Kick it

This assignment (Concepts I yet again) (from a long time ago yet again) involved designing an ad for a newspaper. We weren't supposed to create a finished piece, but a refined sketch for whatever we were advertising. I chose to do a cross-stitched Converse ad with the slogan "Kick It Old School" cause, you know...old people do stuff like cross stitch....

Peace and War

These pieces are from the first assignment I received in Concepts 1, to do a cover and two spot illustrations for the New York Times book review of 'Peace and War,' which was a review of Jonathan Franzen's newest novel, "Freedom."
Now I'm moving into the last two weeks of the semester so it'll be super busy for me and means I won't be able to sleep much at all :(

Queens of the Stone Age

Today I would like to say: "Lol what are updates"

I am very busy with the exciting and confusing process of study abroad paperwork!

Anyway, for Illustration Concepts I, our most recent assignment was to redesign an album cover. I chose the album 'Songs for the Deaf' by Queens of the Stone Age, mostly because I found the original cover really boring and only reflective of the song "Go With the Flow," which I think is kind of an outlier in their music.

For this album QOTSA had DJs create fake radio noise to simulate the drive to Joshua Tree, and it's included in the beginning and ends of a lot of songs, hence the radio. And frankly I find their music creepy and a bit sinister, so mosquitoes seemed like appropriate imagery. And I realized this after, but they chose their name to be the "Queens" rather than the "Kings" because king would have been to macho- and their music is rock for men and women. So I feel like the parts of the cover that I embroidered fit pretty well conceptually.

Lazier than you could ever imagine

I have a penchant for large-scale stuffed animals. I made the rat in the spring of my freshman year at MICA and the snake in the spring of sophomore. I think I could potentially have crawled inside the rat before it was stuffed, that's how big it is. Anyway these are just rephotographed because when I first did the photos were AWFUL.

And the knives are pattern-made from actual knives; it was a pretty useful exercise from Intro to Fibers although I want to figure out a system (or just learn one in general) for making a pattern from my head.

I am SEW lazy, get it?

These are some of the embroideries that I did over the last school year that I just forgot to post. The embroidery portraits are from my Intro to Fibers class last fall- the articles of clothing (a t-shirt and a cummerbund, in case you couldn't tell) belonged to each of the subjects. The t-shirt one is of my dad (he was and is so 70s) and the cummerbund is of my late "Grampa" Rose.

The rainbow one from a set of three illustrations from my Illustration II class. We had to have an image illustrating a certain idea and each image had to include a dog, a broom, and a radio tower. This one is "harmony" cause don't they all look so sickeningly happy? I sure wish I were that happy! This was the only embroidered one of the set because embroidery takes "sew" long.

The Great Finals Posting

Just Visual Journalism pages, some of which I edited to put into the book we had to make.

Tarot

Create a tarot card of The Magician using American culture as a theme. What's an American Magician? A con-man, that's what. Frank Abagnale, the subject of the movie "Catch Me if You Can" is who I chose to depict on my tarot card. Done with prismacolor.

It's "Maryland Zoo" not "Baltimore Zoo"

Zooooo poster! It's inspired by 1910s newspapers and periodicals. The background is scanned newsprint but I'm thinking it would be better to cut out the middleman and just actually print it out on newsprint. The concept: Summer of 2010, zoo visitors (primarily children) vote for the "King of the Zoo" and the votes are tallied at the end. I guess the winner would get a crown or something. The drawings are done from multiple references both found online and that I took myself so this is actually what the animals look like-ish.
P.S. I wish I were the lion, it's super cool and knows it's Boss.

Toxoplasma Gondii

Apparently about 50% of the human population has the toxoplasma gondii parasite and it makes men more jealous and women more outgoing. Very cause and effect!

Fattus Rattus!

So I'm making a zine for Illustration 2 and to do it I'm making some stuffed animals and photo-graphing them.
The first one: this fat, buck-toothed, wrinkly mole-rat. It's like revisiting my past because freshman year I made a giant-human sized one using the same materials:

Blade Runner

After being forced to sit through the tedious, long, and annoying 80s movie Blade Runner, our assignment for Dry Media was to do a portrait of one of the characters in pastel. Here is Rachel, she's the only person I've ever seen pull of shoulder pads so well. She also looks like a corpse.

Emergency Snake!!

For my Illustration II class we had to make a poster for something, that was an actual thing, even though the event could be theoretical. I chose to make a poster for Greg the Bear, a band a friend of mine is in, advertising their appearance at this year's Ram Jam music festival(although they weren't actually playing this year, they had played the year before.) Now my teacher kept laughing at the name "Ram Jam" and it took me until today to figure out what was so damn funny and now I'm wondering why the hell the founders of Ram Jam chose such a name, but oh well, it's already named that and all the people that attend it don't seem to mind.

Now as for the poster, it didn't turn out like I had hoped. The teacher said "MORE SNAKE!" since it kind of falls into the background, so now my options for reworking it are to reshoot it and give it a simplified line background or to edit out the tree and replace that with a simplified line drawing. At any rate I generally like the way the text worked out even though it's not as visible as it should be, although when I change the background that's not really going to be an issue anymore.

ScratchArt?!

This is my first post ever, I had been toying with the idea of making a blog for quite some time (since everyone else in the illustration dpt at MICA seems to have one,) and finally have gotten around to making my own. My first post is: scratchboard! We had to illustrate in three panels, a story of one of our classmates being lost. I don't hate scratch board
but it's kind of a pain to scratch into the board and have control over the markmaking. As a process I consider it to be something like reverse-inking. Here it is: a lot of rum, a dock with boats, and "where the fuck am I?"
For Studio Kitchen: Dry Media