Gouache painting - Friday Night Challenge

Friday night was a great night. I got done with class a little bit early and headed to Moto-i with Francesca and Chris. It's the first weekend in a long while that I wasn't swamped with work, and Francesca and I sat down for a 2 hour challenge. Originally, we had planned to finish a piece of art in two hours, but as things started going, I changed my idea from inking a drawing of this sleeping girl - to painting her in gouache.


detail of her face

As the night wore on, I went over the 2 hour limit and painted for almost three hours on her skin. Gouache is one of those mediums that if you don't mix enough, you're screwed. I had to paint over her skin a second time, since I hadn't done it right to begin with. Also - once you start, you can't stop.

Eventually I called it a night around 11pm and headed home with Chris to play some Marvel vs. Capcom for a sec. :) I am excited to pick this back up and finish this painting once I get another couple hours of free time!

Drawing in Class

My Illustration one class on Thursday was a ton of fun. For about 20 minutes we sat in a circle and sketched each other for a character development project. I was up late last night taking pictures of some of the stuff we did and thought I'd throw this one on the blog!

Everyone had some really fun sketches and we then took turns trying to do one minute captures of some weird faces we were making. I was laughing the whole time - seeing them try and make faces and draw each other at the same time was awesome.
I should do that more. :)

Since I was part of the circle for the first group, I figured I'd pick up my pencil and sketch them, too!

Happy Valentines Day!

Happy Valentines Day!
May your Monday be filled with kittens and things! :)

Guess Who? Blue Man Painting

You'll never guess who this painting started out as...
I am HORRIBLE at making likenesses of celebrities! There was a point tonight when I was referencing picture after picture and I ended up with a painting of a man that is WAY different (in many ways) than the blue man you see here.



There is no way you'll ever guess who this was at the beginning of my painting...
Anyone want to guess?

I'll buy you a tea if you figure it out.

Painted tonight in Painter 11 with about 1 hour of real painting, and 1 hour of trying to figure out how to make this look like the guy I started to draw in the first place.

I guess it ended up looking like a cross between Lawrence Fishburne and O.J. Simpson.
Love those freckles.

Ballerina

Here's a cute sketch of a ballerina. You can tell by the bun.

Strange Self Portrait

Oh man, I haven't done a self portrait in forever and I think it shows...
Here's a painter painting I did tonight for the sake of doing personal art in my free time. It's definitely not the most awesome thing I've ever done. Then again, It's better than some of my MCAD self portaits (It's probably been that long).



here's a detail of my painting


Also, I've been grilling my students left and right about making sure that when they use color that they use the "Squint" rule. Squint your eyes to see value so you know you're doing it right. Just because colors are on your art doesn't mean that it works with value. So - with this, I just wanted to check myself before I wrecked myself. (OH SNAP!)

I suppose that's pretty good! My face hurts from squinting for three hours.

Abraham - the Upright Gorilla

This weekend I saw a video of Abraham the Gorilla. I guess he learned to walk upright on his hind legs, just like we do. After being totally enthralled with the idea that all gorillas could potentially do that, I watched this 5 part documentary from the BBC on Youtube.

I had a couple hours after class tonight to do something fun - so I opened painter and made a quick-quick painting.

Man, I love science. I love animals. And I love learning about all of this stuff.
So, Abraham, I made this one for you!

Happy Holidays from Me, Chris & Francesca

I made this last night for you! We're all headed to our respective parents' houses for a visit over the holidays! This was a little neon-colored bike I painted (painter) yesterday for the festivities!

Happy holidays you guys - I'm sure I will cross post this with Paper Bicycle's Blog as soon as it's my turn to get up to bat!

:)
Hope you guys are enjoying the snow out there!

Life on the Internet with Emo Hair

I spent about 45 minutes wandering aimlessly around the internet today - and, when I was through with the obligatory searches for "awful plastic surgery," I started clicking around on hair websites/ groups.

Here's a piece I did inspired by the millions of crazy emo girl haircuts I saw tonight.
I figured since I was snowed in that I should be doing some personal art.

This one is another piece done with Painter - I am so happy I have my wacom tablet back!!

Life Update!

OK!
SO - things besides the normal things (what?) are happening in art- life.

Two things :

1. I often complain to myself about the fact that it's too bad that I work in a field where I can't post things until they're manufactured and in the stores. - so It seems like I might not do anything all day....

and

2. I even have personal projects that I can't show yet because I will jinx myself! WAAAH!


On that note, I wanted to TELL you about this thing!
Chris is in San Francisco right now preparing for a pitch to Chronicle Books (Best publisher ever). We've got a book idea and I stayed up until 3 am prepping at Kinkos for, like, EVER.

The guy at kinkos was really nice, but somehow I got into a conversation with him about this Gundam robot that they made in Japan and that he just so happened to have pics of on his phone.... What? Yes.

Anyway, So - tomorrow from 3 - 5, Chris will be standing and waiting his turn in line to pitch out concept - face to face - with an Editor of Chronicle Books.
Cross your fingers for him! I really believe in our idea and we did a bunch of work to prep for it! :)

Anyway, when it's all said and done with, I'll post some images of what we worked on!
Good luck, Chris!

Cat - Delightful!

Here it is!
The "finished" painting of Oliver!
I quick did the leaves on the bottom and got rid of that sprig floating above his head!
I owe this piece of art to John from my tools of the trade class - for a show at Cause this week. I hope that I can get it to him in time!

Francesca was super nice and helped me frame it tonight, so it's all ready!
I should really do more painter/paintings!

It was a lot of fun and I'm sure I'll probably go back and add some details when I don't have a splitting headache. But for now - I'm happy!

Happy Thanksgiving, You guys!

Hey! We're headed to Columbus Ohio tomorrow to visit our dear friend Ryan. I can't wait to share some sleepy airspace with Chris and a million other thankful folks.

Hope your travels and family/friend time is amazing.
Eat some cranberries and yams for me!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Working like Crazy.

Thanksgiving is almost here and Chris and I are headed out to visit Ryan in Columbus OH.
I'm interested to see how the bubble tea tastes over there, and I'm happy to get out of this painful Minnesota frigid icy weather for a second.

Things are the studio have been cool - We're working on some amazing projects right now for Target, a waterbottle company, and a stationery company - which is super awesome!

Here's a peek at some of the bits I've been developing (in preliminary sketch form)
for one of our big projects. It's a little bit of this, and a little bit of that...
mostly assets for a big piece of print & pattern I was working on, but a fun project nonetheless.

I hope to finish that cat painting soon and hopefully get it over to John C. for a show at Cause on the 3rd! My Wacom tablet broke and I sent it to vancouver today in hopes that it'll be fixed by the time I get back from vacation!

More Oliver Painting

I did a little bit of painting on this weird painter piece of art I'm doing!
This time, he's floating around in a pile of blobby leaves!
Not sure what is going on, but who cares!
It's just great to be painting in painter!
Hopefully I can keep the atmospheric softness to some of these elements.
That's the part I really like right now, even though most of that softness was happening in the underpainting.
Yeah painter!

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!!





Over the past week, Chris and I have been working diligently on Sharpie-ing the crap out of these outfits! We went out with a couple friends last night to a Party and then went dancing. We were ready for noone in the world to know who we were and were super excited that the people that did recognize us were like

"YEAH BOIIIIIIIIII I LOVE YOU GUYS!!!!!"

And then everyone else just thought Chris was Vanilla Ice - and that I was some weird tagalong strange short blonde girl version or something. Confusing for the rest of the world, really.

It was a pretty awesome night and it was nice and warm wearing full sweat suits in the 39 degree weather! It was totally worth it!
For anyone who doesn't know who we went as, here's a bonus video for you. So FRESH!

Rock Band 3 & We're on TV

We're on TV this week on the DIY network! We did a shoot for a new show called "I hate my kitchen" and they've titled out show "Wild Side". HA! If you want to catch me and Chris being goofy on TV, it's on a couple times tomorrow (the 27th, and one more time in the early morning on the 30th!) We're hoping some awesome person records it for us. We don't have cable, and are really hoping for it to show up online!

Also - we got Rock Band 3 and made some characters tonight. Here we are - Plus, guess who leads up our fake band? Sweet Sweet Ryan Michlitch. This one's for you, buddy.
Look at that bad motha...




Courtesy of Chris's flickr.

Sneak Peek - Halloween Preview

Guess Who Chris & I are going for - For halloween?

yo yo yo landi

lazy eyes all around.

More Kitties

Adam is over here right now working on his new website!
While that is going on, all the cats are running about and accosting us. I had some fantastic cherry apple crisp and we're waiting for some dominoes to show up!
All this and I did a little more on this painting of Oliver.

He keeps quoting the olsen twins "i want pizza" and it is driving me nuts.

The last time he came over he repeated the whole "flea market montgomery mini mall" sensation... I'd rather have that, I think.

Baby Big Head

EDIT:


I was messing around with painter tonight while we were watching the office on netflix.
I was inspired by all the 60s-70s stationery I got in the mail as well as all this talk about painter lately. I drew a piece of my cat Oliver. Maybe I'll go back and make more sprigs of stuff around him so there isn't just one weird leafy thing shooting out of his head! Or add some whiskers and fix the rest of him...

Also - His head is not this big in real life.