Industrial Crafts

I work for an artist who's making a large-scale public art project involving a high-tech projection screen, and we're working on making the screen. It's extremely labor-intensive and requires a lot of different parts. Everyone's been coming up with cool ways to use the waste materials from the process. For my part, I used the backs of adhesive strips to make some quilled designs, and rolled discarded tape into stars. There's no good reference for the size of the stars, so they look just like paper, but they're actually very heavy, make a thunk when dropped, and I can hold maybe four in my hand at a time. They're really fun to play with, like marble balls or something.

Paper Bead Necklace

I've been making rolled paper beads constantly, and this is my first project with them. I just strung them on tigertail between silver beads and held them in place with crimp beads. I love the letters from the magazine paper, and I need to think of some more interesting ways to use these kinds of beads.

Subway Man

This man was across from me on the subway today, and looked very sketchy with his red lollipop. 

Flowered Headband

This was very easy to make. I collected some fake flowers and lace from my stashes, sewed them to a felt oval and sandwiched a fabric headband between that and another piece of felt so the whole thing can slide around. I like the color combination - I'm really looking forward to fall...!

Paper Beads

I was on jury duty until this afternoon, so I've been whiling away the time by making paper beads out of magazines. I find it pretty addictive, although the feel of Elmer's on my fingers definitely isn't.

This is about half the beads I made while waiting today. I'm stringing them together so I can coat them all with clear lacquer, and then they will be ready to put into jewelry. 

Feel free to post any ideas for these beads! I'm excited about them and open to suggestion.

Silent Carnival

Click to enlarge.

Equipment

I drew this while watching people DJ for MIT student radio. It was kind of funky being there.

Also, I apologise for not updating regularly these days but I've been busy at jury duty! I have some new scans now though so expect more soon.

Illustration Collaboration

I did a collaborative project with a writer friend for a show last year, and I tried to take photos of a couple of the pieces:

There are many more, but I wasn't pleased with the photos. Any suggestions?

City

This was my final project for Intermediate Animation last semester. I apologise for the size, but I hope it can still be seen. 

The animation was made with a combination of 2D and 3D techniques. Essentially, I used traditionally-drawn textures on a "flattened" 3D landscape. The bird is a 3D jointed character with a hand-drawn texture, and the cat is a sequence of still images, drawn in Photoshop with a traditional feel. The buildings originally had animated textures, but the technique was too complicated to work well with the rest of the animation, and would have distracted the focus from the characters. Perhaps I will post some of the studies for that part as well; they were a big hit in class...!

Boston

Have some pieces of Boston.

City Pieces

Sketches

Jewelry

Bobby pins:

Bottle cap pins: 

Cute

One of my favorite recent projects was a Cute:

It's about all I can call it. Its expression is pretty great.

Watercolor

Map Drawings

I'm thinking of doing more map drawings and having them printed as greeting cards/postcards.

If I did more screenprinting I could put them on scarves or something, but at the moment I'm limited to paper. What other applications would be good?

MoCCA Comic Con and Renegade Craft Fair

[Reposted from 6/9/09]

This weekend was busy! Saturday and Sunday we went to the MoCCA comic book convention, which was pretty inspirational. The night before I went to an event for women comic artists held at a bar on Houston Street, so I got to meet some of the artists beforehand. It was a bit silly to be going up to girls and saying "Hey, remember me from last night?" Wink. But it was lots of fun. I met two very talented girls who'd gone to comic book school in Sweden. Åsa Ekström (took me a while to find those special characters!) amazed me by drawing in an incredibly authentic manga style. Who knew that was popular in Sweden? 

I also met a couple other women there whose work I later looked up:

Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan, who write a cute slice-of-unusual-life webcomic with mythical beasts;

and Natalie R, who has an impressive deviantart account and was very supportive of my drawing efforts.

I also ran into women I recognized at the con, like Bree, who has a fun webcomic that sort of takes the same direction I intended for mine. I wish I had a working scanner so I could keep posting! I have a few things from the weekend that I'd really like to put on it. 

We also saw Randall Munroe (surrounded by fans) and I talked to Jeph Jacques for a while about drawing inspiration. That was pretty much a highlight of the con for me. And he gave me a drawing of Hannelore. 

Then we went to the Renegade Craft Fair, which was huge and full of all sorts of things. I found a lot of the crafts to be similar, and even saw some of the same belts and headbands at different stalls. I feel like maybe the fact that everyone reads the same craft blogs and magazines means that they end up making similar things, or maybe buyers just generally want the same products. But there were a lot of cute things. I'll post some links when I find the business cards I took from the event.

I'm waiting on some photos, and then I'll post some of my new projects, including a Cute...

People on trains