Christina's Sketchblog

invitations sneak peak

2011-04-15T14:39:00.000-07:00

Here's a sneak peek at the wedding invitations I designed and printed over at my internship. I'm pretty happy with how they came out. I love the look of letterpress.

And here's the press they were printed on. This baby is an antique (dated 1926), but great. Kelly of Paper Stories was super amazing and helped me to print- not to mention letting me use her press in the first place!

They were a lot of work.. and I'm not quite done yet. I'm waiting for patterned paper to arrive so I can make envelope liners, as well as two flat printed cards that also go with the set. There is lots of cutting and gluing in my future.

Crochet!

2010-11-12T22:02:00.001-08:00

I've been getting into crocheting lately, it's a very calming activity. I've been working on a scarf, but recently I've been seeing a lot of these crocheted dolls and animals- called "amigurumi," which means "crocheted doll" in Japanese- it seems like there's a huge movement for crocheted cute things there, which has spread here. I started noticing them I think at ACen 09, but I really noticed them at ACen10. I'm a sucker for cute things, so I decided to try making one myself.

So here is a baby chick! I marathoned this today.

Look, he has a little tail!

Definitely learned a lot about crocheting doing this. It actually helped me learn the basics more than the scarf I'm currently working on (I did most of that backwards, oops), but I think he came out cute for a first try. I definitely want to try making more! Including Sackboy from LittleBigPlanet.

Letterpress notecards

2010-11-08T15:23:00.000-08:00

I am currently interning at a local design and letterpress studio (run by basically the nicest person ever), which is a lot of fun. To learn how to use the press, I was able to design and print custom notecards. I got to experiment with different weights and textures of paper, along with trying to align plates and mix colors. Getting colors right on a letterpress is a lot harder than just mixing them together with a paintbrush. Definitely learned a lot though!

Halloweentime!

2010-10-15T21:49:00.000-07:00

It's almost that time. We always get a ton of kids for Halloween, because the farmers get a flatbed trailer, line it with lights, and round up all the farm kids and drive them to the neighborhoods. So we'll get 40 kids at a time. It's an adventure!

valentine

2010-10-08T21:24:00.000-07:00

I might be four months early. Though to be fair I am contemplating possible illustrative styles for my save-the-dates. I'd like to do cute illustrations without them feeling too forced.

sketches and patterns

2010-10-04T13:07:00.000-07:00

Just some random things from my sketchbook.

I love Iron Chef. Battle Truffle!

Illustrated based on a poem someone I know wrote.

Hanging out with a dear friend watching Where the Wild Things Are.

Pattern!

Options

2010-08-07T19:46:00.000-07:00

Half a year ago I had no idea of the various wedding "silhouettes". I know differently now.

Hearts & Tetris

2010-08-04T20:18:00.000-07:00

Odd face, odd, vaguely Alice-inspired character, and tetriminos. Otherwise known as Tetris blocks. I love Tetris.

Inspired by some fabric I saw in the basement of the woman who owns Southern Pursenality. I don't think the particular swatch is on the website, but she makes amazing purses.

Cupcake adventures

2010-08-03T21:08:00.000-07:00

No new sketches today, but I did make cupcakes!

I've been meaning to be in the kitchen more often, but I usually don't get a chance to- my Mom rules there. But I found a box of funfetti cake mix in the store and I swear it called to me. Funfetti is kind of magical.

I also found food coloring. And sprinkles. I decided to make some pink and blue frosting and see what happened when I smeared it together. My workstation that probably doesn't make any sense at all.

Cupcakes en route to small children! (aka my 8 year old nephew and 6 year old niece.) I need a better camera.
Baking lessons learned: Don't overfill cupcake liners, or you wind up with weird mushroom cupcakes.

Superhero Princesses

2010-08-02T20:34:00.000-07:00

Presenting Superhero Princesses! Wonder Snow White, Aquamaid, Sleeping Bat Beauty, Teenage Mutant Ninja Jasmine, Super Alice, and Wolverine Belle are ready to take you down, evildoers of the world.

Rydia

2010-08-01T18:28:00.000-07:00

Another fun, quick photoshop sketch today. I was listening to the Final Fantasy IV soundtrack and so here is Rydia, who was always my favorite character from that game. FFIV came out in 1991, and my cousins and I basically grew up with it. I swear the stars are part of her design.

Alice

2010-07-31T17:15:00.000-07:00

I just realized I never introduced you all to Alice.

Meet Alice.

Based upon my own redesign of the main character from the original Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland novel, Alice stands at about 8" high and is made from a conglomeration of things.

Look! She even has striped socks and mary jane's!

Alice was a part of John Hendrix's Narrative Sketchbook class. We had to redesign a character from a given list, and after we had created the character, we had to recreate our design out of Sculpey (+various other materials). The trick was, we didn't know ahead of time we would be translating our characters into the third dimension. It was tricky, but fun!

The original character sheet that I made, pre-3D. Essentially my "blueprint."

Also, her arms are opposable! And her little dangly hair curls.

Valkyrie

2010-07-30T18:05:00.000-07:00

I spontaneously felt like doing a digital painting/sketch today. This is a quickish portrait of the valkyrie Gwendolyn of the game Odin Sphere. (The art for that game is pretty fantastic, by the way. You can check some of it out here.) Normally I start with a line sketch, but for this I focused on blocking out big sections of color instead. I wound up having a lot of fun with this, it got my brain thinking in different ways.

Flowers, Lake, and a Groomba

2010-07-29T09:47:00.000-07:00

Another spread from my sketchbook. Silly grooms cake ideas and orchids. I think this was also part of an assignment, what foods did I eat over spring break, but I always wanted to eat my food, not draw it... so I usually drew what was on the table, or what I didn't eat.

I have returned from vacation, so here is a photo I took while in Minnesota! There is a beaver dam somewhere back there. I love this lake.

hello tangles

2010-07-15T18:07:00.000-07:00

Another sketchbook spread. Stringy tangly hair is fun to doodle.

friends and cupcakes

2010-07-14T10:04:00.000-07:00

Some more spreads from my sketchbook. Two awesome people from my undergrad studio (plus notes and reflections about studio... and printer hate) and some toxic looking cupcakes.

Fishies!

2010-07-13T11:08:00.000-07:00

A spread from my sketchbook. I love fish!

Going to Canada soon, so I hope to have some sketches from that trip!

thesis is over; now I need a new life goal

2010-04-15T09:24:00.000-07:00

I am officially done with my senior seminar thesis presentation!

Well, except for the two additional copies of the book I have to make. But that's all right.

The above image is one of the spots from my book, from the story Cinderella. It's actually an important part of the original fairytale!

But essentially the seminar project has been the reason why I haven't been able to post much of anything. But now that that's over.. more art will be posted!

Rapunzel Rapunzel let down your hair...

2010-02-14T12:56:00.000-08:00

The first of one of my images for my senior thesis project. The colors, especially the lilac background came out so dingy in the scan, I'll keep having to mess with them in photoshop.

Anyway, I'm going to be illustrating six tales from an anthology of The Brothers' Grimm fairytales. So this is Rapunzel and her long, long hair spilling down from the tower. This media is very very new to me, so there is definitely a bit of a learning curve. I like the textures and the unpredictability of painting with real paint, but I definitely need to keep practicing.

I'll keep trying to post, but I have 11 more pictures to finish by April 2! So back to work for now.

copics and things

2010-01-05T20:58:00.001-08:00

I got some copic markers for Christmas, so I needed to play with them... I only have about 16 right now, cause the bigger set I got wasn't the sketch... so I don't have any gray right now, so there is some shading missing still. These are my friends' and my Ragnarok Online characters. (Mine is the green haired one.) The little emotes are from the game...

Various sketches trying to see how the miller girl from Rumpelstiltzkin might look... and pumpkins. Pumpkins are fun.

My friend requested a purple kitty with copics...

Another friend I haven't seen in a year or two with a stuffed horse that has epic legs. Epic legs terrify said friend, though she is not terrified here...

decade in reflection

2010-01-03T16:47:00.000-08:00

Art decade memes are big right now. I found this one on deviantart... it starts at 2003, but that's fine with me, I don't have much art older than that and it's... well, it's better stuffed in the back of the closet anyway. 2009 was really hard for me to find pictures for, especially for the last 4 months or so, because the way I was drawing was changing every 2-3 weeks. I'm still in an epic transitional period.

Ugh, the old stuff is so hard to look at... shiny kawaii anime eye desu!! I've gotten over it, I promise.

I still have a lot of improvement to make, let's go 2010!

muse of music?

2009-12-30T22:26:00.000-08:00

I was at a friend's, who was showing off some awesome music he had written, and that made me pull out my sketchbook, since music tends to make me want to draw. And since the book was out, my friends made some requests...

My friend Katie asked for a fairy...

This is just what came to mind listening to my friend Brennan's song. It made me think of running and the wind... also of rain, but I didn't put that in.

I doodled this one today. Does anyone else feel like this when they can't seem to draw anything?

I've found that if I feel down, drawing it helps. You should try it too.

I have more doodles from the past week or two, it's been my goal to draw something every day during winter break. I'll try to put some more up soon.

doodles

2009-12-17T21:40:00.001-08:00

Finally at home for winter break. Was hanging out with my brother's kids, and my niece Rachael (who is five) and I decided to draw each other. She was so enamored that I included the flowers on her dress that she insisted on giving me a huge flower on my shirt.

Rumpelstiltzkin

2009-12-13T08:16:00.000-08:00

Studio is finally over for this semester. While frustrating (plus the fact I didn't make a lot of "final" art), I learned a lot.

For now, I leave you with my design for the character Rumpelstiltzkin. If you haven't read the Brothers' Grimm version, you might want to take a look. It's pretty interesting (and creepy!)

astronaut!

2009-11-07T18:38:00.000-08:00

I forgot to add this little guy to my last post! He was drawn in the same vein as the exploration of the cartoon characters, but this guy was probably my favorite of that set... just because you can look at him and know exactly what his deal is. He's going to go save the world somewhere by zapping you with little green lasers.

Visual Language Process

2009-11-06T13:13:00.000-08:00

Currently I'm in a class called Visual Worlds: Image Development for Illustrators and Cartoonists. Which essentially is a class to help you discover what your visual signature is. At the end of my junior year, I felt really lost as to what my art would look like, so this seemed like the most ideal class to take.

I really had no idea what I was getting into.

The class is broken up into three sections. The first was the professor becoming familiar with our work and assigning different projects, including reportage, cartooning, and a storyboard project, to see how we would tackle these projects so he could get familiar with our work.

The first project, which is actually a series of three images, documenting people at the local mall here in St. Louis...

The cartooning project, where we were given words like "robot" and "lizard" and had to interpret them as simply as possible...

A single frame of a storyboard/animatic about a girl who steals and eats a pie.

After this initial phase, we were given the infamous 100 Figures project, where we were given approximately two and a half days to draw 100 figures, each on an 11 x 14 piece of paper. The assignment details can be found here.

I put a cap on myself, not allowing myself to go past 10 (or at times, even 5) minutes per character, so I could actually finish on time. The following two figures were two images that I created from that project.

After this, the class was split into two groups- illustrators and cartoonists. I was put in the cartoonist group, even though my stuff was kind of dancing through the entire spectrum of illustration and cartoons.

A lot of emphasis was put on what is uniquely ours and trying to find out how we work best. Now, I'm really used to and comfortable with an 'anime' style (that label really bothers me, because there are tons of different styles in under that umbrella term- everything from Studio Gainax to Miyazaki (studio Ghibli) to CLAMP. But, that is a different story.)

Anyway, my critique for the 100 figures assignment (we literally pinned up all 100 images) went... interestingly, to say the least. Basically, I was told I was all over the spectrum, and a stick figure I drew was pulled out and pointed to the best one. Alot of the stuff up there was 'anime', because when you're making 100 figures in that short a time you freak out and do what you're used to. This really discouraged me, because I felt like I was spending an obscene amount of money and time to be at an art school just to draw stick figures.

After another meeting with the instructor, we settled on going on a cartoon route, trying a lot of things I had never done before.

I was used to drawing things like this...

And was trying new things like this with watercolor... (yay costume design class!)
And suddenly am trying super bug-eyed things like this.

I liked them well enough.. some of them, at least the ones I posted here. I did about 70-80 of these and inked 10 with a brush pen. The following figure was one the professor and class really liked that I actually do not like much at all. I was told to create a world based in this visual language with 5 characters. The instructor thought my style might be in the realm of licensed imagery. I was willing to give it a shot.
When I started to... I was just physically unable to. I tried drawing the bug-eyed characters, but it drove me crazy. You can see a few attempts to here... and I wound up defaulting to my archer character there on the left.
The more and more I tried to draw those cartoons, the more and more I drew even more realisticly.. this page came out of me really trying to make the cartoons!

I tried to make a cartoon little red riding hood character and that failed too... I wound up making the French anime-ish character in the lower right... by this time, I had only two days to create the 5 characters and a world for them, so I jumped on it and went for it.

I went with girl stereotypes.. I had a French girl, Catholic schoolgirl, a Japanese girl in a summer yukata, etc...
But this was still not what I was really supposed to be doing! She didn't look anything like the curvy, shapely girl above. My instructor looked at the more realistic faces and told me to make more things like that....

So I tried the 25 expression challenge that was floating around on deviantArt sometime last year.. and actually had a lot of fun with it.
my 'WTF' face. But when I posted the pictures for this, the critique was barely about the work on the wall but how I'm going in circles, see-sawing back and forth and not making a decision as to what my things look like. The metaphor used was that I was at the high dive, but kept looking down instead of jumping. At this point I'm still searching for what my stuff will be, but I'm going to have to pick something and really try to invest in it. I spoke with an additional professor today, one who I hadn't worked with this semester yet, which helped give an outside perspective to this situation. Personally, I feel I'm somewhere in between illustration and cartooning, but more on the cartooning side. Illustration is more about informing and cartooning is about abstraction and entertainment... which is really where I fall, I think.

An additional metaphor my professor for this class used was an old school radio.. where you have to tune to try to get the station, but you go back and forth until you nail it. I think I'm still in that tuning phase, but hopefully I'm narrowing it down a little bit.

turkeys and thorns

2009-10-15T11:29:00.000-07:00

Two spot illustrations for my Illustrated Texts class. These two are meant to accompany the short story The Turkey by Flannery O'Connor. O'Connor was a southern gothic writer who lived in the predominately Protestant south in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and often reflected on her Catholic faith as well as issues of morality and ethics.

Gestures

2009-09-21T19:11:00.000-07:00

Gesture drawings! Going to do this 10 or so minutes every day. Yay practice!

Keep bleedin' love

2009-09-10T11:57:00.000-07:00

Keep bleeding/Keep, keep bleeding/Keep bleeding love.

Sugar Bombs!

2009-09-03T11:49:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the long pause in updates, school at Columbia picked, up, and then I was whisked off to a magical land called Canada. (which was cold for the summer! brr!)

Senior year started off in a whirlwind of projects, and I'm really excited about this coming year. There are a lot of projects, both in and out of studio, that are upcoming. For now, another project from Columbia.

At Columbia we had to create a fake cereal ad. I decided to create Sugar Bombs, the cereal for sugar addicted little kids. This was another experiment with gouache and fluid acrylic. Sorry for the quality, I had to take a photo, since I had no access to a scanner at home.

8-bit?

2009-06-20T19:49:00.000-07:00

I'm going to Columbia College Chicago for the summer, and I'm sort of treating it as a mini-study abroad (even though Chicago is basically in my backyard). It'll be nice to bring new experiences to studio when I start back up again in the fall.

One of my classes is 'Applied Drawing'... which is basically a drafting class, lots of paralinear and perspective drawings. One assignment was to create a "future city"... which could basically be a city that didn't exist, and we were to create it in perspective. I was having trouble thinking of ideas, and my instructor just said to go with what we were interested in.

So of course, this is what happened.

Super Mario "city"! Ahaha.. ha.

(sorry for the low quality of the picture, I had to take a photo of it- it's pretty large, and I don't have a big enough scanner at home!)

2009-05-13T23:07:00.000-07:00

Drew this while at ACen. Saber Lily, from Fate/Unlimited Codes! Ross thought I should color this, so I spent the better part of today working on it. Have to get all the anime out of my system before the fall semester stomps it all out of me by force.

2009-05-03T16:07:00.000-07:00

Decided to update my blog in my procrastination for my upcoming final exam. My final for color systems... basically where the sketches from the last post ended up. Sorry about the watermark, I feel like a loser putting it up, but I've heard way too many horror stories about art theft, so better safe, right? And oh my gosh they look so different when I'm not staring at a 200% 600 DPI version of these things. Easily some of the biggest files I've worked on. 1GB per picture? what is this.

Anyway, the focus was a study on atmospheric color as it pertains to mood and emotion. I wanted the color to do most of the work, so that's why there are no props and a 'psychological background.' Aka pretty texture. There are parts of all three that are working, and parts that are not, but it was a really good exercise for me, I learned a lot, and it was fun! Many thanks to Louise for letting me take crazy ref photos for the poses.

Summer is coming up, and that means ACen! I'll (hopefully) have buttons, definitely bookmarks, and we'll see what I can do in the realm of prints. Come say hello! After that, I'll be studying at Columbia College Chicago a few days a week while working on a lot of personal art. Which means more updates. College really takes it out of you. Though I have more direction now of where I want to go. Which always raises more questions, but progress is always good.

2009-04-16T13:56:00.001-07:00

Some preliminary brainstorming for my color systems class. My final project is going to involve atmospheric lighting as mood and emotion, and I'm exploring that concept and how to effectively use it in a set of illustrations. I'm still coming up with a character, at this point I'm letting my pencil hit paper and just letting what comes out come out, so everything is very unrefined at this point. It's strange to say while being in art school, but I really miss drawing! I'm looking forward to working on these.

2009-03-06T08:52:00.000-08:00

My friends Laina and Coral have been doing a comic strip of their day, for each hour they're awake, so I decided to try it myself. Sorry I'm so boring, haha! (Go look at theirs, they're much better. :) ) It's all scribbly.. I might try more of these to get better at sketching.

Wine labels!

2009-03-04T08:36:00.000-08:00

Sample wine labels for studio in the major. (I apologize for the watermark. Better safe than sorry right?) We had to come up with three animals created in a similar, cohesive language and then make them into a cohesive identity for an imaginary company. I'm really happy with the images themselves, though the type needs a bit of work. Hopefully I'll be able to address that before the semester is over.

My boyfriend has a small bottle of wine for his dad, so we're considering swapping the label out for one of these, just to see his reaction. I wonder what people detached from the assignment would react to these?

Fable Illustration + Artist's Alley

2009-02-12T13:59:00.001-08:00

These are a series of images of Aesop's "Eagle and the Arrow" done for the first project of the semester.

I forced myself to use gouache, which (after several initial disasters) worked relatively well, I think. I'm not very efficient with wet media, so this was an interesting experience. For both the media and style, I was influenced by the game "Okami". If you don't know what it is, you should check out the art on this site: http://artofokami.com Absolutely beautiful art.

Additionally, I am going to be in the Artist's Alley at Anime Central in Chicago this May! This will be my second time having being in the AA at a convention, but this is the first time I'll be selling at a con like ACen. (the first time was a good 4-5 years ago, and was more a trial run than anything.) I am stoked. Come say hello! :)

class doodles

2009-01-20T14:54:00.000-08:00

Class doodles. Apparently I draw a lot of heads. I also really like pen scribbling when it's just sketching, cause then I don't care what it looks like. It's fun. :)

mermaid-ly

2009-01-04T21:46:00.000-08:00

Decided to try my attempts at an art blog. Hopefully having one will help my motivation to draw more, even if they're just scribbles. :)

An older picture from sometime over the summer. Was playing with different effects in photoshop and trying a more rendered, atmospheric painterly effect. The whole thing was sort of impulsive and accidental. After this past semester I really want to try something rendered like this again.