indignities fit for an undergrad

Hey Team,
As you may know, this semester I am in a professional practices course where each week the gang is given a presentation from a successful professional. We have already been lectured by Yuko and the legendary Milton Glaser. We also hear from creative directors and get our portfolios reviewed. Before any of that could happen, our professor, the great and wondrous Mirko Ilic reviewed our portfolios to offer direction on what we should show to the bigwigs.
He announced in front of everyone that I need to learn to paint hands.
I could have died of shame.
He told me the hands were bad in this piece and this piece and this piece and that he sensed I was deliberately avoiding painting sets of hands in this piece and this piece (if that's true I swear to you that it was subconscious).
Now to complete my humiliation and to avoid such future chastisement I have been doing a page a day out of Hogarth's Drawing Dynamic Hands, which is an activity appropriate only for a college sophomore. THE INDIGNITY OF IT ALL!
Hopefully it will cure me of this affliction, even if Hogarth's hands are strangely stylized. He simplifies knuckes into little upside-down hearts/buttcracks, and I don't know anyone who's finger tips are shaped like long skinny shovels . . .

I hope you appreciate the vulnerability I am sharing with you here, team

:(

no nude of the week this time.
Its a 3 week pose, so in a couple weeks there will be NUDE OF THE MONTH
and its gonna be a doozie

S of I sketchnight

Hey team,
perhaps I have mentioned I have resumed my old internship in the permanent collection at Society of Illustrators. They asked me back, and I figured since no one else was lining up to gainfully employ me, I might as well be hanging out at Society and taking advantage of the events there and satisfying my fetish for original Leyendeckers.
Last night I went to their sketch night, which was grand. We had a male model who looked a bit like Devendra Banhart and was so scrawny that all my sketches of him have an Egon Schiele feel. So that was fun. I only stayed for the 5's and 10's though because I had to meet Kikkomonster downtown for dinner later on.

2 min warmups:

5 minutes:
10 minutes:

an announcement

"Crabapple" by A.E. Kieren, 2011

Hey team,

now that I am at last forever freed of the Yiddish curses project, the time has come for us to discuss my next major ongoing project. For the next two terms I will be working on a children's book of a sort tentatively titled An Appointment in the Dreamworld.

I daren't tell you too much about it because I want to give myself some latitude to let the creative process ebb and flow, and also should the time come that it is published I want you to be obliged to buy it. And nobody's going to buy the ice cream truck if I'm giving away the popsicles for free (tee hee).
I will tell you that this book will have a lot of double meanings and riddles and allegory and other fun stuff.

inspiration hunting

today my camera and I stepped out with Alaina to finally visit the Library of Morbid Anatomy in Brooklyn, and to otherwise seek inspiration for my new book project, which will consume my life for the next 7 months and so must be done right

so nice to have a day off and feel a little bit productive at the same time

nood of the week (back to doods)

BUY IT!

the head of Carl Titolo

As I have maybe mentioned, Team,
this semester I am auditing an undergraduate class in figure sculpture for illustrators. The course is taught by Michael Combs, who as fortune would have it is also an alumni of the very same illustrious masters program in which I am currently conducting my studies.
For my first project we were asked to sculpt the head of a recognizable figure. I sought and was granted permission to do the caricatured head of the inimitable and wondrous Carl Titolo, artiste and professor extraordinaire.
Here is some reference that the boss was good enough to pose for:Some sketching, trying to make decisions about how to caricature and stylize:
And finally the finish:This head was sculpted a tad larger than was assigned, and with some extra hardware involved because when all is said and done it will be a functional marionette, dressed in high-style as Carl Titolo in a paint-streaked sweatsuit with a bandana around the neck.
I have big plans for this marionette, but for right now, it is still just a head

last nights show

well well well, team
the opening of the Ostracon show was last night, and it went swimmingly. Now that it has come and gone, I feel there is no reason not to let you see the book project in its entirety. And that's all she wrote. Now that project really truly is done done done, and I get to to start telling you about the new bigger better project I'm already at work on. Tomorrow's post is going to be a doozy.

nude of the week (it's a lady!)

hey team,
men are so much easier to paint. But this week we had a female model who looked a wee bit through the face like Uma Thurman, which I approve of.
I did a close crop of the face and upper torso because usually in these three hour sittings I don't have enough time to give the face the finesse it needs. Actually that's not why. I did this crop because Ryan Hartley made me move so my view of the pose had an extremely foreshortened pair of legs shooting right at me, and I wasn't in the mood to go through that again. Females are hard enough to paint without that.

I suppose it turned out decent enough. I'm not sure what I was thinking when I bought a square canvas, and the flesh and the background are very close in color (which is certainly unfortunate) but that shouldn't stop you from buying it.

installation day

hey teamthats my name hanging out on 23rd street for all of New York to see




team,
today we convened to hang the show (which you are all compelled to attend)
and now that the show is hung, we are ready for next tuesday's big opening,
which means I am completely, totally, 100% done with this book project

and this is how I feel about that