Talon is wonderful I can blab about him forever and all the sickenly sweet things I would say would make you want to vomit, but he is very honest, trustworthy, and I have lots of faith in him. I chose his mythological alter ego to be Odin, because he loves Norse mythology and because I thought it fit pretty well. Odin has two ravens Thought and Memory, a sweet sword, usually is brandishing a helm and shield, and has an eight legged horse. Along with a pack of two wolves that he commands and a magic spear that never misses its target and a magic ring, which are not featured in my illustration. And on top of it he only consumes wine or mead. Party on Odin, party on. And Valkyries are his bitches. That's right. Talon is wise beyond his years and bad ass. So that's where I drew the comparison. My Odin is kind of like a monstrous combination that's more of an eight legged centaur. For Talon I chose red for the vibrant energy.
Myra is my best friend, room mate, and one of my favorite people ever. She is kind, considerate, caring, loyal, and everything you could want in a best friend. Along with being compassionate, she always sees the good in people and is very intelligent. Her fairy tale alter ego is Beauty from Beauty and the Beast. In my modern rendition she is a punk-ish looking girl with a torn dress, converse high tops, and the Beast is protecting her, because she herself is fragile and sensitive to the real world around her. Beauty was selfless and took the place of her father at Beast's castle. And able to see the goodness inside the Beast despite his appearance. I always think of purple for tranquility/calm when I think of Myra, so I went with purple and indigo.
p.s. to everyone, I, for some reason am much better at drawing women than I am at drawing men. That is all.
Brian has been a close friend since the beginning of high school. I chose Orpheus, because he was essentially a sweet bard. Brian is really good at telling stories, and entertaining people in general he's very funny and sociable. However, like Orpheus, Brian doesn't have very good luck with the ladies. The death of Orpheus is what is most concerning Orpheus decided one day to stop believing in Dionysus his patron god and instead chose to follow Apollo the sun god and renounced all the other gods, so a mob of Dionysus' followers came to him at sun rise while he waited for Apollo and cut off his head. I find it almost too coincidental with the timing of this project that our friendship of many years is becoming precarious, and follows the storyline a little too well. Minus the beheading part. Brian wears lots of lime green and whenever I see green it reminds me of him.
Overall for these entries I focused on the techniques of:
Random Stimulation: While I was sketching the portraits and characters I had it in my mind that they would be completely finished drawings mixed with acrylic or tempera, but as I was sketching rather aggressively I stopped paying attention to what I was doing and really focused on the sketches themselves, and didn't even think. It became a kinetic exercise and like Jackson Pollock always ranted on about it was "an act of the collective subconscious" "almost like a trance." I liked them so much I decided to leave them and top them with india ink and workable fixative in case I wanted to re-approach it later, but I love the sketches themselves being raw and energetic.
Color Selection: Rather than choosing multiple colors I decided to pick one color per person and character that I felt most strongly associated with that person. Subjectively assigning color, if you will. Then focused on hues and textures to make my entries more tangible.
Visual Voice: I had been thinking about how I would want my journal to look and I wanted it crazy and expressive, but polished and presentable at the same time. I think by using the sketches with the textured paper, and hand stitching it created a mood for the rest of my journal, that I am glad to carry out. The only thing I wanted to do and didn't yet was add copy of descriptions like what I typed next to the spreads above. I ran out of time to write and stitch those, but if I have more free time this week I will revisit that idea, because I really like the idea of my visual journal being a complete piece based off of process and exploration.
Embedded Images: I found that using the transparent drawing paper would allow to see the beautiful textures underneath the line work of my sketches. And then hand stitched the images onto the paper giving it an even more tangible feeling and the action itself was very personal.
Jake is one of my old co-workers from hot topic. He lives really close to school in a punk house with like 8 other people. His match is Dionysus modified into a drunken robot because he loves robots and loves being drunk. 
Tara is another one of my best friends. She is very book smart, loves her dog, and acts like shes my mom a lot (i.e. cooks for me, asks about my health/sleep, and like to "take care" of me), and has a sparrow tattoo on her foot. I chose Artemis the Greek goddess of nature/wilderness and childbirth as Tara's alter ego. Artemis is usually depicted with either a stag, wolf, or bird and because of Tara's tattoo I chose to stick mostly with birds. The moon is also associated with Artemis. Tara in general reminds me of being very earthy, so I chose an earth tone palette for her.
Julian goes to MCAD and is one of my friends from school. He is pretty much made for medieval times. If this were like an era of Vikings and stuff he would fit right in, but its not, so he's just overly muscular and tall with a deep voice. Julian is very nice to me though and sometimes I feel like he gets sort of a bad rep as being scary, but he's really a big ole softie. Anyways, Julian is quite the party animal and he often times has this coin-like personality sort of like a good side and a bad side well not necessarily bad, but a "darker" side. His alter ego is a lycanthrope or more commonly known "werewolf". The lycanthrope can be traced back to Greek mythology. The most obvious connection being the transformation and struggle between balance of good/evil. If Julian were a color to me, he would me muddy water colored, in a good way that's not an insult and only makes sense to me I'm pretty sure, so I tried to combine a scheme that fit that feeling.
Willie is hands down one of my funniest friends, we worked together at Best Buy for like ever and he is soooo funny. He has this unicorn sweatshirt he wears all the time in public and he really likes this game on Adult Swim called Robot Unicorn Attack so, the obvious love of unicorns originally drew me to choosing a unicorn for his alter ego specifically a badass rainbowy robot one, but the unicorn is also mentioned in Lewis Carroll's Alice Through the Looking Glass and is quite humorous. I chose blue, because we worked at Best Buy and I mostly saw him wearing blue.
Talon is wonderful I can blab about him forever and all the sickenly sweet things I would say would make you want to vomit, but he is very honest, trustworthy, and I have lots of faith in him. I chose his mythological alter ego to be Odin, because he loves Norse mythology and because I thought it fit pretty well. Odin has two ravens Thought and Memory, a sweet sword, usually is brandishing a helm and shield, and has an eight legged horse. Along with a pack of two wolves that he commands and a magic spear that never misses its target and a magic ring, which are not featured in my illustration. And on top of it he only consumes wine or mead. Party on Odin, party on. And Valkyries are his bitches. That's right. Talon is wise beyond his years and bad ass. So that's where I drew the comparison. My Odin is kind of like a monstrous combination that's more of an eight legged centaur. For Talon I chose red for the vibrant energy.
Myra is my best friend, room mate, and one of my favorite people ever. She is kind, considerate, caring, loyal, and everything you could want in a best friend. Along with being compassionate, she always sees the good in people and is very intelligent. Her fairy tale alter ego is Beauty from Beauty and the Beast. In my modern rendition she is a punk-ish looking girl with a torn dress, converse high tops, and the Beast is protecting her, because she herself is fragile and sensitive to the real world around her. Beauty was selfless and took the place of her father at Beast's castle. And able to see the goodness inside the Beast despite his appearance. I always think of purple for tranquility/calm when I think of Myra, so I went with purple and indigo.
Brian has been a close friend since the beginning of high school. I chose Orpheus, because he was essentially a sweet bard. Brian is really good at telling stories, and entertaining people in general he's very funny and sociable. However, like Orpheus, Brian doesn't have very good luck with the ladies. The death of Orpheus is what is most concerning Orpheus decided one day to stop believing in Dionysus his patron god and instead chose to follow Apollo the sun god and renounced all the other gods, so a mob of Dionysus' followers came to him at sun rise while he waited for Apollo and cut off his head. I find it almost too coincidental with the timing of this project that our friendship of many years is becoming precarious, and follows the storyline a little too well. Minus the beheading part. Brian wears lots of lime green and whenever I see green it reminds me of him.
Collection: 2 page spread in journal 2/4 pages thus far. Ripped images to form collage from:
Mind Map 1:
Mind Map 2:
My editorial piece was about criminalizing miscarriage in Utah, pretty much if they suspect any foul play they will arrest the mom, kind of unconstitutional and the law does not clearly define what is or is not included in the law so plenty of loop holes for douches but if there is a good prosecutor anything can apply if twisted around right. So We had to work with symbols and metaphors. The symbols are the broken heart made by the framing of the hands and the orange jail uniform. It shows the heart brokeness and the pain involved in miscarriage and how they are trying to make something that can happen accidently and naturally into something criminal adding insult to injury. Loves playing around with texture this is a re-done assignment looks much better than the first go around. Very successful and polished, and strong use of concept that is relevant to the article that I chose for this particular topic.
Pulp printing, so taking what i learned from the hand made paper you again take the screen and use the base color of whatever pulp you were using (bottom right was a lovely lavender mix Bridgitte O'Mailey made for us) and transfer it to the felt cloth. Then you place a stencil I made my stencil with one of those overhead transparency sheets (can't remember what its called but its semi-thick sheet of clear plastic) and an exacto knife. Place the stencil on the still wet paper square base. Mix more pulp, with dye, setting mix which is like goo, and color holder so it doesnt blend and bleed all over. Mix that concoction to a good consistency and then you literally paint over the stencil and you paint with more pulp onto the wet pulp creating an image that dries when the fibers attach to one another and then it is permanently stuck in the paper. I chose to do old school roses and they turned out beautifully.
Cut lino-block!
Please full view to get the desired bigger higher res pic k thanks. This is a zombie chick eatin a heart :] for my digital illustration class we had to illustrate the topic "food". which I very loosely interpreted. gonna change some stuff like the outlines and add a background maybe play with not using black.
This is the finished cut block of linoleum I can continually use this to make more prints if I desire.
I printed on a small hand press in the print shop and I used acid-free scrapbooking paper I got from jo anns from another project I did last year fortunately I had lots of victorianesque and very grungy purples and reds which worked beautifully for my theme. I had to make 7 editions so I have 7 prints total all on a different design of paper. I am VERY pleased with how this came out [: The following are some examples of the different types of papers and to show the different quality of the prints due to how much ink was applied and pressure.
This is the swatch for the pattern.
