Some upcoming events, etc

Wow, so it's getting to be the end of the semester. Which means that it's time to buckle down and get crazy with the self promoting.

Places where both my work and I shall be in the near future:

MSU Comics Forum

March 26th (keynote speech) and 27th in the RCAH on the MSU campus

I was fortunate enough to be able to snag a table at this event. I went to some of the panels and skulked about the artists' alley last year, and if it's even a tenth as awesome this year then I shall be pretty happy.

For more information, I offer this website.

SPACE

April 24th and 25th at the Ramada Plaza Hotel and Conference Center in Columbus Ohio

I will be sharing a table at this even with at least two other people, possibly three, depending on how things shake out. I will update you as we get closer the event and actually know which table we'll be at so's you all can fiiiiind me.

WEBSITE!

Oblique Patience (at Scene Metrospace)

May 7 - June 27 at Scene Metrospace in East Lansing Michigan

Opening Reception on Friday, May 7th from 6-9 pm

The website for this one just went live a little while ago and I've avoided looking at it because I signed on to take part in this project about a year ago now. It seems so unreal. Work is still rolling in and it sounds like the site is going to be updated a lot in the near future, so I suggest checking it out now, while it's still young, and going back to check it again and again in the future.

Please please please go to the website.

---

Hopefully, I'll have another gallery show to add to that list in the near future. I may not have much job experience to put on my resume, but I am determined to have a list of exhibitions as long as my arm by the time I'm done with school (assuming a very large point size...)

In the meantime, I should probably mention that my recent application to the BFA program here was accepted, which means, among other things, that there is no way I am graduating at the end of next year. But! It also means that I am one step closer to getting into a really fancy pants grad school.

And now, I'd like to leave you with a sketch for my next painting:

(must...paint....rational....lightsources)

The culmination of about three weeks' worth of crazed research has lead me to the purchasing of my very first netbook. It is this:

The Asus eee pc 1005peb. It's working out really well. I'm in the middle of getting everything set up to where I want it to be right now, actually. But I did turn away from it for a moment, and it fell asleep.

It fell asleep. And then started playing elevator music. I can't decide whether that is awesome or horrifying.

Either way, that feature is getting turned off NOW.

Two warm up pieces

I've just spent some time updating links to direct people this way, so I thought it would be appropriate to do a post with some art.

This time, some smaller pieces that were actually considered warm up pieces for our first project in painting 2. I consider these more successful than the final, but that's probably because, per square inch, I definitely had more time to work with them.

And also I just like the way paint sits on board more than on canvas.

Warning: abstraction

This is the first piece where I've ever really played with highly textured, loose elements against sharper, graphic ones. Plus, I really forced myself to stick with a blue/orange color palette this time, which made the image look cleaner all around, in my opinion.

I call this one 'Grand Theft Chicken,' because there are chickens in it,but in the collage I was working from I also included characters from grand theft auto. I also wanted to play more with white space, which I will definitely go back to in the future.

Weird tips for art students

Hey guys, it's been a while. This is not because I don't love you, but rather because I keep having thoughts about what I want to write about but I'm not sure which one I want to tackle first and then I decide on one and realize I have to do more research or at the very least doodle up an illustration and gosh wouldn't it be nice if I didn't have to hold the cord into my scanner with my foot while praying that my computer doesn't overheat while cs3 pulls the image slowly into my computer pixel by agonizing pixel?

And then, in the middle of the night after a long, long day, I realized what I needed to write about.

Foot care.

'But hey!' you say, 'this post is titled 'weird tips for art students', what gives?'

What gives is that proper foot care is the weird tip. Surprise!

I'm not talking about the usual horror stories that you hear going into college about fungus in the bathrooms or whatever. My dorms had communal showers and they were fine. It's amazing how much your university of choice wants to cut down on things like the spread of disease. I'm sure there are places in the world and even on my campus where ringworm and athlete's foot are actually a concern, but with the power of the internet I have no doubt you could find such things out.

...and if not, why is there no map of this? It could be crowdsourced so that people could update when they pick up some minor annoyance, like the sniffles or pink eye...anyway, I'm getting away from my point.

My point is this: I know you really like those shoes, and that they look super cool, even if they're not comfortable, but you should probably throw them away right now. Or, well, I guess you can keep them, but you should definitely also buy a pair of sturdy, all purpose shoes that your feet will be comfortable in for hours and will minimize any blistering that may happen.

Think lots and lots of cushioning. Flats may be adorable, but are they worth the pain?

I'd also invest in a thick odorless lotion, because no matter how good your shoes are, you're still going to want to give your feet a good massage at the end of the day.

If your specialization is design or something like that, it's likely that this post is pointless for you, because you're spending most of your time in front of a computer. But for painters and sculptors and ceramicists and so on and so on, you're going to be spending a lot of time standing. And the floors are all either concrete or hard tile, because those are easier to clean than carpet.

When I say 'a lot of time,' that's pretty ambiguous, and it can vary from person to person. Studio classes here are 3 hours a class, 2 times a week, and I've had two syllabi this semester state that the teacher expected 5 hours of work outside of class per week. Doing the math, that's 11 hours a class (minimum), and I'm taking 3, so that's 33 hours, which is the upper edge before you drop off the cliffs of crazy (4 classes) and into the seas of utter despair (5 classes). 2 classes is a more manageable work load, and what I'd recommend.

So, y'know, make sure you save up some general education courses for the end. And also: buy good shoes.

The mooooore you knoooooooooooooow.

(this post brought to you by 12 hours in the sculpture building)

koosh-llama

Late night blogging. You know what that means, right? That's right! As soon as I get back to school, I am doooooooomed. 8 o'clock classes mean a 6:30 wake up time for off campus students.

Dooooooooooooooooomed.

In the meantime, I have something I'd like to share with you.

I'd like to introduce to you someone I first knew of ('knew of' instead of 'knew', because I am a creepy internet lurker. Sad but true) as koosh-llama, and then lost track of.

But now, with the power of blogger, I can easily follow her blog without having to remember pesky things like urls or where I put the link in my bookmarks menu.

Her blog is here. Go. Go there. Go now. Go now and weep.

If you're running short on time, just check out Kiss the Sky, which is a brilliant little silent comic and I love it.

Taniger

Gonna say this right now, so that there's no confusion:

THIS PIECE WAS DONE ON COMMISSION. DO NOT REUSE, MODIFY, OR REDISTRIBUTE IT WITHOUT THE PERMISSION BOTH OF MYSELF AND THE COMMISSIONER.

Taniger commission by ~sparksel on deviantART

This was a sketch commission done for Taniger on Fur Affinity, who was absolutely lovely to work with. I just sent him the original copy in the mail, in fact, and he's going so far as to frame it and show it off to his family and everything. It makes me a very happy person :D

For those of you who may be interested, sketch commissions are still open at $10. Standard sketch commission rules apply.

Wearing my nerdhat

Right, so, I've been waiting to post this somewhere for a while, but couldn't do it in case someone from the yuletide art exchange over at livejournal saw it on accident--wouldn't do to spoil the surprise after all.

This went through....quite a few incarnations. Originally, it was going to be an oil painting. Hence the blocks of color--my painting teacher was a huge fanboy of one of the advanced painting students, so we all went down to look at his work when he was putting on his show and some of his techniques just...stuck with me.

Anyway, after I screwed up the real media version of this (I started working on it the day after pulling an all nighter. Foolish move on my part) I attacked it in photoshop. Everything in this, from the lineart to the textures, is digital, and is probably the first piece that I'm reasonably happy with that I can say that about. Yay!

For those of you that are interested in what I'm doing comics-wise, I will hopefully have some concept art to share with you next week. As of right now, I'm very sadly separated from my scanner, which is the only reason nothing has gone up yet. Almost done with the preliminary thumbnails, too.

Actually, even though this next one is going to be even longer than my last (I just hit 28 pages and have at least two more to go before I can reasonably say that I'm done) I feel better about being able to get it done quickly, because I'm going to be cutting down the detail like you wouldn't believe. I've also decided to try and make peace with the brush pen. I'd try to go for full on brush inking, but every time I try it my work comes out sloppier than I'm happy with and my wrist hurts for days. Besides, the pen is easier to take from place to place.

But I won't say anymore about that until I've actually got some images to go along with it. Hope everyone had (and continues to have) a happy new year.