31: "In the Birchwoods"

Stone lithography, drawn with grease pencil and scratched with a razor, etched, and printed in an edition of 12 on Reeves white heavyweight paper.

30: Vulturoo

It all started with this guy. In Mr. Kovach's illustration methods class, we were to design a narrative sculpture, creating a character or scene and a schematic to accompany it. Admittedly, I was rather frazzled at the time it was assigned, so I chose two guide words for myself and went with it: Kangaroo vulture.


Since it had to be narrative, I decided to give the newly dubbed Vulturoo some prey, which was initially a rabbit, and evolved into a sort of springhare-sparrow to fit the mammal-bird theme.With the final schematic on display, I set about making a wire and foil armature, sculpting directly onto it with Super Sculpey and gluing it to a wooden board for support. I didn't get any photos of the sculpting process, unfortunately, but here's a few of the final sculpt and the primed sculpt:
good movies

And here we are all finished up! It was painted with acrylic paints accompanied by loads of matte fixative, a dash of pastel, a small portion of nail polish, and some moss I found at Michaels. The vulturoo's coloration was based on a king vulture and a tree kangaroo while the springhare-sparrow was based on a white-throated sparrow.


This was my first real attempt at full-blown sculpture, so it was very much a learning process. Things could have gone a lot worse, especially considering I had no idea what I was doing with the wire armature supports, so I'm thankful the entire thing didn't break under its own weight!

Vulturoo wouldn't be smiling anymore!

29: A Smidge of Productivity

Finally, some finalized lithographs! First up is the pterodactyl plate, the acetate painting on the left and one of the prints on the right, and second is an edition I'm calling "Baumsaurs", star-crossed lovers of the Deciduous and Conifer houses.

This...this poor plate. I murdered the thing- I...ouch. But it was a great learning tool, I'll give it that.

The orignial for this piece was drawn digitally in Painter, with a few resolution issues while I made the transparency for the photo-plate. The actual printing for this edition went nigh-flawlessly, and I'm eager to make even more plates now.


In Electronic Illustration, we were assigned a very open-ended project, given only the theme "Transformation" with which to work. Clunking around various mythology sites on the internet waiting for something to click, I discovered a Slavic forest spirit called Leshy, who shapeshifts and changes size to befuddle wanderers in his woods. Forests and guys with glowing eyes? I can do this. So now I need to design the man! Above are some initial concepts out of my head, working with strictly the theme of the spirit. Tonight I'm going to do some proper research about historic Slavic people, what they looked like, and what their spirits would look like.


Also for Electronic Illustration, we made pen-and-ink drawings of landscapes based upon our own photos and colored them with Painter's transparent tools (watercolors, markers, anything on the 'gel' layer setting). Not sure I like how this turned out, but as far as landscapes go, it's something, right? The photo was taken on Mt. Pilatus in Switzerland a few years ago.

...and this is more personal nonsense from the sketchbook, but I quite enjoy how it turned out. Her name is Lli, and she kills little runners For Religion. :c