quayle

It's been a blast! Here's to the next hundred, which will hopefully be even better.

Lydia Martin portrait--

 Hi everyone, I'm still here, arriving just in time to give you a little Halloween art.  


 
Referenced from here.  I'm going through a Teen Wolf obsession and everyone loves Stiles, right?  Dylan O'Brien has ridiculous disney princess eyes.  On that note, this post in the muddy colors blog has been floating around in my brain ever since I read it and that's probably what got me started on this drawing--not that I really recreated that effect in any way successfully, but it got me thinking a lot about colors.  

Anyway, this is me getting back on the wagon after a long hiatus.  When I'm not desperately trying to find gainful employment, I'll try and make some stuff.  

Thank you also to the mods for their their hard work running this challenge!

( ART )

I don't think I need to say anything further to recommend this story than that it's really excellent and plotty Smith and Wesson! Go read the story at:

AO3
Dreamwidth
Livejournal

 Some of my friends from Illustration got together and decided to make a super special just-for-the-exhibition zine around the theme FIRST DAY.
Here's my contribution.  It's kinda big so I'm placing it behind a cut.  


( First Day ) 

In other news, I'm working on an honest to God website!  Stay tuned.

I revised my lesbian princess adventure comic based on expert advice from my typography tutor. Damn but she knows what she's talking about.



I guess i never really wrote about what my motivations were for making this comic. Basically I wanted to make a queer version of the woman-disguises-herself-as-a-knight-and-has-adventures-and-marries-the-prince trope.  I am a huge fan of that trope. When I was in fourth grade I read Tamora Pierce's Alanna series and it was like the most amazing thing ever, my little mind was totally blown. I have a friend who shares my feelings about this stuff and when we meet up we always watch princessy fairy tale movies together and have an awesome time. That was how I discovered Princess Fantaghiro, which is this amazing Italian miniseries about a kick-ass princess who pretends to be a prince in order to duel the prince of a neighboring kingdom for her country's freedom (and then they fall in love!). Mulan is of course another good example. However, it is a total shame that the kind of inherent queerness in this trope is always kind of negated in the end once the girl falls in love, gets married and (in a lot of cases) kind of settles down and doesn't have any more adventures. Also, if we're going to have something as gay as a butch cross-dressing princess why can't she just be gay? I am sure my young self would have loved a story like that, as would my current self. And that is basically what I tried to do with my comic. I left the ending kind of open in case I ever get the urge to do a sequel, because I have the feeling that once they show up at the castle the king is not gonna be so down with their plans, not to mention that Sigrid and Genevieve are still in the process of getting to know each other.

Ok, so a little bit about the animation--
I started working on this last fall.  My awesome musically gifted friend Nick and I had talked about collaborating on an animation for which he would write a soundtrack, so I pitched this idea to him and we discussed it and dissected it A LOT in order to get to this story and mood.  He is truly a wonderful person to work with and I think he did an outstanding job with the music.  I should also thank my tutors who helped me along with this and terrorized me into finishing it!



The concept for the animation comes from an essay ("Die 'süsste Melodie des Lebens': Historische Beziehungen von Herzschlag, Puls und Musik" by Werner F. Kümmel) I read about the historical relationship between the human heartbeat, the pulse and music.  Up into the 18th century Medical Doctors explored using musical notation in order to record their patient's pulses.  More well-known of course is composers using a heartbeat rhythm in music (especially waltzes ;D).  This animation is kinda about those two worlds meeting.  

The setting is based on Greencastle, Pennsylvania which is my grandma's hometown.  

Hope you enjoy!



ETA: Uh-oh there's a clip missing--thus the weird black part in the middle.  It will be a little while before I can fix that, but I'll reupload it at that point.

 Got the opportunity today to page through my college's fragment of the Nuremberg Chronicle from the 1400's.  It was surprisingly thrilling!  Apart from being extremely beautiful and relevant to the project I'm working on at the moment, there was a whole lot of freaky stuff going on back then, from siamese twins to bridges collapsing and a bunch of people drowning, babies that were half lion (?), lions being fished out of rivers (?)... Makes me wish my latin weren't so pathetic.  
Anyway, here are some sketches I did:



Now I what I would like most is to get over this godawful cold that's been hounding me for the past MONTH.

 
( Confused rambling with photos )I'm going to let this marinate overnight and make some decisions tomorrow.  

 
charcoal on A2 paper
Eek hilariously short leg!  You can tell where my priorities are.  I spend ages on  everything from the neck to the hips and once I have to go lower than that I'm just like lol guess I'll put in some legs....  She was a fun model to draw though; she had a really sweet face.  

The private view yesterday was pretty successful--lots of people in attendance, and I got to try Absinthe for the first time (because they sponsored us with drinks).  To be fair, I only had it in diluted cocktail form, but it was extremely nice and licorice-y.  I did not have hallucinations of green fairies though.  That was disappointing. 

Going on long-awaited trip to Bologna on Saturday!  I will eat so much that they will have to cart me back on a wheelbarrow.  Hopefully I can get some nice drawing time in.  

 We would love it if you could make an appearance!  
Open from the 13th to the 18th, 10am-6pm.  73 Leonard St, Shoreditch, London, EC2A 4QS.

http://www.csm-illustration.com/2012/