Collecting bits of this and that...

With this week's mini exercise, I kicked myself over and over again for getting rid of so much STUFF in the move last month, as we were instructed to gather papers, textures, bit of this and that, and random  things to collage with later in the week. Assigned colors by astrological sign, this Sagittarius collected yellow and blue items. I raided my studio, and my newly inherited sewing machine and kit from my grandma, who passed away a few months ago. I haven't had time to go through it yet, so it was a JOY to sit down and dig through all her buttons and thread, machine parts and doilies.

MATS week 3 assignment - cranky grumpy ornery snail

Last week's focus for Make Art That Sells was on the children's book market, and our assignment was to create a cover or a double page spread for the Hans Christian Andersen tale "The Snail and The Rose Tree", based on our snail sketches from earlier in the week, and hand-drawn lettering.

My double page spread

The story is pretty bleak - it features an ornery, selfish, dark, mean snail, who cares for no one, puts down those around him, and never changes. A lot of people in the class didn't care for how dark and bleak the message was, but I enjoyed it. I liked drawing a crotchety snail, and I wanted to show with color, how gray and depressing his outlook was. I had a great time drawing the type, and will definitely try that again in future pieces.

I tried again the scan-on-my-sketches-and-use-Live-Trace technique that I did back in week 1 for bolt fabric, and I really like the sketchiness of my snail character. I added color and texure and pattern in Illustrator - and that was a big deal for me, since I normally NEVER use texture in my work, only flat shapes. Its opened up a whole new world!

Overall, I like my piece. It conveys what I wanted it to convey, and I branched out with texture. As I was finishing it though, I wished I had done it in traditional mediums - either pen and ink with some collage or paint, or pastel or something.... I wish I had left more white space, and really focused more on the bleakness of the snail. It was hard to juggle how much life and color of the rose tree to show, in correlation with the grayness of the snail's life... And I wished I had used funkier colors - I'm still having so much trouble branching away from my usual palette - aurgh! (Though its a lot more neutral and gray colors than I normally use.) This is one assignment that I think I will do again after the class is over.

Snails... mad, sad, nerdy, sporty and everything in-between

This week's mini exercise finds me sketching snails and playing with hand drawn type... And I'm having a lot of fun!

MATS Week 2 Assignment - Tabletop!

This week in my back-to-school adventure brought us to the world of home decor, with the week's big assignment focusing on table top and plates. We were instructed to use the sketches from earlier in the week of seed pods, leaves and unusual flowers, and create 2-4 plates. So far I've done 2, and since I'm going out of town for the weekend, I guess I'll be stopping at that amount.

As I write this, I am exhausted! I've spent a marathon day today, cranking out this artwork (though I started it several days ago, and have been working a little each evening, today was the main stuff.) My head hurts, I'm thirsty, but I'm excited about the results. I PAINTED!!! WHOOO HOOOOOO. This was one of my goals for this course - to break away from completely vector art and get back to traditional mediums. I played to gouache, and incorporated pen and ink, scanned them all in, and layered them together in Photoshop. Hooray for texture, hooray for dirty paintbrushes, hooray for breaking out of my comfort zone!

Actually, it wasn't quite as painful as I had anticipated - in fact, I really really enjoyed it, and I'm excited to keep playing in the upcoming weeks. Whats next? Who knows! Maybe I'll bring back cut paper from my college days, maybe I'll dig out the acrylics again - the sky's the limit.

This one is the one I submitted for class.

Seed pods and bud doodles

Week 2 of Make Art That Sells finds me doodling seed pods, flower buds and leaves. I broke out the gouache paint for some of them - wow its been years. I'm a little embarrassed to say a few of my gouache tubes had dried up since I last used them.... I'm thinking for this week's assignment I will go strictly traditional medium..... well, we'll see.....

MATS - Week 1 Assignment

Phew! I'm throwing in the towel and calling this week's assignment DONE. The concentration this week was on Bolt Fabric, and we were given the assignment of creating 2 vintage kitchen patterns (with coordinates) using the mushroom and pyrex sketches from earlier in the week. My goal for this course is to break out of my usual standard cutsie art and get more sophisticated and textured, experiment and GROW as an artist. I almost always go immediately for flat shapes, bright colors, and I found it was SO HARD to break away from that. I definitely want to get away from the computer for some/a lot of this course, but because this week is Bolt Fabric, I knew the computer would be my best bet. The sketching exercises earlier this week were so much fun and amazing, and I was jazzed to start the patterns, because I thought 'hey no problem, I already do a ton of fabric, so this will be a breeze to put together, I'll just concentrate on the more-sophisticated part" - I daydreamed I'd do it all in Photoshop - scan in my sketches, easily add amazing texture - it would be perfect, the sun would shine and the birds would sing my name, the art would be that good.

Um, no.

oh, I tried. I scanned in my sketches, and played in Photoshop - I am pretty good at Photoshop, but my go-to program is Illustrator, which I know like the back of my hand. I have to actually think when I use Photoshop...oh dear. And it was stressful, and I wasn't having fun. My sketches didn't look nice when brought into the computer, I was struggling with a vintage color palette, I couldn't get the textures to look how I wanted them to. Sigh. I wasn't having fun. So I stopped, and went back to Illustrator. I knew I wanted to keep the lovely breath-filled alive feeling of my sketches, of the line work - so I used  Live Trace... this is something that I NEVER do. I always scan in my pencil sketches for each project and then use the pen tool to draw over them - thus creating a beautiful, almost-perfect-but-definitely-from-my-hand icon. Not this time. This time, I thought, Vita you are GROWING UP.

And I struggled some more. There are so many variables you can change and adjust with Live Trace, that is was time-consuming to find something I was happy with. But I stuck with it, and reminded myself that this struggle was GOOD for me. I need this uncomfortableness. I don't have to be amazing at everything, it is a learning process. I reminded myself that I normally LOVE the art-creating process of a project (oh how I identified with Lilla's video from yesterday - I love love the process more than the satisfaction of the finished piece). Good Vita, embrace the pain.

The first piece I created was the mushroom/vegetable piece and I really struggled with the colors. NO MORE CUTSIE VITA. I kept second-guessing myself and thinking holy cow you are terrible. Then some parts weren't completely awful. And that beet, oh my god that beet, so damn nice. Ok I thought, not the greatest, but it's good enough.

And so I took a short break, and then jumped into the second piece, the kitchen items and pyrex. For this one I had a much clearer picture in my mind of what I wanted it to look like, and that helped A LOT. I gave myself a break and went with slightly sweeter colors. I started with one bowl, and loved the look of the icon on a light background, and found my joy again. FINALLY. This once came together less-painfully, thought I admit I was second guessing myself a lot with this one as well.

So after a good night's sleep (hey, it was a 16 hour work day for me...ugh) I got up and put a little bit more time into it this morning. And yes, finally, I am happy with it. They aren't perfect, and there is a lot to improve on, but it was a good first-attempt. Baby steps. I'm excited to keep going with this course and see what comes next.

Which one did I turn in? The one that made me find my joy again, Kitchen Items....
(click on each one to see it larger)

 First piece : Mushrooms and Vegetables

Second piece: Kitchen Items

More mushrooms and some pyrex

More for Making Art That Sells... I'm looking forward to tomorrow's assignment.