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! 

New!

Helloooooo, it's been a while since the last art update. Well, I've been busy here doing this and that (everything) and I wanted to share my first screen print with y'all.


 This first print is called "What Goes Around." This is the first run:

and this is the second, infinitely more complicated run (the colors are a little off - the  yellow is not quite so overpowering in the physical one): 

But yeah. Screen printing is fun! 

this next thing is just the positive image that is going to be turned into my next screen print, but I kind of enjoyed it how it looks as ink on mylar: 

This image fits in with my thesis project, which I shall inform you on in a separate post when I have more concrete drawings to update you on. 

I recently was given a Pentax k1000 and have been fooling around with it. It's wonderful!! Of course the colors are butchered by blogger but you get the general gist I hope :)

These were all taken while tooling around Pasadena! 

More Doll-like Contraptions.

So, these are not legit photos as I have not been able to procure a good camera and a good photographing space for these little guys, but here are some iphone photos that give you the basic gist of what I did for my Concepts II project. (For a the post with the first half of the project, click HERE.)

So. Here's this little thing - it's kind of a snail-like thing with crouching legs.

And when you unroll it, it magically becomes a giant phallus. Funny, that. 

It's blue thermal shirt material, pink flannel, green vinyl cutouts, and embroidery thread. There's armature wire inside, like the other ones.

This is a little butt-hips-pillow type thing. Some nice detail shots there. This one's pink flannel, blue silky stuff (not quite sure the exact name of the material as it was found), blue beaded strings, and embroidery thread. 

Here are some more detail shots of the snailthing - its little upside-down face, and a close-up of the leaf details. Those are vinyl cutouts hand-stitched on.

And lastly, here's the finished version of that guy you saw before - I added a hot orange ponytail. Ooh La- La. It makes it more creepy, if that was ever thought to be possible. 

All of the stuff was hand-beaded, even the strings. A true labor of looove. 

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? 

Figure Sculptin'

Here is my last and most recent figure sculpture from class - it's the best one i've done all year :)

This one was two weeks!