Day 12: Mousecat

 

MouseCat, 2006 Posed digital photograph of a needle-felted scuplture of a cat. Minor digital cleanup/tweaking.

I made this for my mother and psoed and photographed it on her desk, which is made of a long-ago-gutted pianola. It's a charming little bit of fluff, but some of the photos I took were downright surreal.

Day 11: Kiss:Heart

Kiss:Heart, 1999. Digitally manipulated and retouched photobooth picture. Originally intended to be a study for a painting.

I feel a little squicked about this one. On the one hand, it's really an iconic, almost perfect image. On the other, that's me and my ex in the original. It's very hard to be objective about its artistic value when all I see is a bad breakup (even if I was very much in love with the guy at one time). It's not as if you can tell who those people are in the picture, anyway.

Don't make good art with relationship overtones, unless you want to feel faintly dirty about it for the rest of your life. I may do the painting, just to work out the feelings I have about this piece. It's a good piece, even if I wouldn't hang it in my house.

Day 10: Gofer Service Awards

Gofer Service Awards, 1995. Pencil, colored pen and gel pen on 8.5 x 11 copier paper.

Wow, this one's the oldest so far. Very much created on the fly. We had so many apparently suicidally helpful gofers at Anime America 1995 that I felt that we needed to give them something. My sister had a small laminator, so they were photocopied and laminated, and given out to the volunteers.

I think we gave out 16 of them. I'm not sure.

The mere fact that I still possess this flimsy scrap of copypaper is amazing.

Day 9 bonus: Scary silverware

 

Scary Silverware (1999) Chapter heading illustration for privately published cookbook. Pencil, ink, colored pen, scanned and digitally cleaned, then finished in Photoshop. About half digital and half traditional, and one of my earlier tablet pieces (not much was done with the stylus though - it really isn't that difficult to draw a glob with a mouse...).

I did several illustrations for this cookbook project, including two page layouts and two old-style cookbook glamour food shots.

ETA: oops! I thought this was posted today, but it wasn't, so there'll be another up in a few.

Day nine: Shonagon

 

Shonagon (2000) Digital illustration, incorporating lines of a poem.

I wrote a poem some years back about the famous Heian era journalista Sei Shonagon, and her Pillow Book. I wanted to incorporate it into an illustration, so both could be presented together. This is the result of that first attempt.

In future, I'd like to re-work this concept, using more references to her world in the illustrative piece, such as some of the complex and beautiful color and symbol language that was used, and possibly use a more Heian drawing style. Just not too Genji-like...I think I might be capable of doing this, as I am very Asian-influenced, and I like doing linework. We'll see.

Day Eight: Study for August Hunt

 

Study for August Hunt (2004) 11 by 14 inches. Pencil on paper. Same-size plan for an illumination in the style of the Tres Riches Heurs.

I planned this as a gift for a friend, whose birthday is in August. The background is planned to be similar to the background in the August month illumination in the Tres Riches Heurs, except later in the same day or week - the grain is stacked, the reapers are gone. The foreground is a portrait of the owner of the finished piece and her horse, with her dogs running beside.

Day seven: Winter Solstice

 

Winter Solstice (2002) Digital photograph. Taken with an older Canon digital, most of the framing was done while shooting. Cropped, and slightly altered digitally (saturation and contrast were adjusted).

Sometimes landscape photography is just good. I'm no Ansel Adams, but pictures like this make me significantly less embarrassed to hold a camera in the name of art.

It was a gorgeous winter day at my mom's place, so I took the camera outside and tried to capture some of that magic.

Day 6: Androgynous Boy#2

 

Androgynous Boy#2 (2001) Scan of a three dimensional object, a jointed, poseable doll.

Amazing depth of field effects can be got from scanning 3-d objects. I was photographing this doll before sending him to the person I made him for, and on a whim, posed him several times on my flatbed scanner and this was one of the two most pleasing results. No further digital maniputlation of the image was necessary.

He is a doll with a jointed, poseable skeleton, with padding sewn in place and a cotton knit "skin" laid on top and carefully sewn in place. He's a model, a needle sculpture, and an articulated doll in one. Practically speaking, he has yarn hair, faux leather trousers, silk shirt and waistcoat. His face is needle-sculpted and drawn in with art pen. His limbs and torso are intentionally longer than would be proportional, to make him appear tall and fey.

Day five: Untitled

 

Untitled (1999) sharpie over pencil on bristol board, large areas filled with india ink. Some digital cleanup.

A study I did for a white-on-black leather jacket painting some years ago. Not much thought went into it, beyond rough subject matter - pretty girl, check, cemetery, check, rose, check...I never titled it beyond "that jacket thing," and never did the jacket, either. I think it's really more appropriate to some goth club flier, anyway, and I was really outgrowing the scene at the time.

Day Four: Blue

 

Blue (1997) dilute gouache on bristol board.

This is really a quick, one off, color study kind of thing. Yet, I loved it. And I still love it. It formed the basis for a digital piece I did a few years later, but it stands as a good piece in its own right.