snore

For this assignment we were asked to abstractly (no no Brianne, not TOO abstractly) illustrate a sound of our choice. I picked the sound of my grandma snoring.

I started out by rendering both her and the sound of her snore with ink and a nib.



I then scanned these images in and complied them digitally. The hairy animals are meant to represent the snork of a snore, while the tiny falling animals represent the sound of the whheeeeeeesszzz.

dirty projectors

I love the Dirty Projectors. I love their new album Bitte Orca. I love that they chose the name "Bitte Orca" because they thought those words sounded nice together. In the spirit of their experimental sound, yodelling squeals, and the fact that they noted Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche as an inspiration, I made these thumbnails for my CD cover project.


For the final, I quickly blocked in color with very diluted gouache and watercolor, and then went over it with ink via nib pen. I then used a practice stencil I had made for the Float poster (see the earlier post) and dabbed in some more watercolor. Those are the funny blotchy textures you see in the sepia background. After all this, I cut the words out with a trusty X-acto and scanned the paintingstencil in with a piece of crumpled tissue paper behind it. Those orca sound waves were added digitally. I'm disappointed with the legibility of the word "projector" in the final, but it's easily fixed! My professor Megan Berkheiser made the brilliant suggestion to light the piece from behind and photograph it. She has a lot of experience with photography; check out here AMAZING work here. I'll be sure to post the results.

fish on a leash

Here is the one the only "Fish on a Leash" exercise! I have to say, this isn't the most brilliant concept I've ever had--it didn't stray far from the obvious. But I tried to make that big fish look super heavy and vacant and the little fish look light and purposeful. In the end I had some fun with it.

today is brought to you by the letter S

One of my esteemed colleagues, Mark Eberhardt, has revived the SCAD Graduate Illustration blog. To celebrate, he asked the current grads to create a new masthead by making one letter each. I picked "S," and ended up making two.
This one is gross and hilarious. But flying stamp man was chosen instead.

shadow box

We were given such a great assignment in one of my classes this quarter. We were asked to build a shadow box with interesting textures that utilized biographical elements. Here is what I ended up with:


It's made of gutted books (it's sad and messy to gut a book) purchased at the Salvation Army, a boat-shaped nest I made of twigs, vines, and herbs from my back yard, vellum paper, a wire hanger, thread, and antique stamps. The books are a nod to my undergrad degree in English (and the lit magazine we published that was bound in gutted books). Also I'm in love with the water, and a boat-nest was a handy way of representing how I'm constantly moving but stubbornly nesting in each new city.

So! After building this little diorama (mine kind of looks like a bathtub shrine, no?) we were asked to draw it in any black-and-white media, and to add a hint of color somewhere in the drawing. So I came up with the dude below. It was drawn in graphite, and the stamps digitally collaged.

float poster

Right now I'm working on a poster for SCAD film student Andy Trimbach's senior film. From what I've seen, this 12 minute film looks like it's going to be beautiful--you can watch the teaser here. Without giving too much away, it's about a little boy who ties his hopes to the sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker.

Andy and I settled on the idea of a boy floating upside down inside the image of a woodpecker. Since he wants to hand screen-print the final poster, I decided to start with the traditional mode of screen printing: a stencil. The stencil below was cut from vellum.

I scanned this in and set about laying out the final image digitally. When I'm finished I'll convert the image to black and white stencils and screen print the poster. So, it won't look exactly like the digital version. It will have that great element of human error to it.