Mongoose Studio

Occupy Wallstreet

2011-11-15T18:50:00.000-08:00

Some young fiery kid on the subway this morning felt "compelled" to bust my eardrums and yell his outrage over what had happened to the protesters at Zucotti Park (they were ousted by the NYPD). I, in response, felt compelled to make a poster. Here are some rough ideas. Nevermind the inelegant language. For some nice OccWall posters, visit Occuprint.

The poster that is slowly taking over my life...

2011-10-03T19:54:00.000-07:00

...and here's a sliver of it. Still working on it - the names involved are Yale U. faculty and artists.

Flora poquito

2011-09-26T18:29:00.000-07:00

An ornament sketch based on Mexican tile patterns. I asked a friend to translate the title of this post into Spanish for me. I hope it says 'little flower.' I hope.

Squat

2011-09-19T20:07:00.000-07:00

Heey, so I'm finally settled in here in Brooklyn, NYC. Yay. Here are two graphics I did when I was bored. 'Whites' is a pretty funny BBC comedy about chefs, starring some actors I've never watched before. A Power Squat is...apparently...when a bird is about to take a crap. For some reason, I find the idea of a squatting bird hilarious.

cute

2011-08-22T18:56:00.000-07:00

Playing around. A friend and I fake-started a band called the Spooning Bananas. Currently in the throes of a harrowing move to NYC!

Political cartoon?

2011-08-01T17:26:00.000-07:00

Ugh, wake me up when this debt ceiling thing is over. I made the near-fatal mistake of watching 24 hour cable news... six bored, angry, blacked-out days later Don Lemon says 'CNN is devoting ALL of its resources to this story', and I lose it. There's now a crack in my remote and a chip in the wall behind the television. No more cable news for me. Ever. I have never been so enthralled by something so futile and ultimately pointless as this 'debate'. That is, since Casey Anthony.

A Mexican Summer

2011-07-25T17:53:00.000-07:00

Today, designed some cards with Mexican-tile-inspired medallions and patterns. I was agonizing over what colors to use, until I realized an even combination of blue, yellow, ochre, and natural green, with a little terra cotta red, is all I need to hit the right note. For the cards, I'm thinking about varying the size of the medallion dramatically from card to card to keep its repetition fresh.

I didn't know what they were called

2011-07-18T14:32:00.000-07:00

Been reacquainting myself with Illustrator, remembering why I prefer Photoshop (I know, I know). Oh well, this patch of hibiscus flowers turned out okay.

The Sketchbook Project!

2011-07-12T17:34:00.000-07:00

For those who don't know, the Sketchbook Project is an internationally touring exhibition of sketchbooks in which anyone can take part. I received my sketchbook a few days ago (it was smaller than I thought!), and the theme I chose was 'fill me with stories'. I collect stories, trivia, and aphorisms I find compelling, which I then record in my journal(s), so it seemed a natural choice for me.
One of my favorite childhood memories is my brother and I playing tag with a rain cloud. We spent a good twenty minutes running in and out of the summer drizzle on that sunny day. So I prefer the charming Japanese myth on the right to the myth on the left, which I heard years ago from a southern (North/South Carolina?) artist. Ignore the 'or's. The devil is beating his wife, not America, haha.
The letters are tiny stamps; an impulse buy from Michael's. In other news, I just came back from a fun trip to NYC! I didn't have nearly enough hours to take in everything at MOMA, a tragedy since I paid full price and wanted to see everything.

A weekend at the beach!

2011-07-05T18:25:00.000-07:00

Just got back from Ocean City, MD, my first beach excursion! I'll have to do it again and soon. Currently working on beach-themed illustrations, doing more detailed sketches in watercolors. I want to do a lot, so I'm giving myself ten minutes for each, like the one above (self-congratulatory pat on back). The finals are going to be vector graphics. Time to brush the dust off Adobe Illustrator...

more illegible sketches

2011-06-28T20:08:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to be more intense about sketching ideas. For any job, I'll now be doing 75 to 100 thumbnails to really push myself, instead of the usual 10. While I do think my first ideas are usually my strongest, I've come to realize that they change, for the better, when I consider the benefits of other routes. Ugh, missing Daily Show...

Illegible sketches

2011-06-23T18:48:00.000-07:00

Put some pen to paper today, sketching illustration ideas for 'the beach' for a gig. The tack I'm supposed to take is something more like 'beach wedding' or 'romantic beach'. The first sketches were gentle waves, then ended up regressing into beach wear, then had some sun and wave patterns, then worked my way into pearls and coral and sand and shells, which I think strikes the right note without being too heavy handed. I should be in prime condition to be thinking about beaches and summer, my birthday was yesterday, and being a summer baby has made me fond of pearls and beaches.

Prologue: Roughs

2011-06-15T20:48:00.000-07:00

I just had a fun idea: I'm going to count how many times poor Darius gets fatally wounded. I was recently wasting my life on the web and found Movie Body Counts. Fascinating stuff. I love (some, very specific, below the radar) action movies and thrillers, so I have a high tolerance for violence (but not sex, tha's America). I noted that one of the movies with the highest b.c. was Equilibrium, a favorite of mine. Even more interesting was the character with the highest b.c.: Ogami Itto, of Lone Wolf and Cub (movie). Haha, I loved the manga, and the bodies pile up there too, so I totally believe it. As far as samurai go, I wonder how well Miyamoto Musashi would stack up.... Closely following are John Preston of Equilibrium, and Tetsuo(!) from Akira. If you're an otaku, you're totally cracking up over that exclamation mark right now.
Anyway. Darius Fatalities: 1. Will the number rise, or did I just kill off a major character? (Just remembered the last episode of Game of Thrones and tears welled up, I'm not kidding...)

Prologue: Roughs

2011-06-14T11:52:00.000-07:00

Only one page today, I hope it makes sense. It'll look a lot better inked, I promise. Ari's so weird...why didn't she just shoot the guy? She had a silencer on her Glock and everything. She just drops it and picks up another one. Strange girl.

Prologue: Roughs

2011-06-11T17:57:00.000-07:00

Ooh, Ari's pissed. Mostly at herself. And she's supposed to be a professional. I was just reading over what I've plotted for the first volume and I just realized there is a LOT of gun violence. I think I ended up going that route because, honestly, this is not going to be a superhero comic or shonen battle manga where fights are honest fist-to-fist sword-to-sword martial arts exhibitions. The sad truth of modern battle is that guns rule the show. Either you're smart and quick enough to get the other person first or you're ready to take a bullet for another chance. In this case, Ariadne wasn't smart, haha.

Self-branding

2011-06-10T10:56:00.000-07:00

I love Mrs. Eaves, an Emigre typeface with a veritable smorgasbord of ligatures, so I used it for my little banner here. However, it is at times like these that I am truly disappointed by my name.
In all other sectors of my life, from awkwardly ordering coffee at Starbucks to patiently explaining to insurance providers exactly how they brutalized the spelling, my name offers plenty of avenues for adventure. Typographically, though, I have yet to wring true elegance from its letters. For me, it always looks better with serif type. I squeal over the alluring curve of the g and struggle mightily with how the capital L and M will interact. Most days L and M just plunk down in a comfortable space and eke out a civil coexistence. Today, however, they're almost on speaking terms.
Anyway. I will be working on Immortals next week.

Finally, a Portfolio Site

2011-06-09T21:08:00.000-07:00

It's about time I made myself an actual portfolio site. I'm working with these watercolor squares and hand-drawn patterns. I tend to think of my favored aesthetic as hand-generated, informal, with patterns thrown in, so my site should reflect that. I'm hoping the colors don't turn out too juvenile, though I do qualify for that too sometimes, oho.

Statistician's Blues!

2011-06-08T20:42:00.000-07:00

Finally pushed through this little project. I like the palette and Caecelia for the type, but I'm still working on the margins. I wanted the text to have a big declarative feeling, but the tiny margins are pushing the words into the gutter. Soon as I fix the problem I'll print it and maybe make a gift of it to my mother. I'm sure she'll have lots to say.

Currently reading...

2011-05-31T09:47:00.000-07:00

Memorial Day weekend was nice, waaay too hot. Refused to do anything useful. I caught up on one of my favorite josei (women's) manga, Oishii Kankei (A Delicious Relationship). I literally did not sleep Sunday night so I could read it over in its entirety. It's one of those rare romantic manga that strike a realistic balance between man-chasing and dream-chasing.
Typically, shoujo (girl's) manga annoys me because of its unrealistic ideals regarding romance and its obsession with fashionable pretty-boys, and shounen (boy's) manga typically annoys me because they often (falsely) equate skill development with character development (I wanna be the number one ninja/a better person! Step 1: kick ass. Step 2: kick more ass!). Oishii Kankei kind of balances those tendencies: the main character is a young woman who wants to become a chef, falls in love with one of her mentors, and works pretty hard to achieve both in a realistic way. She is overly cheerful and cloyingly sweet, but not enough to annoy me. The drama is good, the characters are interesting, and the story isn't typical, which is refreshing.
Another great series I just remembered is Ashita no Ousama (King of Tomorrow). It's about a much more down-to-earth young lady who wants to become a playwright, and in the process falls in love with a talented actor. Another work-and-romance story that's not so dramatic but very interesting.
I just remembered another series, but I could talk about this stuff all day. I'll stop myself here for now.

Statistics!

2011-05-25T16:01:00.000-07:00

I've loved that song 'Statistician's Blues' by Todd Snider for a long time, and the subject matter seemed like it would make for fun info-graphics. My mom deals with stats in her work so ever since I understood what she did, I was interested in the effects stats have on people's thinking. As immutable as they seem, if you ever become a statistician, or ever take a basic course in it, you quickly learn about their limits. The song's pretty negative overall, but it's damn funny. And true. My charts and graphs look okay, but their hilarity is not as nuanced as those found at xkcd! Super nerdy!

Immortals (p4)

2011-05-24T20:48:00.000-07:00

Ooh, what's in the case? Emet looks bored; isn't he eager to find out? Working on another little book this week.

Immortals (p3)

2011-05-23T13:44:00.000-07:00

Conclusion: Ariadne looks like a power ranger because of the gloves. Gonna change that. Here's Lars, the person who takes care of Darius' technological management needs because Big D is as big a luddite as I am. Don't be fooled, he's only using an iPhone because they're easy to draw.

Immortals (p2)

2011-05-19T08:59:00.000-07:00

The hits keep coming. Avenir, the typeface I'm using for the text, is working okay for me, at least for now. Crete seems like a nice place. Currently reading Ushio to Tora, a charming early 90s shonen manga about youkai.

Immortals (p1)

2011-05-18T19:23:00.000-07:00

Boom here it is. Ariadne, that's one hi-tech helmet. Mmm, still agonizing over what typefaces to use. With my constant urge to buck tradition, I really want to avoid using the typical comic-sans-esque typefaces (and yet little else will suit my lines). Argh... Brushes worked out okay, but I'm wondering about the two-tone photo in the first panel.

Prologue: Roughs

2011-05-17T11:16:00.000-07:00

The prologue is fourteen pages long, and here are the first four. Currently looking for a new type of pen to finish them up. I've gotten really sick of Sakura pens, and I want to try brush pens this time. I've used brush pens for more informal projects, but I'm always afraid I'll mess up irrevocably with them. Then again, everything I try to do with straight pen nibs can be done faster and quicker with brushes.
Since I'm trying to work more efficiently (I can get waaay to precious with these personal projects), brushes may be it. Also, I'm digitally producing the backgrounds and the text; not sure if that'll take me just about the same amount of time, but I don't care. I truly admire comic artists who take the time to lushly illustrate their backgrounds by hand, but for me, I lack the patience. I'm all about the story.
Just realized Ariadne (the woman on the bike) looks like a power ranger, ha ha. The bike suit is based very loosely on those designed in homage of Tron costumes. If you care, she rides a Suzuki Hayabusa. If I had all the money in the world I would buy this baby first. The computer nerd on the third page is a character I haven't introduced yet named Lars.
Ugh, I feel like reading too much manga is making me cross-eyed. My first instinct now is to read right to left. I hope the pages I draw don't feel that way...

Booyah

2011-05-16T13:23:00.000-07:00

Feeling quite productive today. Got over the hardest part (for me) in making a comic; the story board. It's that moment when the images in my head and the words on my paper start to gel together. Rewarded myself by making the above front matter for this theoretical book. I'm playing around with different blackletter typefaces, and since I was too lazy to make my own (appropriate) ornaments today, I stole these from a dutch typeface I had in my library. I might have committed a type crime there, but you wouldn't have known this unless I told you. Unless you're a nerd. Or a typographer. This one worked out alright, the form and the tilt remind me a bit of a feather.

Hmm, keeping busy

2011-05-15T19:04:00.000-07:00

Made these while watching TV and chilling out with highlighters and brush-pens. A few weeks ago I was making paper flowers, but these I can scan and share, plus glue is optional.

Some visual experiments

2011-05-13T10:46:00.000-07:00

Alright, I love making these atc's. I've always struggled to fill up sketchbooks, and I always end up writing in them more than sketching or painting. I think it's the book format that gets me thinking of taking notes over drawing. But these little, un-intimidating blank cards are great for me to just slap something down and get something started and finished with minimal thought, then carry the idea on to subsequent iterations. I could spend hours playing around with them. These used a combination of printouts, ink, and watercolors.
I love using patterns and silhouettes. The flower is based on a tattoo I designed for myself. The one with the clouds and words has lyrics from one of my favorite songs 'Angry Words' by Willy Porter.

A to B Book Project

2011-05-11T14:06:00.000-07:00

Completed for now! Here are the spreads. The actual dimensions are (in inches) 11x17, 11x34 when laid open. I will be printing it on newsprint or some slightly more substantial thin paper. Can't wait to have it in my hands! Have a look:

Travel Journal cont'd

2011-05-10T16:01:00.000-07:00

Here's another page, with the newer type treatment. It's cleaning up, and has some charm, but now that I've got everything sequential down over the whole book, its time to start zeroing on on potential problem areas. Later, I'm thinking I should do something to the images. Printed this large and full-bleed, they lost some resolution and I didn't notice off the bat. Minor problem, though.
Listening to Stephen Lynch and Jonathan Coulton right now, hilarious! Completely out of synch with the project, but oh well, it was mostly busy work today.

Travel Journals

2011-05-09T17:16:00.000-07:00

A sample page from the Pt A -> Pt B book project. I finally chose some appropriate text: a lengthy excerpt from Jack Kerouac's On the Road is in the text box, and the text on the image are lyrics from an excellent song called Clay Pigeons, by John Prine. Both sources have the weary, nostalgic road attitude I'm looking for.
As you can see, I'm currently up in the air about how that big white text box is doing up against those lyrics. I decided on that treatment before I added the lyrics, and now I see way too many things are happening at once. I have to pick my crazy: I'm not going to tone down the lyrics (they won't always be covering the page like this, promise), so I'll work on toning down the excerpt. I'm thinking something super traditional, and not this bold, flush left computer scrolling column. I had this fancy idea that a white column (on other pages it goes from top to bottom), would mimic the white lane marks on roads (what're they called again?). Eh, with black text in them, that's sort of lost. Workin' on it...I hope to finish by the end of the week and print this sucka.

Introducing...

2011-05-07T20:02:00.000-07:00

Yay! With two volumes worth of script done, and a few pages under my belt, I think I can safely say this thing is going to happen. Unlike many of my other stories, The Immortals is a simpler, and more shonen-esque project.
The story is about a young orphan boy, America Jones, who discovers a father he thought had died years ago. He is warmly reunited with his strange new family. His father, Darius Javeed, is a wealthy international arts dealer, his sister, Ariadne, is some sort of super spy, and Emet, her fiance, is the family help. America quickly realizes that something is very off about all of them. Darius seems impervious to pain, Ariadne is never to be seen in broad daylight, and Emet keeps breaking the furniture. On top of that, they're constantly traipsing around the world in search of legendary artifacts imbued with strange powers. Between solving the mystery of his family's curious behavior and dodging bullets at black market art auctions, will America ever get his homework done?!
I like the story, and I love drawing all the characters, so I'm just going to have fun with this one. I'll post pages on this blog as I finish them. Notes on this cover: I like the look of cutting off the text; it takes something stuffy like Cloister Black and makes it less traditional. It's not too graphic (as in violent) is it?

Possible insert

2011-05-06T19:19:00.000-07:00

Spent some time today watching history channel (they had some awesome show on special forces training, ho-ly crap), and drawing this. I like how the dress turned out, but everything else, when viewed from a distance, needed digital tweaking; so much tweaking I think I just took my Photoshop skills to the next level on this one, haha. 'Tis been a while since I used Prismacolor pencils...not prime for small-scale work, they're wa-y too soft.

A Cast of Characters

2011-05-05T14:27:00.000-07:00

Finished character designs and colored the head-shots for this post. Names, from left to right: Darius, Ariadne, America and Emet. I love the diversity of ages and noses. Emet's hair should be a bit darker, and I'm thinking about toning down the crazy in America's hair. While it's true that dreads turn blond at the ends sometimes, I've only ever seen that on longer ones. Also, I would never let my child have hair like that. But its so darn cute, and the alternatives (all the boys in my family had near-shaven heads, my brother sported an afro for a while...) for his character are so boring to me. Besides having some interesting names and hair, these guys have interesting physiological 'problems', one that you might guess by looking at Ariadne. Clue: she's not a Goth.

Character Designs

2011-05-04T13:45:00.000-07:00

I've been writing a script for this fun story for maybe two years now, and I've been thinking its about time I buckled down and actually got a comic started. It's still in the development stage, but the story's pretty solid in my head. My only concern is that its too...literary and philosophical, so I've been trying to think about what people might enjoy reading (in comic form) instead of sticking too much to my original plan. My characters always seem to have a sad, contemplative look all the time, even in my comic strips (whazzup with that?). This gentleman here is one of those pensive types. He's supposed to be more stylish than this, but I ended up taking liberties with the awkward cut of the vest and then pin-striping the pants. Clearly, he's not happy with the result.

ABCs

2011-05-03T13:56:00.000-07:00

Finally finished forming my type for this project. Turned out alright! I tested them on this page just because it was the lightest in color, and as I will be keeping the type white, we're aiming for legibility here. I'm thinking I want to make some more alternate letters, like I did for 'E', but its taking me more time than expected to get this thing underway, so I'm going to push ahead and if its lacking I'll come back to it. Now, to pick a song...

Pt A --> Pt B Project

2011-05-02T13:55:00.000-07:00

I've been planning to do this project for a while. A month or so ago, I took an eight hundred mile road trip home from Memphis. I planned every stop along the way and even had a specific playlist for the entire trip.
The trip, the playlist, it all became a bit of a metaphor for the transitional phase I felt my life was heading toward, so I decided it would be cool to make a little book about it.
I'm incorporating photos from a disposable camera, lyrics from a song (a few songs?), and a wood-type-based typeface I might have to create myself. I drew inspiration for a potential look for the type and pictures from the opening of one of my favorite shows, Justified. I think why it felt so natural to refer to it after I came up with what I wanted was the song: something about atonal blues guitar whispers 'road trip', not to mention it has some lines about a 'lonely road'.
The image on the left is an atc I made from the scraps of this project. I want to make a whole mess of them...

I know the feeling...

2011-04-26T09:14:00.001-07:00

Ho ho, haven't drawn a cartoon in ages! It's Sisyphus, being silly. This is for a dear friend, planning to use it for a summer course she's teaching that somehow involves Greek mythology. At this moment, I'm really empathizing with the guy...

Thanks for everthing, Gutenberg, and now goodbye!

2010-01-25T19:55:00.001-08:00

Announcing the Publication of
The Corrected Version:
Poems by Rosanna Oh

I have been thinking about making a book with letterpress ever since the printing bug bit me last semester. I've decided to make it my senior project. I spent winter vacation convincing myself that what I had chosen to do was pretty straightforward: make a book of my roommate's lovely poems, illustrate them, print them and end my time at Yale with a lovely little object. I would document my process, and turn that into another book, you know, in case setting type for hours on end got boring.

Now, two chapbooks and four re-designs later, I'm beginning to feel the cold chill of panic. I met with my advisor, Pamela Hovland, two weeks ago, a meeting that made me realize how much I hadn't considered. We spent most of the time trying to pin down exactly what I was doing. My proposal was something about mixing different kinds of printing techniques: letterpress and laser printing, old and new. All this in a preciously-treated livre d'artiste, a la everyone from Bonnard to Picasso. Something like this. But the more we talked about the actual form of the book I began to realize that the 'phantom book' in my mind was an empty vessel. It did not interact at all with the poems I was so violently going to shove into its flimsy frame.

First of all, and most terribly, I was imposing the techniques I wanted to explore on the text. Second, by designing the first chapbooks despite the poems and not for the poems, I was robbing myself of some essential knowledge and thus flailing around for a place to start.
"Since design implies intent and intent implies understanding, you can't understand what you have not read." Someone said this once. Very basic. So last week I began again. I wrote down all the poems. Read them. Read them again. Marked the ones I liked. Then grouped them into 3 groups based on consistent themes. Evened out the distribution by chucking out my least favorite from each section, and ones even Rosanna didn't like. Okay. What do we have now?
The progression goes like this:
Section 1- poems about old times, old gods, old places.
Section 2-poems about the framing of those old archetypes, about mediums of experience.
Section 3- poems about family, modern and familiar fears, tradition.

So now the form of the book: As I rearranged the poems in InD to fit my new scheme, I noticed how hard I was trying to squeeze them into the Rennaisance tall proportions of my pages. Most of the poems are tall, with a single long line protruding like a diving board from its thin body. My inelegant solution involved squishing lines those lines, even (gasp) breaking them.
I already had an understanding that line breaks are sacred to poets. They tread a strange borderland between forming ideas in written form, how that is influenced by visual cues in the overall shape of the poem, and how the rythm they produce when spoken/read/seen. So my squeezing and breaking, when I consulted Rosanna, was met with cold opposition. New plan: Base the shape of the textbox on the longest line, then base shape of page on that textbox.

The new layouts are now panoramic, and I like the idea. I'll have to deal with a lot of negative space, so I took a quick trip to the Yale Art Gallery's asian art section and looked at some scroll paintings and Japanese screens. I've always been impressed with how large areas are left blank, lines at the edge of the drawings fading in an out of existence. If I can achieve that sort of pregnant, contemplative emptiness, I think that is the form I want my phantom book to take.

Cold and Love

2009-11-04T22:23:00.001-08:00

A comic I did today, and, surprise, not about stress! It's totally true that people pair up for the colder months- for holidays, and also to keep warm.

Some design work!

2009-10-30T19:35:00.000-07:00

Whoo, today was productive, thus, I'm feelin' good.
News: I received an honorable mention for my book-collecting prize poster (yay). My comic's been on hiatus 'cause I've been slogging my way through coursework and general mid-term depression. Got a lot done in the meanwhile. For example:

Good Hair: a little found type/image book that started as a design exercise for a class, but I'm planning to spend some time with it. I was messing with different ways to bind it (it's an accordion-folded 'flutter' book (I think that's the name, meaning the inside pages aren't bound), and playing around with the ribbon added this playful little touch of the bow in the hair.

Signs of the Times: a poster project for design class, left over from the first half of the semester. The posters themselves are total crap: I showed them at a student crit session on Wednesday, had my ass chewed up. The project is about drawing attention to empty storefronts in the New Haven area. Criticisms range from 'why this spaghetti theatre? style' to 'oh, so it's just a sexy for-sale sign?'. Word. The documentation book is more fun for me. It's a tiny little thing with some good design moves, I feel.

Conservation short story: This little book has helped me work out both typographic and binding issues, though I feel it's not quite reached its full potential. The story, by David Eagleman, is about a single quark that weaves and unravels the universe; hence the 'unraveling' leading in the textblock.

Fright Night Poster: Did this one in under two hours. it shows, but wha-evah, I had mad fun doin' it. Might use the caution-tape-looking move on something else.

JE Press door sign: since this wasn't a job and didn't need a billion copies ASAP, I spent time with the actual printing of these, shooting for just the right amount of impression and correct amounts of ink, mostly. Still way too much silver ink-it shows on the border, which had tiny little designs on it that flooded. Oh well, happy cause I actually did it.

Thas' it. Tomorrow's Halloween, and I'm wearing either my kimono or my yukata. 'pends on the weather.

Woot, done lots!

2009-10-11T14:55:00.001-07:00

Been a busy busy week. How busy? Forgot my mother's birthday! How could I? I feel like a total douche. But this is a fraction of what I produced last week. A letterpress invite/menu for a special college dinner; I probably should have mentioned somewhere that is for the theologian Jonathan Edward's b-day...oh well. Also, the date is totally wrong. :) Next is my entry for the a book-collecting prize poster contest. Mostly inspired by something I read about Paul Rand, I think... The rest was built off a classic book-page-like grid. I added the red and ornaments to reference old-style printing. Lastly, an illustration (one of 6) I scribbled for the YDN.

Stress explosion!

2009-09-30T18:02:00.000-07:00

Not my best effort, but definitely expresses how I feel right about now. I think I'll try to do a comic about something other than stress. I am, however, rather pleased with how the typography turned out in the last panel.

Cold Lovers

2009-09-28T06:32:00.000-07:00

A romantic number I did Saturday for the Penny Dreadful, an great little campus publication. I hope it's obvious that its cold outside. I once drew a winter scene, there wasn't supposed to be any snow in it, and ended up coloring the trees a lush and verdant green until someone pointed this out...Anyway, I was telling my roommate I'm pleasantly surprised the guy turned out so friendly-looking, I usually can't easily get that look of gentleness.

Pooh Bear Invites

2009-09-21T22:30:00.000-07:00

The vegetables from last post came out great in the YDN, and I'm kind of surprised that they did. Pictured above is what I spent my Saturday on. Super simple letter-press invitation to what looks like a perverted children's book convention. Funny story: I finished printing these on a Chandler-Price, went to the paper cutter/guillotine thing, stuffed them under the blade without paying any attention to what I was doing, and proceeded to chop a hundred of these little invitations in half. I saw it happening, and was vaguely glad my finger wasn't there, and yet slightly appalled with myself. Yay, redoing stuff...Just noticed that the 3 didn't print totally (again, absent minded). Oh well.

Vegetables

2009-09-17T18:17:00.000-07:00

This is what I spent yesterday evening doing. I've been using brush pens a lot now and I kind of regret buying the fancy nibs I was determined to learn how to use. My sense of light and shadow, though, is still a bit off; I'm very hesitant with the darks in these ones. I even tried to make up for it with the flat gray added in Photoshop. Meh, its a start. The bottom left ones are tomatillos: basically tomatoes wrapped in paper...

DS 11: Tulip poster

2009-09-13T21:57:00.000-07:00

Here are a few rough sketches of a poster for a tulip-planting festival we have here in J.E., known as Tulip Day. Spent most of this evening flipping through design anthologies with lotsa formalist, futurist posters, which is why I probably went for a more flat, graphic look than the naturalistic tack I was headed in before. Also, this tulip pattern would be easy for me to carve and print on the old-timey press we have in our basement.

DS 10: a grim diagram

2009-09-11T19:41:00.000-07:00

This is for an article about learning to fly private planes, and the fears brought about by 9/11. I was trying to mirror this attitude of how we can complain about fascist security policies at the airport and condemn some authority's perceived carelessness while with the same didactic tone talk about tragedy.

DS 9: a comic!

2009-09-09T18:59:00.000-07:00

I colored this today. A lame comic about Shopping Period, the two weeks when students actually take 600 courses so they can be sure that the 4 to 5 they choose at the end are the best of the best. That's a photo of Harkness Tower in the background, if you can see it...I need to practice this photo montage stuff...

Day sketch 8, a caricature!

2009-09-07T21:14:00.000-07:00

A few sketches of M. Silvio Berlusconi, and the ridiculous and disgusting things he says with such a friendly face, for an editorial. I like how a lot of politicians look the same when caricatured (and even when not), the prolific nose, in particular.

Day sketch 7, again with the patterns

2009-09-06T21:38:00.000-07:00

Here's the deer-head guy, on his way to becoming a fully finished piece. Using heavy patterning in this one, too. I seem to like paisley shapes. Hopefully, the final color scheme won't look as scary as it appears here...or look as crappy...

Day sketch 6

2009-09-05T19:15:00.000-07:00

Spent a lovely 80-degree afternoon sketching this, one of the doors at my residential college, JE. Didn't take as long as it usually does, so maybe I'm getting faster (relatively...). Rather disappointed that I couldn't quite get the luminosity of the window on the right. It was practically glowing, and in my eagerness I overworked the area. Story of my life.

Day sketch 5, also a puzzle

2009-09-04T21:29:00.000-07:00

An attempt at plant life in marker. I wonder if there're flowers that look like this...
Also, my roommate Rosanna and I finished this, a 1000 piece Tonari no Totoro puzzle a friend gave me, in four days of tortured labor. The worst part were the identical pieces in the border and the sky. Its now as large as our coffee table.

Day sketch 4

2009-09-03T18:44:00.001-07:00

Some grey marker sketches. The one on the left was an idea from a friend at Comics Club, and the one on the right is of two characters from 'Alexander', an epic comic I'm currently planning a one shot for.

Day sketch 3

2009-08-31T21:26:00.000-07:00

I don't like drawing monsters. Nonetheless, thinking I should put pen to paper every day from now on, I sketched this (with my brand new pen nibs) without really thinking of anything. It's supposed to be the Minotaur...ish. Tomorrow, I think I'll try a cute scene.

Day sketch 2

2009-08-29T14:00:00.000-07:00

The original design was much more cheerful. You know, watercolors. One gray mass bleeds into the next equals disaster. Or some sort of dark elfin reaper situation...

Day sketch 1

2009-08-28T11:35:00.001-07:00

Sketched a little today cause I had time (yay). I bought these Sakura watercolors for cheap in Japan, and I'd been sitting on them for months, so I colored this sketch I found in my watercolor sketchbook.

The Method (or Lack Thereof)

2009-08-10T17:53:00.000-07:00

I spent most of my evening yesterday sorting through the junk clogging up my creative space (my bedroom), and stumbled across a treasure trove of old, shitty drawings, character designs, 1-15 page manuscripts, inked and un-inked, of comics I drew. I never think that I'm developing my skills, especially since weeks pass before I actually draw anything seriously, but looking back, I can definitely say I draw better than I did in 9th grade. That's got to count for something...
maybe...
Anyway, these were...not my favorite, but pieces that hinted at something(s) I could think about.
These three ink drawings I like for how I seem to go from obsessively thick lines one moment to messy brushwork the next. But, as far as techniques go, I'm not that experimental. The stiff one in the middle with the figures is me in 'okay, gotta illustrate' mode. It was for a paid job, so I thought the more time I spent on a line, the better it would look. Not true. The other two were illustrations for short stories in the Yale Daily News Magazine. Whenever I do work for them, I try to switch it up a bit everytime, and care a little less. Maybe with better results. Sometimes they just turn out plain weird, but mostly they just turn out plain better. So.
This last one is the only actually 'sketchy' pen sketch that wasn't torn out of my high school history notebook (I drew a lot of nude backs during a unit on Russia...why?). Its of the sorority house I lived in, enjoying a semi-monastic lifestyle with a bunch of smart young people one summer at a program in high school. This little breakfast area looked out onto a teensy courtyard garden the house was built around. I want such a little garden in the center of my future house. It feels like you've framed nature and displayed it in your house.

Emir

2009-07-11T11:32:00.000-07:00

I finally semi-finished this drawing. Rendering ever blade of grass became such a hassle for what I think in the end was little payoff, that I left it on my drawing board and refused to look at it for weeks. I dove back in yesterday and roughly filled in the rest, namely the horse and rider. The drawing was inspired by a sketch I did of a character from one of the many epic stories in my head, tentatively named Emir. He's not a knight. The armor came out more convincing than I'd hoped, but the entire right hand side needs some work.

Indecent Sketches

2009-07-09T12:19:00.000-07:00

These are a few sketches for ideas I might want to do. The first is a sketch inspired by Edo-period e-maki illustrations of the Tale of Shuten Doji, which I saw at the Sackler Gallery in DC last week. I really appreciate Japanese illustrated scrolls, mostly because of the luscious way the calligraphy and illustrations are treated. You can actually see the ink sitting thickly on the paper, you can see the difference in sheen between matte ink and glossy gold, etc. I also enjoy trying to 'read' the story without knowing exactly what's happening, following the visual cues: for example, finding and following the main character, usually designated by a repeated kimono pattern of some sort. Also, the Japanese have a lot of bizarre but interesting demons, Shuten Doji, as far as I know, being one of the least bizarre. My favorite image, repeated in several scrolls and books, is the climactic one: Minamoto Yorimitsu fighting off the severed head of Shuten Doji. My sketch is a lot less exciting; I've kind of turned it into a more contemplative moment.

The second sketch is kind of a joke concept I got after reading something by a typographer named Geofroy Tory. He mentioned something about letters should reflect the ideal human body. I immediately thought of the Vetruvian Man, but with women, then the word 'indecent' crept into my mind, and suddenly I want to make a small series of rather lewd letterforms. Ever since I made a small piece that used gang hand signs as a pretend-typeface called Synez, I've wanted to try another way to integrate the human body and letters.
We'll see how this turns out...

Textiles: my new source material

2009-07-06T09:13:00.000-07:00

I can't believe my summer is half over. I haven't drawn much in weeks, mostly due to the distractions of daily life and the general lethargy that plagues my unstructured vacation time. I have, however, decided to pursue my interest in using textiles as inspiration for my work (as is evidenced by my blog's new layout, colors borrowed from the pattern on a kimono I own). I have always been fascinated by patterns and the symbols used within them, and I once used Kenyan textile patterns in a horrendous series of paintings I did as a sophomore. I've tried, but never quite succeeded, until recently, in producing the kind of patterns I consider successful. The drawing above is not an example of a 'successful' use of patterns for me, but a triumph in stitching together source material: the architecture is based on a Moorish mosque in Spain, the rest is from sketches, photographs, etc. The drawing was completed a few weeks ago, exploring ways to use pattern in my usually figurative work. Using colored pencil was a way to torture myself into drawing more. This one, tiny drawing took so long I actually cried at one point during its production. Priority number one: expediting my production. As enjoyable as scribbling the same square centimeter of space for hours at a time may sound, I think, you know, for my health, I need to speed it up a bit.