Kaly Davis
Exercises and the Like Sometimes taking yourself seriously is just too damn hard. I found the ad image replacement exercise to be a particularly strange and hilarious assignment, so it became my dumping ground for bad cartoon jokes, swearing, and visual puns. ‌ I'm still trying to figure out what Spoon Transference is to this day.
The Avatar Project Our first project of the semester was to create a personal avatar image for the class's group name: Sketchbusters. I decided to pursue it as something of a wordplay to Ghostbusters with the use of the disembodied spirit monster; the pencil it holds, combined with the circular framing, is an additional visual play on the logo of the original. As for the fate of the shrieking human-like form below it, I wanted to leave the "issue" it suffers ambiguous, something of a fill-in-theblank story for the viewer.
The Product Illustration Project I considered our second project, which required a household object of our choice to be rendered in either stippling or crosshatching, to be more of an advanced technical exercise than a conceptual expression. I selected a small ivory bulldog figurine as my subject because it was the closest approximation to something "living" I could find, and brought out the values with harsh spotlighting to help emphasize detail. I feel that stippling (rendered with a .005 black Micron pen) was definitely the way to go for a smoother, more lifelike approximation of the object's fine cream colored surface.
The Ultimate Bedtime Story Project For this project, we had to pick one sentence from a designated inspiration list to give narrative visual context. Having read the line "if you think this is big, you should see the other one" I immediately thought of a tremendous, looming colossus-esque monster, and it snowballed from there into a full blown story drama. I really wanted to capture the enormity of the giant as she closes in on her foolhardy challenger, her tail and stony projections literally breaking past the borders of the image as she crests the rocky hill. Watercolor proved to be a very fitting medium to convey the atmosphere I wanted, with the addition of salting, applied nail polish remover, and touches of white gouache to help boost the more dramatic highlights.
A Walk Through The Forest Project The Forest Walk project was a fascinating visualization exercise, and I surprised even myself with what I witnessed. My forest was a tangle of ancient bamboo stalks, and through the entirety of the journey, I was followed by an enormous, barrel-chested tigerlike entity with teeth like a fu dog and vivid fur the color of a fresh orange smoothie, accented by lemon curd yellow stripes. It was there with me as I encountered a boy of water, which took the form of a small lotus-laced koi pond, and pawed at the water's residents while I dipped my toes in, which is the moment I ultimately portrayed. Yet again, watercolor seemed to be a perfect fit for the delicate effects I was after concerning the water's surface, employing all of the same techniques I'd used in my prior work with a title more refinement and practice. The fish and highlighted pond ripples were brought out with gouache on top of black washes, which I felt produced an acceptable "look" of translucency, and the background was left atmospherically washy so as not to clutter the main figures.
The Matte Painting Project For this project we needed to create an appropriate scene in which to fit some toy or action figure in our possession, and for lack of anything better, I chose a Zekrom (.. a legendary Pokemon) McDonald's toy I'd recently acquired. Being a hardcore Pokemon nerd myself, my first thought was to use the toy as a silhouette and pit it against its canon rival, a white polar-opposite monster called Reshiram. Since the toy itself was very static, I decided to impose a dramatic battle/confrontation image in the background, and though it was somewhat protocol-breaking to diverge from natural media, attempted to render my values digitally instead. It was, at the very least, something to learn from.
The Student Choice Project When I saw that our final project proper would be a student choice, it didn't take me long to figure out exactly what I'd be revisiting. During the narrative illustration assignment some weeks earlier I had doodled a number of possible story concepts for several different subjects and sentences, and short of the colossus I wound up using, there was another idea I couldn't dismiss entirely. Originally based on the phrase "it ended a different way every time", this is just the closing scene of a story about unicorns‌ or rather, a search for them gone horribly wrong. Rather than stumble across the benevolent magical creature, this poor girl has been lured to her doom by a carnivorous doppelganger, thrown to the ground and inevitably moments from becoming part of the menu. Ever since the first project we utilized it, I've fallen back in love with watercolor, so naturally it was the medium of choice, which leant itself brilliantly to the dark atmosphere I wanted. The background is only implied with a bleeding textural wash, and the ground is kept simple with heavy salt application and sparse patches of grass, so as not to detract from the subject at hand. I tried to use a low-to-ground perspective and vertical composition to give the monster a more menacing presence, and while I could have pushed the perspective a little further, I am still immensely satisfied. As usual, I applied various techniques to give different elements texture and partnered the medium with a cheap white gouache to reinforce the glow of the moonlit areas.
Extra Process Work (Thumbnails) This would be a favorite thumbnail collection of mine from the UBS project, which would also be used at a later point in my last assignment.
Thumbnails Continued These are the collected thumbnails from my forest walk exercise, which turned alarmingly tiger-centric in subject matter. I was more fascinated by that monster than the whole of the scenery by the end of it, and I think it showed in this collection of scribbles.
Fin~