New Stop-motion Drawings

I'm working on a couple of 15x20 drawings at the moment, and yesterday I took a few hours to photograph them for animation while drawing. I set up a camera on a tripod next to my work, focusing on the paper until it filled the frame, and then started drawing. After almost every line (and breaking some long ones in the middle), I would lean over and snap a photo with the camera. I ended up with about 800-1000 photos for each piece, taken over a period of about 1.5 hours of drawing. I downloaded, resized and renamed the photos into a sequence, and then brought them into AfterEffects for color correction, timeshifting and rendering into video. The process took most of the day, but I love the way it shows the drawing process on its own, in a sort of mysterious way that eliminates the actual creator.



Timelapse Drawing - Water Map from Emily Garfield on Vimeo.


Timelapse Drawing - Network Map from Emily Garfield on Vimeo.

Colored Maps

I've been experimenting with making entirely colored map drawings. I did a large one using blue and green acrylic paint and the effect worked really well. It also sold really quickly when I showed it at Somerville Open Studios.

I've tried it again, this time using colored pens as well. I like that it makes each element stand out a little more. It's less purely graphic than the other maps, but with the slightly more realistic approach that I'm using these days, I think it helps to make the maps more interesting.

During the last fair in Union Square I talked with a silkscreened clothing vendor who had a stall near me at SOS as well. He said that he had remembered my maps from that show, but he thought they were just drawings over antique maps, not completely new cartography. I thought that was kind of interesting. I'm not really looking to replicate any place too closely because I think it would be more interesting for people to be able to invent a place when looking at them, but it's good that they are recognizable.

Island Maps

I've been working on a new idea for map drawings. I've basically reversed the role of the ink; instead of making bodies of water, it instead makes islands, and then habitations are drawn in.

I love the impossibly long "bridges" and the way they intersect. I can completely imagine the kind of habitation that would grow up here. I think it comes from viewing photos of native towns during my visual research yesterday.

Illustration Collaboration Online!

I just posted a new section to my website for a collaborative illustration project that I did for a show. Please check it out! The thumbnail images are a little wonky at the moment, but I'll have to take more time to fix those. For now, just click on each to enlarge and cycle through the group.

New Old Drawings

I just recently dug up some old watercolors and sketches for a job interview, and am in the process of posting them to my site. Some of these are from an independent study I did sophomore year....and the portrait in pencil is from my very first art class at Brown! It's old, but I still like it and think of it when I think of realistic sketches that I've done.

This is just a sample - more can be seen at my website.

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...!

City Pieces

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?