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Fiber Fridays #8 Sewing Exploration

rissaw Leave a comment

Hello everyone,

This week I have been working on exploring sewing through by fiber structures course. I have learned so many new techniques and find the course exciting. Our current assignment, we have been tasked to explore muslin as a material with the machine. I am not the greatest at sewing as I have just learned how, but I am excited about the different possibilities it might bring to my practice.

In my explorations, I decided to work with different techniques such as quilting and creating patches. I plan on completing the rest of my explorations this weekend, including techniques I have discussed in my prior blog posts such as fiber slashing. I really enjoy how the fabric can be dyed to whichever colors I want. I found dying the fabric very time consuming. It takes over an hour all together to measure out the dye formula, and soak the fiber in the dye. It then needs to be hung to dry completely before use. I think that I personally enjoy the way just the plain muslin looks when layered on itself, but I do intend to dye more of my fiber work in the future.

Here are some of my explorations below !

See you next week!

-Marissa

Helia Kuai, with less spiky hair

Micey Leave a comment

As I think about how my art evolved recently, I think I noticed a trend toward realism. This is evident in how I gave Helia (Simon’s annoyingly perfect and vengeful black-ops cousin from Toronto) more naturalistic hair. She used to have this super spiky hairstyle to signify her prickly nature, but she started to look weird next to everyone’s updated designs. With her new hair, I can now imagine Helia as a kind of real person. Here, I tried to make her outfit more militaristic, more like she’s a woman on a mission, hence the mask and armor. This time, the kiss is canonical.

Industrious Illustrating #55 – Study Step-by-step

Robin Leave a comment

Hello and welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! This week I’m doing a quick breakdown of how I do digital painting studies to brush up on my fundamentals and improve my mental visual library for my drawing and design work.
It’s generally better to do studies from life rather than from photographs because cameras distort reality and also you can understand the subject from more angles if you see it in real life. However, for this exercise I’m using a Shutterstock stock photograph because trying to find and draw an excavator on-site during the winter months is too much hassle for me personally.

My first step is to draw color blocks to get down the idea of the subject matter while not worrying too much about complete accuracy. It’s way easier to work with a drawing that already exists than with a blank canvas.

My next step is to tweak the proportions and start adding in details to represent what I see in front of me.

As I work on details, I realize that some of the proportions aren’t correct and fix them. This is also how I work on my regular art pieces — mistakes are just a natural part of the process and can be overcome!

The finished study now looks like this! It’s not a fully refined drawing, but I feel like I’ve done enough work to better understand how the different parts of an excavator work together, which was the goal of my study session anyway.

I even draw shapes over my study to solidify my understanding of what the basic building block shapes in an excavator are.

Of course, this is only one way to do studies, and there may be a way to learn that makes more sense to you! I just hope that talking through my process like this helps you discover what might work best for you in the future. See you next week!

Observer: Poster Design for Musician

zbn Leave a comment

This is a poster design I did for my friend in Berkley. My goal here is to create poster design templates for musicians to advertise themselves and help them look for jobs and add on their own website page. With their basic information and past achievements. Posters provide artists with a platform for creative expression. The design of a poster can be an art form in itself, allowing musicians to showcase their visual identity and artistic vision.

S3 Scribble #13: Bells for Her

Sydney Braun Leave a comment

“Can’t stop loving,”

Today marks the 30th anniversary of an album that changed my life and provided me with some much-needed feminine strength, energy, and power throughout my late teens and into my present-day early twenties: Tori Amos’s Under the Pink. It was this album that launched me into the phenomenal discography of Tori Amos – an artist who, if you’ve been following my blogs for a while, is clearly one of my favorites. I often see myself in her music, and sometimes her music even helps me process emotions I don’t fully understand prior to hearing one of her songs. 

“Can’t stop what is on its way.”

I’ve had the good fortune of seeing Tori Amos perform live in concert several times. I have made friends through our shared love of her music, and I was even lucky enough to meet her after one of her shows. I’ve been told to never meet my idols. Clearly, whoever said that did not experience meeting Tori Amos. I wrote her a letter thanking her for her music and sharing the impact that it has had on my life and I gave it to one of her team members prior to the concert. When I met Tori after the show and told her my name, she said she had read my letter and thanked me for writing it, even referencing some specific things about myself that I had written in the letter. It was an unforgettable experience: someone whose work I admired so much had not only read my letter, but retained the information it contained! Needless to say, I will be a fan for life.

“And I see it coming,”

When I feel particularly strong emotions, I love that I can often find comfort and relatability in the songs of my favorite artists. This week, I have once again had to practice letting things go, and the song “Bells for Her” is about exactly that. Letting go of things I can’t control isn’t easy for me, and, thanks to this song, I know that I’m not the only one who struggles with this. I “can’t stop what is on its way,” but I can work on accepting that I don’t have control over everything. In this week’s case, everything turned out alright… as it usually does. This is just yet another experienced example I can use, moving forward, to remind myself to relax in the face of uncertainty, because getting worked up will not stop what is on its way.

“And it’s on its way.”

Listen to Bells for Her by Tori Amos here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWIvvDjOt-A

Wolverine Stew: Memories for Pete

clydemg Leave a comment

Going below the cold

The snow churned by a hundred

Trails cut through the slush

Into the pink neon on

Black ceilings and white tiles

Taking the time to

Work as a trio, cutting the

Lights, always night and day

Count the phobias skittering across the

Screen: spider, cicada, wasp, mosquito

See how far I can stretch a

Line of paper from me to the

Machines pulling me closer

Walk the rows of pinball lights showing

Rings, monsters, castles, in every

Corner awash in their glow

Balance dragons together on plastic skateboards

In the cool of the tables behind the stairs

And just breathe