pastels, mostly

just in case you guys were wondering what the heck i've been doing lately, here is an update. a lot can happen in three months - sorry about that. i am the worst blogger some days.

what i want to get for my next tattoo...mmmmmm yes

a highly unrealistic caricature of a man who mildly resembles TheBoy if you squint real hard.

an abstracted guitar of sorts. unfinished. 

zentangles! it's like doodling, but a little more sophisticated.

Honduras water color. i'm in the process of making some cards with these on the front. should be good.

chalk pastel sunflower. i turned out liking this a lot more than i originally planned.

what i've been doing recently

here's just a tad of what i've been up to lately in the art world.

watercolor. chalk pastel.

lots of ink work. the library can get boring.

and remember those graffiti sketches i posted almost a month ago? well, here's the development of the second idea:

it's all framed and ready to be hung in the gallery next week. the artist opening is on the 19th and i couldn't be more stoked!

sketched

I've been playing around with the idea of a graffiti landscape, and at first I had no idea what that could possibly entail. So I did what every young artist does these days and hopped on the interwebs to see what kinds of came up when I entered those words into the google machine. I was pleasantly surprised by what I found.

I also talked to my family to see if they could brainstorm any ideas, and let me tell you - some of the things that father of mine came up with where pure genius.

So here are two concepts I'm developing:

This is based off of the idea to merge the graffiti and landscape through a word. At first I was trying to put the landscape inside of the letters, but I wasn't really excited about what was flowing from my fingers. So instead I started drawing the landscape on top of the word, still incorporating plants and trees into the letters, but in a different way than originally anticipated. So far so good.

And here we have a slightly underdeveloped concept, placing graffiti font into a graffiti style landscape. So far I love this, but it still needs some work. I want to put a little Zacchaeus figure in the tree and move the letters around to a better spot. 

Eventually these will turn into paintings and not just sketches. Which will be incredibly exciting! At least for me.

remembrance

Here is the latest oil painting I've finished. I created it for a friend's mom in remembrance of her mom's father.

I'm a bit annoyed with a few things, but overall I think it turned out great. Sorry for the crappy cell phone pictures - the lens on my phone is scratched and it just doesn't do justice to the way things look.

some watercolors

I really like painting with watercolors. It's probably one of my very favorite things to do. Ever.

Some art supplies were donated to our school by a woman who's mother had been an artist. After she passed there were all these supplies that needed someone to love them, so she gave them to us. There were a lot of different types of supplies, among them a plethora of tubed watercolor paints. I died. They are the greatest. Today I played with them to create this mermaid: 

Lately...In Art World

Beginning Pottery

I have never taken a pottery class of any sort, in high school, college or otherwise. So imagine my somewhat dismay when I found out the my student teaching semester would be filled with not just one but three different pottery classes. I am learning so much about clay and ceramics these days, folks. I think it's my new favorite.

Although, if we're being honest, the gesture drawing in our advanced art has rekindled my love for all things charcoal and I just don't think pottery is cool enough to take the number one spot. But it is a dramatically close second place.