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Screen Printing, stencils

22 March 2011

I attended my first class with Nicole Cipriano (Cipriano Designs) tonight at her studio in St John’s. She has a really great space for creating screen-printed leather handbags, wallets, and belts — and it’s a nice, intimate setting for her screen printing classes. Her dog, Chico, spent the evening napping in a small ball in the corner.

We worked with stencils this evening: we drew our designs, traced them to mylar sheeting, and cut them with exacto knives. Nicole helped us prepare our screens and we were able to have a few goes!

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Organic blogging

13 March 2011

I also wanted to quickly post an illustration I made for Tidal Labs (NYC) this week. They’re a marketing firm that helps companies by encouraging bloggers to write about trusted products and then packaging the articles onto custom made websites. This illustration was to reinforce the idea of better quality products (marketing) coming from local, individual organic farms (bloggers) rather than the low-quality, high output that comes from factory farms (advertising by traditional means like radio, tv, print advertisements, etc).

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Last day of Word + Image

13 March 2011

Today was my last day in Kurt Holloman’s Word + Image class. Throughout, he has pushed us to experiment with our illustrations, adding typography, brush strokes, and other unrelated design elements to our practice work. His instruction has really reinforced my attitude of organized destruction in my drawing; I like the idea of destroying something in order to create something else that’s better. *

Our life model was Katherine and I loved drawing a model that was clothed! I’ve grown tired of smalls of backs and soft shading of buttocks.

* Plus, ‘experiments’ can cover up maladroit technique and nefarious rules of realism.

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Restless at life drawing

24 February 2011

Last night at PNCA’s life drawing there was a great model, but I was just feeling so impatient. Perhaps it’s being detailed all day long on the computer that makes me want to just draw squiggles. For the last two poses I decided to just draw the other artists; their hunched postures during the intense 25-minute sessions and their colorful, stripey clothes felt more interesting than the minute shading on the model’s lower back. I have been experimenting with drawing in this old book of sheet music.