More Character Designs

These are a series of characters that are basically our generation 50-60 years in the future, as big kids that never really grew up/out of things that were trendy in their '20s. They meet in an online chatroom and decide to go on a cross-country motorhome trip while they're still relatively healthy. So, without further ado:

Kyle O'Connor : Kandi Kid raver. Lives with his boyfriend Trent in rural Connecticut. Likes to get together with friends and have old-school rave parties. 

Mariah West: Ex-hardcore porn star and current owner of a huge pornography and fetish equipment company. Lives with husband in New York City, has 5 kids, none of whom followed in her footsteps. 

Nicole Dominguez, "Nikki": Venezuelan immigrant working various retail jobs in Camden, NJ. An ex-juggalette and bodymodder - she covered most of her limbs with scarification "tribal" tattoos. 

Corey Hardis: Tattoo-happy ex-straight edge kid living in Nashville, TN. Is now a bitter old alcoholic. His secret: Appears to be vain about his hair. But, in his youth he tried out the skinhead thing for a few years, got a skinhead tattoo on his head, and now is deathly afraid that he'll go bald and everyone will see it. 

Woo! 

Beasts

I'm sorry for the updating drought - life has been happening. No excuses!
Here's a bunch of stuff I have made for my character design class this semester!

a series of 3 beasts and their "owners." 

a "Moga," a.k.a. Japanese flapper girl.

These 2 guys were part of an ongoing group project - a fictional comic book thriller, called "Wendigo," where a group of characters get stranded in wintry minnesota by a train crash, lost style. My two characters, "Lawrence Stuggs" and "Amos" are, in succession, the hysterical train conductor and the drunk train-hopper.

Interior of the kitchen after the crash.

Cover for a volume of the comic.

2 "creatures."

These have been fun! I'll be posting more soon.

Things

Updates! I've been a busy little beeeee.

Here's some sort of lo-res process shots of how my fabric portraits are going:

Here are all the cut pieces laid out. 

Done some beadwork, 

a little detail. Those hip bustle things are made of green stretch velvet that are stuffed a tiny bit underneath. 

Mah messy studio.

Here are some things i've been doing in screen print: 

These are twelve of my favorites out of about twenty monoprints of this one. This queen's an evil witch queen (however she ended up being more adorable than evil) :-)

These are two different editions of my 5-headed queen, one done in CMYK and one done in random colors of my choice. I like to think of this one and the queen above as a sort of Wicked Witch of the West/Glinda the Good Witch pair. 

Here are also some more sketches I did for my thesis project scanned from my sketchbook!

These three are my top favorites of this round.

These are some random doodles that aren't going to make it to final but I thought were amusing.

And this was something that I thought was so delightfully silly that I turned him into a little fabric sketch. 

Tee-sis

Hello agaain! This is my beginning-of-thesis-holy-crap update. So I've decided that my thesis project is going to be (*drumroll please*)

Portraits of Extraterrestrial Monarchs (cue some punny wordplay on the word "monarch"..... spawnarch? mon-alien? Overlords? Underlords? weak, I know.)

Why that, you say? Well, I started out knowing I wanted to create characters and make embroidered/appliqued fiber portraits of them. So I was thinking of stories to do and I was not coming up with anything I was excited about. So, I thought about the things that I got excited about doing last semester and I thought about my Concepts II dolls project and my Character Design 70s Alien project. And, what better way to combine the two than to create stuffy, pretentious, (hopefully) humorous portraits of quasi-human-like alien creatures in ridiculous costumes ?

I am also secretly (or not-so-secretly) poking fun at the concept of Monarchy and the unbelievable amount of pomp and circumstance that goes into being king and/or queen (I also may or may not be obsessed by 17, 18, and 19th century costume). Many of the "planets" I came up with are also parodies of human economical systems and how flawed they are. Probably the most important thing is that my sense of humor is appeased and shows through, and I hope it shows in these drawings that I did when I was fooling around and conceptualizing:

this little dude is my absolute favorite ^

these are just some funny little doodles when I was researching costumes: 

 

 

That one on the left was the one that inspired my screen printing queen below! 

Retro Aliens

So, these are an assignment for Character Design - we basically had to come up with 8 Characters that had a story behind them with a chosen theme. So, my chosen theme (from the teacher's list) was Alien Sprawl and Brave New World. These little aliens are confused aliens from a planet about 40 light-years away who are vaguely humanlike. They know we exist, and want to be like us, but their only form of correspondence from us is radio and TV waves from the 70s that they picked up. So, getting ready to come to our planet, they deck themselves out in garbled versions of what they think we will think is "cool," and gave themselves "earth names" of famous 70s icons. so here goes (Click to enlarge): 

Barbra

Karen

Donny

Farrah (couldn't help myself)

Dusty

Marie

Cher

And those are their character sheets and height charts. I guess I just felt like being silly when I made these - good not to take ourselves too seriously, right?