September 1, 2010 – 3:01 pm
later august!
helloooo september.
i’ve been meaning to do a big post about my sketchbooks and sketchbook habits for a while now. this isn’t that post, but it’s related to the the underlying principle that my sketchbook is basically my brain’s external hard drive. i have a smart phone that i’m a little obsessed with, but my sketchbook has always been (and continues to be) my real PDA, day planner, assignment book, etc. etc. it’s the one thing that’s pretty much guaranteed to be where i am, regardless of how frantic i was when i was packing my purse. i lose track of my sketchbook far and away less often than my wallet or my phone or my car keys.
i never used a calendar or planner much in school, but since i’ve graduated and started working a hodgepodge of comically-random freelance jobs, i’ve become much more dependent on actually writing things down in order to keep myself organized and on schedule (for certain values of both). one result is that i’ve started keeping monthly calendars in my sketchbook-of-the-moment.
click here for more rambling and calenders
August 30, 2010 – 1:46 pm
i spent this past saturday making a little house for my ridiculous pop up book about rats. it was pretty fun bc, as usual, i didn’t start with a very clear idea of what i was going to make and how. i eventually ended up with a basic 5-sided box with an L-shaped drawer that pulls out. the drawer is made from three interlocking pieces of board, which will hopefully help it maintain integrity under stress better than if it was being held together with glue.
in keeping with the tasteful, understated color palette of the book itself, the box is BRIGHT ORANGE.
click here to see 4 photos of the box
August 30, 2010 – 1:33 pm
a couple pages from my sketchbook– blind contour drawings of crosby stills and nash, drawn in the dark during a concert.
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August 5, 2010 – 11:45 am
this past month has been pretty heavy with graphic-design, which is sort of novel for me. i don’t see myself as a graphic designer per se, but i’ll take a stab at anything visual if it offers me billable hours! everything’s a learning opportunity, and logos are nice because they’re sort of like design candy: concise little nuggets of aesthetic sugar. =)
these are a few logos i’ve recently designed for music-related ventures around nashville. (most ventures around nashville are music-related. it’s fun!). i’m also including some samples from the sketch process on each. since i’m not a proper designer with a vector-based brain, it usually takes me at least three rounds of sketches before i can muster the courage to move into adobe illustrator– until then it’s rapidograph and marker all the way.
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a quick sketchbook spread from an in-store performance at Grimey’s yesterday (colored in after the fact). i really like this band. their new album, The Disaster, kept me motivated during my mad blind popup quest a few weeks back– and for those who didn’t preorder it off pledgemusic, it was just released on itunes and at bandcamp.com yesterday!
my view wasn’t awesome, and i wish i’d been quick enough to catch a sketch of the trombone and maracas, but oh well; that’s how on-site sketching goes. =)
click here for the sketch
i made my first pop up book! it was something of an adventure (bc i had zero idea what i was doing) but i’m actually kind of pleased with the way it turned out! i’ve found that it’s easier to motivate myself into semi-scary learning experiences like this when i have some sort of concrete deadline or goal, so i’ve been finding calls-for-entries to make new work for. last month’s masks and naked women tangle is another example of me doing this sort of thing to myself.
(links to the project at my website gallery)
this is a picture book of pen-and-ink drawings with two pop up spreads, three cutouts, and a central 3D box structure with moving layers. it tells the story of a little girl who gets kidnapped by rats after her father’s death. the concept of the Rattenkönig (a group of rats who get knotted together at the tail while burrowed together underground) is used as a visual metaphor for the grief experience and the search for connectedness out of absence.
keen observers will notice i’m still attempting to use pink as a “gloomy” color, with questionable effectiveness. but this project marks the most ambitious palette i’ve attempted yet (four whole colors! and none of them black!) so maybe i can be forgiven for keeping my favorite around as a security blanket as i tiptoe out of monochrome.
…and just in case i tricked anyone for a second into thinking i know what i’m doing, i’m including some sketchbook scans to show my design process in all its baffled panic. the first half is me thinking way too deeply into the conceptual structure of the narrative, and the second half is mostly me realizing i haven’t the first clue how to build the thing i’ve just designed. i learned so much in the last 48hrs of this project.
nine sketchbook spreads under here
just restocked my etsy shop with more blank books. buy them! they’re ridiculous, and good for writing and drawing in. =)
each book is made with my own special blend of whimsy and obsessive attention to detail, using a variety of fine decorative papers, 4ply linen thread, 50lb acid-free canson sketch paper, and the covers of ridiculous old paperbacks from the bargain bins at the library used booksale.
peruse the books in my ETSY shop
–any friends of mine living in nashville, just contact me directly if you see one you want. we can settle up outside the bounds of etsy.
i made this book a while ago as a present for a friend, but only got around to making the box and actually giving it to her last week –coincidentally, the day i ended up giving her the book was her BIRTHDAY …so it kind of worked out.
it’s a bilingual (English/German) editon of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis/Die Verwandlung (spellchecking a language i don’t speak was hilarious, btw), with a double-spine variation on the tape binding from the massive tutorial i recently posted. each bookblock is illustrated with six beetles (under the cut) printed onto fiber paper. it’s technically part of an edition of three, but so far this is the only copy that actually exists.
thumbnail links to the project at my website gallery.
beetles under here
a couple sketches from a CD release party at mercy lounge last night.
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adventures in instruction! my first attempt at making a photo-tutorial.
EXTREMELY image-heavy, as one might guess from the title:
