2008: The Best! & Original Pirate Material 2009

Hello there and welcome to my new art blog!

I plan on putting up a lot of artwork here ranging from drawings, paintings, screenprints, photographs, assignments from my major and whatever else I feel like putting up here. Like thoughts, cool stuff that's happening and plenty of other stuff. All on a weekly basis!

To start, let's take a look at what I consider my best work from 2008. (Mind you this will probably get updated when I find more things from my previous sketchbooks and assignments which are currently hanging out in my studio, so I'll probably put up a quick notice every time it's updated. This will probably only happen once, so it's not a big deal.)

This was one of my first paintings of 2008 and was made shortly after Christmas as a painting practice after I got a mid-semester review. It's of my friend Kaitlin, who really liked it a lot.

This was a painting I did for my Illustration I class at the beginning of last year. It was a practice in painting with acrylic and I was pretty pleased with the way it came out. Not necessarily pleased as punch, but pleased none the less.

This right here is a portrait of my friend Laura for my Digital Illustration class and is quite possibly the best thing I've made on a computer, considering that I'm really not that good at making art at the computer. It's my triumph!

This was made shortly before school ended and it was my first experiment with silkscreen on paper. It was more of an experiment than anything else, but I still love it.

A present that I made for my girlfriend over the summer that I want to make something more of. The original idea was to use girls, comic art and song lyrics (or rather reference to, if you can figure this out you're pretty cool.) and make these neat pop-art style comic panels like this. I didn't do much else, but I plan on revisiting this concept very soon.

This is my second assignment, Editorial, in my Black and White Illustration class. Unfortunately, this isn't the revised version, but I'll be sure to fix that in the next update when I put up new work and update this section as well.

This is another piece from Black and White, "Children's Book" which features a character named Raina (who is based off of my girlfriend, who you'll see in a moment), her robust cat Deliah and a rather wicked rat. The point of this assignment was to work exclusively with a pen nib and detail with cross hatching.

Hands down the best art piece I made in 2008 and it's another black and white assignment, Stipple Portrait, where we were supposed to do a portrait of someone who was important to us. My father had suffered a heart attack shortly before when this was assigned (he's alright now) and since he's so important to me, I decided he would be the subject of the piece. We had to incorporate three aspects of him into the work, so I used a roadmap of his hometown Aurora, Colorado, an Ovation acoustic guitar and three chords. It's currently hanging up in my studio at Mass Art.

If I missed anything that you think should be in here, please let me know so I can add it in.

Now let's move along to the newer things that I'm currently doing for the new year and the new semester, ranging from assignments to personal projects and of course, sketches... Which you'll probably see again depending on whether or not I like them enough to do more with it.

The next four sketches are all of my girlfriend when she was visiting me over the winter break.

This was drawn about a week before school started again, I was riding the sixty-six from Harvard and was just sketching people all over the bus. For some reason this guy struck me as interesting so I sketched him, I'm thinking about doing a much bigger piece with this sketch as well as what's written beneath the sketch itself.

The only good sketch I got out of a party that my Gamestop threw at my manager's apartment.

The next two are a sketch of my friend Sherrie and a test print of a lino-block of her. It's the first part of a several part series of portraits of good friends of mine. When I get the actual print up, it'll look much better than this.

Unlike last semester, I actually have time for myself. So now I can ACTUALLY make my own stuff and have personal projects, so naturally one of my first projects was to make a cardboard cut out ala Alex Carlson.

Last semester I wanted to make Altair from Assassian's Creed and I still will, but I found it a bit more pressing to make a Charles Bronson cardboard cut out.

Originally, I was going to do a much more serious version of Bronson, but then I figured "Let's have some fun with this." and I was watching a LOT of Adult Swim at the time (Sealab 2021 especially) so I decided to make a cartoony version of Bronson.

Then I painted him...

And then I posted him up on the 9th floor over by the refrigerator, asking if he can have some of the unmarked food in the fridge.

These are sketches from the first day of degree project one with Linda Bourke. I really like these sketches and I think I'm gonna do something with the drawing on the first page. Maybe a screen print or something, I'm definitely going to refine this one.

Just some stuff I was doodling in my sketchbook during Word and Image with Suzanne Barnes... I also write a LOT in my sketchbooks too.

I reckon that this is off to a good start for now. I'll be doing another post this coming week, so stay tuned, watch the skies, same bat-time, same bat-channel, etc.