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PROCESSES AND IDEAS in the ILLUSTRATION PRACTICE MFA at MARYLAND INSTITUTE COLLEGE OF ART 2014-2015
IMAGE HARVEST 6 BOOKBINDING 10
PAPER ENGINEERING 14 LASER CUTTING 18 LETTERPRESS 22
BOOK PROJECT 24 ART MARKET 30
WORDS ON WHEELS 34 STOP MOTION 40 PATTERN 44
HANDLETTERING 48 SELF DIRECTED 54
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EST IM A G E H A R V Image Harvest was confusing at first, but ultimately the most important exercise of the year. I was used to describing my work on the surface- “it’s flat, graphic, dark, etc,” but I had never dug deeper to figure out what I gravitate towards and why I feel an attraction to certain imagery. Ten sketches were hard. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to sketch, whether the assignment should have a commercial application, or whether it should come from a purely personal space. I’m happy with my final piece for the assignment, but looking back, I still think some of the ideas were more interesting, or original. Working strictly in illustrator was kind of liberating; I kind of gave up on trying to render forms digitally and worked flatter than I ever had before. I relied a lot on line, which just makes more sense to me. Before coming here I really tried to stay away from line, because I didn’t want my work to look “cartoony.”
I don’t know why I thought that, but working with line the way I do now feels very natural, and I can feel my drawing skills improve pretty rapidly. I was also asked to design the signage and marquee wall for the image harvest exhibition. The first two weeks of school were very busy with designing the gallery stuff, doing the sketches and finish for the assignment, printing, framing, and hanging. I think my participation in the show was really important for a few reasons: it forced me to move fast, make decisions, and trust my gut, and I think the resulting marquee and signs looked really nice. I’m really proud of them. It also forced me tget involved with the MFA ILP class. I tend to keep to myself but working with so many people in those first two weeks was really crucial, it made me feel welcome, and like I belonged in the program.
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Top: The color sketch for Animal
Alphabet. Other sketches, below, were rejected but are still worth
revisiting. Many of their concepts come back in later pieces:
themes of struggle, interesting
juxtapositions, and letters are all
present in work from this year.
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The original marquee design
The final, edited design in the Lazarus Gallery
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BO OK BIN DIN G
This was the first workshop and reaction piece. I wasn’t sure how successful my piece would be. I don’t consider myself a great craftsman: I’m generally extremely messy, and working with such precision is a little nerve-wracking. With assignments like this, I tend to hold back, so as to not damage the craft. The resulting work usually looks a little boring, or like I didn’t try hard enough. I originally started doing this beautiful comic thing, with graphite drawings in the example book we bound in class. I messed up the first drawing and couldn’t erase it. I threw the whole thing in the trash and completely started over with a new idea. I’m really happy with the zine I made for this, for a couple reasons. I realized that I should be making work that I want to make, not work that I think will fit the assignment best. Once I started trusting my voice, I think my work really became much stronger. I also decided to take what I learned from the project and make it applicable to my interests. I’ve always been into combining my own writing with imagery, making zines, so I researched some more bookbinding techniques to make this zine for the assignment.
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PAPER ENGINEERING
This was definitely my least favorite project of
the year. The crafting side of this is really difficult for me. I
couldn’t follow the workshop, and I really didn’t know what
to do for the reaction piece. I wasn’t interested in intricately cutting or folding any paper, but I also don’t think that type of work fits with what I’ve been doing. Coming up with a
concept took forever, and I think my final idea was strong, but I don’t think the execution is so great. This workshop kind of solidified some of my reasons for staying away
from more crafty projects: I really do not like wrestling with the medium, and I’m just too clumsy to handle anything
super intricate or delicate. I’m fine with this, however. This helped me narrow my scope; there are so many things I’m interested in, so many projects I want to do, that it’s good
to just cross something off that list. It helps focus my vision and strengthen my portfolio.
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Conceptually, I think this project was interesting, but I still think it needs revisiting. I chose three historically
censored, banned, or challenged books, and did jacket artwork for them. I cut an innocuous icon into a solid black dust jacket, which I wrapped around the cover designs. At first, you would only see these icons,
but removing the dust jacket would reveal the more
startling imagery underneath. I also experimented with pattern, for the endpapers.
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LASER CUTTER
I thought this reaction piece was not going to
work well, for the same reasons that the paper engineering
assignment didn’t work well. Even though I personally didn’t have to cut the paper, I didn’t know what exactly to make. I wasn’t sure how to fit the precise intricacies of laser cut art
into my portfolio. I took a step back, looked over the mistakes I made with the paper engineering reaction, and tried to use
this tool to my advantage. Overall, I think I made three really strong posters, and I had a lot of fun doing them. With this
assignment, I embraced the happy accidents instead of trying to minimize them, and the end result was strong. I used a similar process during for my stop motion assignment.
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The process for these posters was pretty interesting. First, I did a vector drawing of the final artwork.
Then, I laser-cut the drawing into black paper.
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In a dark room, I projected colored light
through the negative space in the paper.
I photographed the resulting shadows that were cast on the walls.
Finally, I cleaned up and finished the posters in Photoshop.
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LETTERPRESS
This was a really inspiring, fun, exciting workshop.
The trip to BPS made me start considering bringing a
handmade element back into my mostly digital work. I
think the letterpress and screenprinting process itself is
really beautiful, and that all the tiny imperfections in the ink and paper can make a huge difference in the final piece. I thought my cards looked great, and I ordered a rubber
stamp to put my contact info on the back, so I could use
the letterpress cards as a promo. this also led me to think
more about packaging, and using new processes to make my work stand out.
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I was a little apprehensive about this project,
because I had never done any work for a young audience, and I was honestly never too interested in picture books.
However, the irreverent text made this project easier to jump into, and now I consider it one of my strongest pieces of the
year. It was definitely a breakthrough for me. A couple things I had been toying with until this point really came together during this project.
I decided to use the heavy vector outlines I used
during image harvest, to simplify forms and objects. Then I printed those outlines on newsprint, scanned them into
Photoshop, and blew them up. This allowed for a distressedyet-legible line, that I then colored underneath. I tried to embrace the happy accidents that came from textures
and imperfections in the printings. To further this effect, I intentionally mis-registered the color layers beneath the
outlines. Then I bitmapped the whole image and overlaid it
onto a duplicate color fill. I was inspired by some of the old comics and posters we saw on our field trip to the Geppi
Museum, so for my presentation, I printed them to scale on
newsprint, which made the whole project feel very intentional and considered, despite its “bad comic book� aesthetic.
I think I handled the humous aspect of this
assignment well, but I don’t think I want to focus too much on making humorous illustrations anymore.
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Beginning thumbnails are rough, loose, and fast. I try
to get as many ideas onto the paper as possible. Free association writing is helpful at this stage.
The best thumbnails move to finished sketches.
Feedback from the sketch is applied, and a
finished vector drawing is done in Adobe Illustrator
The vector drawing is scaled down, printed on newsprint, and scanned back into Photoshop.
From here, the print is scaled up, the contrast is
intensified, and the print is colored. At this point, I can embrace happy accidents like misregistration weird colors, and the illustration is finished. 28
The finished illustration.
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ART MARKET
I’m happy with the end result of this project, but
I would like to completely redo it anyway. I was trying too hard, at first, to make something that would just sell well
at the market. I think the final poster I made looks fine, but it just doesn’t feel personal enough. I liked figuring out the
logistics of making something to produce and sell, and I also liked working the booth. Making the poster itself was a total
nightmare, though, because of a lot of dumb mistakes I made. I took shortcuts in the preliminary steps that created so many more problems further on in the process. I lost a lot of money by wasting materials, and made such a headache for myself that could have been avoided if I had just done things right
the first time. I was too concerned with making something that people would buy, instead of making something that I was
proud of and that I wanted to sell. However, this was a good learning experience.
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THE SKETCHBOOK PROJECT
This was a really cool opportunity, and I’m glad to
have participated in it. Seeing my drawings interact with my classmates was really interesting, and the finished books
were diverse and surprising to page through. This was the
first project where I realized that my personal voice should
be stronger. The first couple spreads I did were really bad. I
was trying to draw weird things that didn’t make sense to me. After the first month, I was embarrassed about how bad my drawings were compared to my classmates’. I realized that
my drawings for The Sketchbook Project looked nothing like
my actual sketchbooks, so I decided to just draw what comes naturally to me. After that, I think my work in these books
improved dramatically. It definitely reinforced the idea that
doing work that is interesting to me will always look better than
doing work that I think people will like. I’m really happy with my last few spreads.
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SPR 36
RING 37
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Typical pages of brainstorming for
thumbnails and concepts. Sometimes
ideas come quickly, but other times I’ll go through many pages like this.
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This was a fun assignment to work on. I like illustrating for text, and while working outside the comfort zone is great experience, sometimes its nice to work in a
way that feels comfortable and natural. These were fairly straightforward illustrations, and I used this project to further refine my technique of scaling down, blowing up, and coloring vector shapes to make a more distressed and original-feeling illustration. That’s not to say I didn’t learn anything from this assignment. On the contrary, I actually learned a lot, and I think this was a pretty important project for me.
We had to illustrate two poems. One of mine was pretty straightforward, and my sketches were pretty resolved. The other poem, “Heroes,” was really hard to come up with ideas. My sketches were bland and uninspired. I think I was trying too hard to make something that would use the core idea of the poem to appeal to everyone in the audience. I had to do another round of sketches, which helped me realize that the best work should feel personal to me. I’m
really happy with both of my finished illustrations, and even though only one was chosen to run, I think they both are pretty successful. It was also important to learn the nuts and bolts of InDesign, too. .
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STOP MOTION
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I had experimented with stop motion in the past, with mixed-to-poor results, so I approached this assignment pretty cautiously. I wanted to make something kind of dark, and I wanted to experiment with found objects. I also didn’t want a straightforward linear narrative, and I wanted to explore light and silhouette, so I made this creepy movie with little vignettes of backlit found objects. Once I started actually making the movie, I was really excited, and working on this project was pretty fun. I don’t think I see myself going further into animation, though. I think simple moving gifs is as far as I want to go right now. Not because I don’t like animation, but just because I already feel like I have too broad a range of interests, and I’m trying to narrow my vision a little more. I could definitely see myself doing more work like this on the side, though, just for fun.
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Food Poisoning 49
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McDonalds
Pattern was an interesting assignment. I work
with a lot of icons and simple images, so I thought I’d be good at making patterns. Often times, when
I’m working on an illustration, I find myself thinking
these elements would look nice as a pattern. This was deceptively hard, though. It was hard to realize when
the pattern was finished. I always felt like I wasn’t doing enough work, even though I spent a pretty long time on
each pattern. I guess it was hard to let go of conceptual restrictions I place on myself and make something that is just purely decorative. .
Public Bathroom
Medical Waste
Cystic Acne 51
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FACULTY SWAP: HANDLETTERING
This was one of my favorite projects. Letters are
easily my favorite thing to draw, and I’ve been drawing
letters long before I ever started drawing anything else.
The hardest thing about this assignment was the deadline: three type specimen sheets in three days seemed pretty unrealistic, but I am very proud that I both met the
assignment, and made some work that I think is really
strong. I used a Cintiq to hand-draw one alphabet, which
was good to learn. seeing my natural hand come back into a finished piece was interesting, but I don’t think I want to
pursue this. I like the control and craft of a vector line much more. With this project, I didn’t want to just use objects
to make the shape of the letter. I really wanted to take the
existing armature of a letter, and really bend and distort it, almost to the point of illegibility. I felt very at-home doing this assignment, and I really want to bring more lettering
into my work. I just don’t know how? My lettering work and
my illustration work feel very separate to me right now, and I want to figure out how to join them. .
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These pieces were fairly resolved by
sketch stage, so I was able to quickly move to the final artwork.
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SELF DIRECTED: “PINK” NEWSPAPER ZINE
tThis was easily my favorite project of the year. I
was able to take all the lessons I learned over the course
of the year and condense them into one cohesive project that felt true to my interests. I am really happy with the
images I made for this assignment, and I can’t wait to make more work like this. I gained a lot of confidence in myself
and my work throughout the year, and I think it shows here the strongest. The dark, unsettling tone of this project is
definitely what I want to pursue in my later work, and it’s interesting to look back at some of the Image Harvest
sketches and see themes, like interesting juxtapositions and struggle, that manifested themselves in this project. I have wanted to make this zine for a long time, and I think this is the best example I have of combining my images with text I wrote.
I’ve been really speeding my process up in the last
couple years. Each one of these illustrations didn’t take
too long. While I don’t want my work to look rushed, I think
I work best with short deadlines, and I think I benefit greatly from making a large volume of work in a short amount of time. .
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The vector image (right) and the final illustration (left) after scaling down,
printing, and scaling the image back up. Nothing changes compositionally, but
the image looks much different. I tried to be bold and unconventional with color when I worked on this project
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Thumbnails for this project were a lot looser and came from a much more persoanal place. Some of the final illustrations didn’t even need thumbnails, but other images required more brainstorming. I tried to get as many ideas on the page as possible.
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The cover (top) and an example
spread (bottom.) I wanted the layout to be as sparse as possible, to
completment the quiet the tone of the stories and illustrations
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