New Year's Smorgasbord

Happy New Year!  Following suit to last year, I got caught up in all the craziness of the end of the semester and neglected my blog.  In my defense, not having Internet in your place of residence does not help such matters.  However, dear readers, I will now hopefully rectify myself with a big whopping post full of new exciting things! 

 

 Suggested Reading:

Over my break from school I have been experimenting quite a bit with media that I had never felt comfortable with until recently: ink and gouache.  I had started to ease into it with my work for the Advocate with the help of some nice Bristol paper, some choice pens, and Photoshop, but I decided to be a little braver with it during my time off. 

At the beginning of break I was perusing Goodwill and found some interesting Life Nature Library books from the 1960s.  These were filled with some great animal photographs as well as some amazingly brash captions that can only be found in an age prior to sensitivity.  As you would expect, these appealed to my curiosity and dark sense of humor.  With a barrage of tantalizing subject matter to translate, I began working feverishly in my sketchbook.

Posted here are the results of my explorations.  I started by trying to render things in simple black and white, and then moved on to ink washes and the infiltration of painting with white gouache.  With the serendipitous effect of some bleeding red ink, I started to crave some color, which I appeased by investing in some brown inks and breaking out the neglected watercolor set from a couple of summers ago.  Also thrown into the mix where a few layers of colored pencil, which performed wonderfully on top of the dried ink and gouache. 

And there you have it:  the beginning of a new love affair.  What is most enticing about ink, gouache, and watercolor is that you can let them dry up and then reanimate them later with water.  This is immensely useful for time and money’s sake.  I’m hoping to keep up this momentum and utilize these techniques this semester in my work for the Advocate.  It’s been a really refreshing advancement so far.  Thanks for reading,

- Blake

P.S. Further inspiration that drove me to this madness: Aaron Horkey, Frankenstein – Mary Shelley, From Hell – Alan Moore/Eddie Campbell, V for Vendetta – Alan Moore/David Lloyd, MAUS – Art Speigelman, Stitches – David Small, John Carpenter’s The Thing, and the Will Eisner documentary Profession: Cartoonist. 

More Advocate Illos

I just put these on my website as well, but here are a couple more illustrations I've done for recent issues of The Advocate.  October's been a pretty busy month so far with school, work, illustrating, and everything in between.  It's been hard to stop and post!
The first one is for an article about education and the recession (and maybe even depression).
The second is about bachelorette parties.

I included the scans of the ink drawings as well.  I've been pretty happy with how those have been coming along, getting more comfortable with the medium.

HAWT AUGUST

This week's illo for the UCD Advocate.  The article is about how it was so freaking hot last month, breaking all sorts of astoundingly miserable records!

Thanks for looking, y'all.  I'm trying real hard.

Phake Fone Calls

This week's UCD Advocate Illustration for an article about pretending to be on the phone so that people will leave you alone.

And just because I was so delighted by how this guy turned out, here's the B&W of him:

Thanks for visiting,

B-boy.

Political Illo's & PIP (Process in Process)

For my illustrations for the school paper I've been getting back into working digitally, but am still relying on pencil and pens for drawing.  I'm using this opportunity to try and develop a process (or maybe a few perhaps) of working digitally that works well and quickly for me.  For the portraits in last week's post, I just did pencil drawings and scanned them into photoshop, adjusted the levels to make the lines thick and clear, and then proceeded to paint.  For these two illustrations I did the pencil drawing and then inked them with pens, scanned, adjusted, painted.  I think they're working well so far, but I still have some tweaking to do to get the line quality I want.  Hopefully I will get better at inking, too.

Pencil drawing & thumbs

Ink on tracing paper

Final in Photoshop

Closet Conservative Obama

Link to Article

For this one I just inked right on top of the pencils (no tracing paper).  

I liked doing it that way a lot better.

Final in Photoshop
2011 Iowa GOP Debates 

UCD Advocate Gig

I was recently hired as a staff Illustrator for the UCD Advocate, the weekly student newspaper for University of Colorado Denver.  My first assignment was doing the column portraits of some of the writers/editors.  :::

Bryan

Kelsie

Dan

Kait

Lindsay

Adam

I will probably be doing all my illustrations for the paper digitally, so that means some much needed love for the wacom tablet, and lots of stuff to put up here!  Thanks for looking, boys and girls.

Last One

My last project in ceramics class: head pile 2

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Freshly Glazed

Finished pieces! "Double Talk" and "Head Pile 1"

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Finished Idol

Quite the surprise ending: this is how the idol turned out after his glaze firing. More pieces to come soon as they come out of the kiln.

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Work from Ceramics Class

These are some of the projects I've been working on in my ceramics class I'm taking this summer for my teaching licensure.

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