motivation

I’ve got a little more new work to share.  I’m starting a new project as we speak- I’m finally going to try and tackle another carousel book, a big project for me, but we’ll talk about that later.  First, let me tell you all about the show I participated in for the last First Friday.

Drink Philly opened up their office for the first time as a gallery space and invited the public in for beer sampling and pretty pictures.  It was a little bit of a melting pot show with a couple of fine art painters (Megan Coonelly and Brit Miller) and a photographer (Jimmy Lin) and two illustrators (April Kuhn and myself).  It went over really great, was massively attended (see below), and was a lot of fun!

Hopefully we’ll be working with them again and participating in more shows in their space.  It also served as great motivation for me who, post-college, has been having a lot of trouble getting my act together.

And here are the two new pieces I created for the show.  I used the same techniques as I did in my last post (that piece was also in the show).  It’s very involved and not totally practical, but I think the effect is really interesting and it also serves as a tool to get me more into the project (I love cutting and pasting and playing with paper!)

Because I’m so proud of it, here’s the drawing construct first:

At the time, because the drawing/cutouts/shadows were relatively complex I kept the colors pretty simple…  Looking at it now, I kind of want to either redo the piece, or go back in and spend some more time with the painting aspect.  We’ll see….

And here’s the other piece that I did, which turned out to be my favorite.. even though it had the most involved and annoying process.  I ended up drawing everything on different layers of layout bond, which I photographed separately and digitally composed (because layout bond is too thin to make the 3D constructs out of- hence the annoying rippling that I encountered in the first piece), then I printed the drawings, drew back over them to get good, thick, textured lines, and then I cut, composed, and took the final photos.  A lot of fuss, but I think totally worth it because I kind of love how it came out.

It’s definitely the best 3D effect I’ve gotten so far- and it carried through really well to the final product.  Probably has a lot to do with the nature of the drawing, the fact that it’s kind of in an empty space (no real perspective to deal with), but this is still a learning process so we’ll have to see what interesting new road blocks I run into with the next piece!

Thanks for looking, and the next time I’m in a show, maybe I’ll actually give some notice, invite some people, and we can bust the seams out of that gallery!