of posting up doodles and art. Daily blabber is excluded and floating around somewhere else on the internets.

A short intro: I am currently a senior at Washington University in St. Louis finishing up a BFA in Communication Design, concentrating in Illustration. I am also working towards a minor in Writing. As far as post-grad plans go, I'm up for anything, but I have some interest in publishing, concept art, character design, and fashion design.