brittney's 3D entries

kDee is very sweet and kind hearted her match is Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.

















Avery is one of my friends that is going to school for music. He wants to be a producer/mixer and he raps. I chose Apollo the sun god, because he was also the god of poetry, music, and all that fun stuff.



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.

Things I dislike:

1.) I painted directly on the people I was illustrating, but didn't find anything to capture the quality of my sketches onto skin. So that was a pretty big fail for me. I was using brush pen, but it bled and got all yucky and pretty much looked like rubbish.

2.) I am so insanely busy with working full time, my other summer class, and preparing to leave for vacation on Sunday, on top of a hundred other things going on in my life that I didn't have a lot of time this week I was going to print it out on vellum and make the nice spreads again for the previous week and this week to match the first entries more, but alas.

3.) Arranging times to meet up with people was kind of hard and blocking out an hour to paint them.

4.) I didn't finish Kdee's sketch yet, I am creatively drained/falling into the I don't give s*** category, hence the much needed vacation for the summer.

5.) I don't know why jakes bio is underlined in blue like a link, I couldn't get that to go away.

Things I do like:

I really like the illustrations by themselves in the tempera instead of watercolor I think that was improved and I'm satisfied with them especially the robot <3

brittney's maximizing the page - entries

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.


Maximizing the Canvas:

I tried a new technique of drawing/painting on a human canvas my roommate volunteered, and I think it turned out pretty cool. It was my first time ever so I tried to use water soluable materials like crayola markers, water color, and brush pen, also, I didn't want her to break out or anything. But I think if I'm pushing this like I intend to do for next week I'm going to need to find better mediums maybe invest in face/body paint or something similar made for skin application. It was surprising how well the pieces fit compositionally to the curves of the body and I'm very happy with placement/composition for the most part. I want to be a tattoo artist eventually so this was kind of fun to just play with using skin as a canvas.

Next week, I'm going to get the people I'm doing for my journal to sit for me so I can draw their portrait and their alter ego on them and then take pictures :)

Things I'm Not Happy About:

1.) Obviously, I didn't allow myself enough time to sew the transparent parts on and I lost my needle on top of it, so I will have to sew them on and re-scan them later this week.

2.) I had intended to print the pictures of the illustrations on vellum and then sew the printed ones on to keep consistency, but when I went to the store to buy vellum for my printer, they were out of the slightly frosted vellum that I normally print on so I bought semi-transluscent drafting paper and tried to print on that instead, but its much more slick than the vellum and the ink smeared right off and made a mess for me and my printer, so I had to improvise and just crappily layer it in Photoshop to be able to post it on here on time.

3.) When moving things around in my studio I accidently ripped off part of Julian's head. Whoops!

brittney's depth and content entries

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.

brittney's title page, collection, and mind maps

Title Page:
My Visual Journal is an exploration of my interests with:
people
portraiture
illustration
& fairy tales/mythology








<3 britt


Collection: 2 page spread in journal 2/4 pages thus far. Ripped images to form collage from:
~An Illustrated Treasury of Fairy and Folk Tales by James Riodan
~Favorite Tales From Grimm & Andersen Illustrated by Jiri Trnka
~Andersen's Fairy Tales Illustrated by Maxwell Armfield
~Grimm's Fairy Tales Illustrated by Ludwig Emil Grimm
~Myths, Gods and Fantasy by Pamela Allardice


Mind Map 1:
Theme 1: Others Around Me - Basically, portraits with descriptions paralleling my friends with alter ego characters from fairy tales specifically Grimm & Andersen tales, and Norse and Greek Mythology. (See Mind Maps for more specifics)







Mind Map 2:
Theme 2: Modern Day Fairy Tales/Mythology - My own modern twist on Grimm & Andersen's tales or Norse and Greek Mythology. (See Mind Map for more specifics)