Stipple portrait

We had a stippling assignment in my black and white illustration class which had to be a portrait of someone important to us with at least three different elements in it that meant something about their character. I decided to be the ambitious jerk of the class and did mine on a wood panel with a wood burner. The man in the picture is my dad, he's a pretty cool dude.

Huzzah, for things!

So yeah, its 2:30 in the morning and I'm sitting here making a blog instead of going to sleep.
"Why?" You ask?
In actuality you're probably wondering why its this that Im doing instead of a variety of other interesting, important, or responsible things. For instance, I could be watching more episodes of Arrested Development, searching for new webcomics, or possibly even doing something that doesn't make me into a giant geek. Or I could be working on sketches or research for my degree project (what my school calls a thesis). Or I could even just be getting a reasonable amount of sleep so that tomorrow when I go to the Museum of Science with my boyfriend, I'm not a crabby sleep-deprived mess.

... "Why?" You ask?
1) I, like many of my art school cohorts, am a bit of an insomniac.
2) I really need to get my good work out into the world in a way that is not deviant art.
3) I enjoy typing.

So there it is.

Recently, I've been making myself feel a little down just in the slump that is the closing of my junior year at college. It's getting to the point where I'm ready for break: the assignments are a bit stagnant because its not yet time to stress about finals, yet everyone I know is stressed out anyway due to the realization that we are all dangerously close to being real people (i.e. graduating and going out into the world to be shredded to pieces by people saying "What? We can't afford to pay you for making the world pretty. The economy is WAY too shitty for you to be successful as an artist." This particular day dream is usually followed by this person laughing me directly out of their office).
In all honesty, I'm excited to get out of school and work. Being a student is alright for another year, making minimum wage at an art supply store and getting beers with my friends on monday nights is fun for now, but I really look forward to the point when (hopefully) doing what I enjoy can manage to pay my bills.
I suppose that if I could have one wish, it would be to reach the point where life is stable and predictable as soon as possible. That I get out of college, become a teacher, get a little cruddy house in Natick or something and get some bunnies, then kitties, and maybe a husband and some kids down the line.

Lost Poster

An assignment for Nick Edlund, which was a poster for Lost: A Pop Opera. This assignment was really fun mostly due to the subject matter, which was really goulish and awesome. I tend to gravitate toward creepy subjects, which is weird being such an almost abnormally chipper person...

But yeah, the story behind this poster was a character who would apparently play his fiddle in order to put rattle snakes to sleep, and subsequently smash them to death. He was then found in the desert dead and covered in snake bites, and his ghost is supposedly heard playing his fiddle some nights.

The finished version of the poster (which the lab monitor unfortunately deleted) was a colored version of this with text on the side. :(

Kiss Me, Kate Publicity

Ah, the joys of MIT Musical Theatre. This was a fun project to work on, mostly because no one really made me change much about it apart from the positioning of text and a few color things. It was a pretty easy assignment from the Guild, though I wish that it had been more organized, or I suppose I wish that I had just decided to be the Publicity Manager and Designer as opposed to just the Designer. It all worked out for the best in the end though...

I really need to do these things for a pay check from now on.

Chris' Tattoo

Tattoo designed for my friend Chris. It's a bit of a weird one, I don't know how his artist managed to make it flow well on his chest as it's just a big rectangle. I liked working on the skull though. Anatomy is fun.

For Meghan

I did this a while ago as a birthday present for Meghan, a girl that I have known since I was in the first grade. We were children together, and were best friends up until we got separated by my going to the private school that my mom taught at when we went to middle school.

We still talk on occasion, I get the random birthday email or nostalgic conversation. The inspiration for this piece was pretty miraculous though, as I had a dream about she and I meeting up and talking about our lives on the swing-set at our old school, and she called me the following day to explain the same dream back to me.

I feel bad about this piece because I still have it in my apartment, waiting to be sent to her.

self portrait.

This was done as a cathartic piece, but also as fulfillment for another assignment for Wiseman. This one had to be with different hand gestures.

I got the assignment mere days after I got the news that my uncle Randy had passed away from a heart attack, and I finished it the day after I flew back from his funeral. All in all it was a really fucked up experience, but a good one for inspiration in my art nonetheless.

Looking back on it now, the piece really still serves as pretty evocative in terms of how I still feel when I look at it.

My only regret is that my roommate at the time dropped her bike on it one day, leaving the smudge mark on the forehead, which I couldn't erase or effectively cover up with more colored pencil.

Lateral Head Anatomy

Also from olden times, I did this for Robin Wiseman's class as an assignment showing the muscular and skeletal anatomy of the head and neck. I based it on that image that most frat boys have hanging up in their rooms, "The Kiss" by Chalkin (its of girls lying on a bed in underwear kissing, whoo lesbians).
I thought it was an interesting direction to take such a medical/sterile illustrations and turn it into something with more meaning and emotion.

Back in the long long ago/before times when I would go to MIT and hang out every weekend, my friend Raph was still an electronic engineering student there. He has since gone on to rock stardom in California with his band Dizzy Balloon (they're pretty good, they won a battle of the bands and opened for the Killers). Anywho, I made him this three paneled birthday present basically just asking "what's your favorite animal and what's your favorite color"

Those were good times, it makes me feel old.

The Maxx

Back in the nineties, Sam Keith wrote this awesome comic book called "The Maxx" which basically chronicled the life of this guy who lived in alternate realities, protecting the same woman in both. In one life, he was a homeless man, wearing a purple costume and living in a box in New York city, and the woman he was protecting was his social worker. In the other reality, he was this heroic monster, fighting strange monsters in the outback, and the woman he protected was a jungle queen. It was an interesting, depressing comic book which was then turned into an animated series on MTV (remember when MTV was good?)
Sophomore year we were assigned to do a sculpture based on a two dimensional image, so I did the Maxx. It was a good time and turned out pretty rockin.

Unitown Logo

A logo for a diversity seminar that my mother directed.

The Traveler

I did this for a friend of mine, KC when he was writing a script involving a man who wore a wolf mask.