Minotaur

One of my favorite things to do for practice is troll sketch blogs for ideas and inspiration. I like to experiment with new ways and styles of drawing. Plus, I've always been the person who likes to sit behind the best artist in art classes, it helps me learn!

Here's something that I drew a rough outline for a couple days ago and then came back to today. It's just a rough sketch of tonal values and form. Maybe I'll use it for a color study.

In one of the children's book series that I'm reading the main character battles a minotaur. I liked the body style of a demon drawing that I happened upon during one of my late night internet art blog trolls and thought it'd make a pretty neat Minotaur. I haven't finished rendering the face yet... and I think I want the head to be a little bigger. Oh well, we shall see.

Self portrait

This wasn't supposed to turn out to be a self-portrait, but like many of my figure drawings, it started looking somewhat like me... so it became me. Granted, a Schiele-esque, broken, bar sitting me, but me nonetheless. I can't believe I'm guilty of being one of those artist who just draws herself, even when she doesn't mean to. Guess it's something I can work on.

Here's the sketch:

Portrait of a Lady

Let's face it, Target, Ikea, and Goodwill are godsends to broke twenty-somethings trying to hodge-podge together some semblance of a living space. I'm not going to lie, like most 24 year olds, I am pretty much addicted to all three. Normally I'm pretty practical about my purchases, essentials first! But, I believe that everyone should treat themselves every now and then. Buying things for my humble apartment (and the occasional sweet treat or sushi delight) is my way of saying, "here's to you Kid."

Naturally, my last Ikea trip for a coffee table (Lack Series!) took me far and away from the coffee table section and straight into the jaws of the wall decoration section. Okay, okay, that's an exaggeration; I was in there for the purpose of finding cheap frames in which to house my collection of limited edition silkscreen band posters. Whilst in the frame section, however, I met and fell in love with Ung Drill, the ridiculously decorative plastic oval frame:


It was pure impulse... but I had to have that frame.

I bought the frame and it sat in it's packaging leaning against the wall for about a month or two. Then, I decided to just put something, anything in it and hang it. I found some left over wrapping paper, cut it to an oval shape and hung the frame.

It took me about 4 days of staring at the ugly paper in my awesome Ikea frame. Something had to change. So, this morning, I grabbed some leftover BFK and craft paint and sat down to figure out what could go in the frame.



My apologies for the dark photograph, fingerprints, and the flash that I poorly photoshoped out. I wish I had access to a silkscreen studio because it'd be neat if it had a patterned gloss background, but, I'm pretty happy with my simple (ok, super simple) painting. At least I don't have to walk past the wrapping paper stand-in anymore. I see a few things that I might go in later and change, but it's fine for now.

Physical Reminders

One of the blogs I read, Leon of New York , inspired me to start a 43 Things list. Basically, it's a list of things you want to accomplish in your life tied into a social network of folks who help cheer you on and give you ideas and inspiration in reaching those goals.

One of my goals is drink more water. An entry by LittleJude gave me this idea to create a journal to track the amount of water I drink in a day via drawings of glasses. I extended it to include things that my boyfriend and I are interested in doing (and tracking) on a daily basis. I opened up Illustrator (which incidentally helped with my “Draw More” goal) to sketch out a simple list of things I want to track everyday.


My boyfriend and I are interested in tracking:
1. Vegetarian meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner)
2. How many servings of caffeine we drink (0-2)
3. How many times we eat after 9, 10, or 11
4. If we played or practiced hockey with room for notes
5. If we did yoga with room for notes
6. If we meditated with room for notes
7. Our mood (happy, sad, neutral)
8. Hours of sleep
9. Servings of water
10. and a space for notes

The size is 4.25”x5.5” (a quarter of a page) which is think is manageable to carry around and I can always print out more pages and staple them together.

Sketches for Ms. Merry Story

About a year ago, I wrote a story about how the Pillow Tree came to be. I've always wanted to illustrate it so I decided to take it on as one of my side projects.

Here are the first couple of sketches:

This is a drawing of the Castle of Miracles (it's a real place!). This is the setting of the story.

Here's a few sketches of the main character, Ms. Merry.
This is a dream of Ms. Merry's.

I'll post a link to the finish drawings when I'm done!

I finally have a scanner

Expect more frequent posting for 2009!