Queen Crafter

For Portraits we had to do a portrait of a public figure using objects relating to them. This is Carol Duvall, the woman I learned needle felting from via television (The Carol Duvall Show.) I used thread, embroidery floss, fabric, buttons, and a zipper on top of a ground of gouache and acrylic. It could use more buttons/hair to make it complete, but for now it's done. Sorry for the Snot, Craft Queen!

MLK

In-class color portraits- colored pencil, each took about one hour. Imagine Martin Luther King Jr. with dreads and I think this is what you would get.

Dragonslayer

So we had to do a fashion piece based on a recent movie or movie that hasn't come out yet, and I was assigned Dragonslayer, a documentary style movie about broke-ass punks who skateboard in abandoned swimming pools and whatnot. Pretty much what I got from the previews was a bunch of young people who skateboarded and did drugs and talked crap about how the government was bringing them down or something, and overall the whole feel of the preview to me was pretty sparse and bleak. And so, my piece is sparse and bleak, which pretty much expresses my feelings about the film to a T.

Bionic

My senior thesis that I am working on is designing, making, and creating packaging/promotional work for a line of stuffed animals, the theme of which is "Bionic Body Parts." So in other words, I'm making robot organs! They are made out of different kinds of vinyl and pleather, with the features embroidered on. The ears stick together with magnets which I think are the most fun thing ever, so in future organs you'll be seeing a lot of that! These are the four I've documented. They are tentatively named: Metal Heart, Billy the Kidney, the Siamese Ears, and Shutter Eye.

More Paper Dolls

There's only one more after this, and then the semester is done...
I've only done two dolls per week for the last three assignments since I've been so busy, but I prefer dressing two dolls to dressing one and accessorizing two others, so there!

It's business, it's business ti~iimme

Heyo, these are the starting point for my business cards. I only ordered 25, for my presentation in Professional Development, because sometime within the next couple months I will be purchasing a domain name and will have my own professional artist's email. For now, I'm still at my micamail and using the basic Cargo Collective website. The dog and lettering are both hand-embroidered.

October

This assignment involved doing a 10x10 calendar illustration, and the month I got was ~October~, definitely one of my favorite months. It's not excessively Halloweeny since we were told to avoid holiday cliches so I made it in the spirit of fall, with creepy hand-leaves that aren't actually creepy at all...

Fluffy Floofy

I'm working on integrating my 3D work into a 2D format, cause drawing ain't my best thing. So here's my first/second stab at it: Some fluffy monsters wearing sunglasses, for an assignment in Lifestyles where we were working to incorporate photographed accessories with out illustration styles. I like where it's going but it's not quite there yet; in the future I think I'm going to try working with dioramas more than digital collage.

More Paper Dolls

For some reason I can now once again access my blog! Here are more weeks of paper dolls, courtesy of Lifestyle Illustration. You might notice that in the Halloween edition, my main-man-model is wearing ladyclothes. This is because Yandy.com is sorely lacking sexy fruit costumes for men! And they said it would be the new big thing. Clearly they didn't think it through!

Papier Dolles

For Lifestyle Illustration we had to draw three different models to dress every week- here are my models, and the first week's dressings. The clothes were from someplacesomewhere~

For a class I took of which I do not know the name, we got to pick our assignment- basically take something not made-up, and do 5 illustrations about it. Since I'm on the internet all the time I read a lot of articles and lists about interesting things, and one that I came across was online dating. No, not match.com, but something a tad more interesting. I can't really vouch for the legitimacy of any of these websites but I can for sure say it is funny as hell that they even exist. I give you: strange online dating. I picked some of the ones I found most amusing and made some stuffed thingies, which I then turned into sort of ads or posters.

Hand-Lettering Final

This is my final project for my Hand-lettering course- we could do basically whatever we wanted (preferably something involving a brand) as long as we did the text by hand. I had absolutely no idea what to do since the assignment was incredibly vague so I spent a good deal of the semester flailing around, mentally, until my time was dwindling to the last months and I settled on Forever 21, the store where I spend all of my money. I designed some tags for their different clothing lines and a new bag design. It doesn't seem like much work for one semester...we only had 3 minor assignments, but I guess in Germany that's how they roll.

"Er"

For my first German blog post: ER. Done for my Kalligrafie (aka hand lettering course), we were to come up with five potential new book covers for Franz Kafka's "Er." What is Er about? I'll never know, cause I looked and couldn't find anything, and I can't read German. But here are 4 of my covers.

Smocking

If there was one thing I learned during Explored Stitch with Mary, (actually I learned a lot) it was that I loooooove smocking; smocking is when fabric is pleated and then embroidered on top of to create elasticity without elastic. The modern, industrial equivalent is pleating the fabric then sewing elastic onto the pleats.
For my final assignment I decided to take smocking, which historically was used on clothing, and use it to sculpt a form, rather than letting the smocking conform to a body. I used linen (the fabric of choice for a serf's smock) and created a giraffe.

Another Portrait

In case you were wondering what my mom looked like in the 90's when she still had that perm, this is it!
This was a piece based off the idea of the traditional Victorian Sampler for Explored Stitch, and since we had learned so many different stitches I was thinking that they were a lot like an alphabet and made a code. Then I took a sketch I had done, gridded it out, and made it into a phrase using the code I had made.

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.