First real week.

This is the beginning where I just stick my toes in the water and explore what it is that really catches my attention and curiosity...

By the end of the end of the summer, I really started looking at artists that I have always been drawn to in my life and tried to figure out just what about their art really struck me and why. I have always loved films by Tim Burton, the way they are geared towards every age group, the slight humor he uses, and his unique style of creepy cool characters. Last week I bought a 430 page book of Tim Burton illustrations and I have not been able to keep my eyes off it. It is basically my favorite possession at the moment. Along with looking at this book, I have also studied artists like Ralph Steadman, Yoshitomo Nara. Besides artists, I have also researched such graphics as beer labels (inspired by the Flying Dog beer label created by Ralph Steadman) and fun and quirky greeting cards by various artists. I took 2.5 hours researching all of these things that I have captured my curiosity. I feel that Tim Burton captures my style the most with human characters drawn in such a way that really shows the personality of the character, which is shown in the first drawing above. Ralph Steadman is also very interesting to me because his style is so unique the way he creates animals and people that usually take a different form than just animals and people. His use of ink is also unique and something that I want to explore. Yoshitomo Nara is another artist who has work that I feel is similar to mine. His usual focus is on children, but he gives them a twist so that the art is geared toward a more adult audience.

After researching, I started sketching people in a more expressive/abstract/surreal form different from what I am used to drawing. I then developed these sketches into more complete ideas of how I wanted to represent certain emotions. I came up with 6 images of certain strong emotions that I have had during the last week or so since classes started. This took me a total of 7.5 hours.

From here, I started to think more about what I wanted to accomplish for my IP project. I came up with a few ideas including things such as greeting cards for every single situation (even angry cards, drunk cards, flirting cards, etc.), trying to display every type of emotion or state in a distinct way, and documenting every emotion that I have. Coming up with these ideas took me about half an hour.

On top of trying to create something for my project, I also took about half an hour to start setting up my studio. I know that I want a place that I can feel comfortable in and which can also inspire me to create new things. I have not gotten so far with this yet, but I have ideas that are in progress.

Here are images of the emotions/states that I have felt lately and represented through an illustration. I had so much fun creating the 6 images. Personally, I am horrible at expressing my emotions vocally. I think anyone who knows me well can agree with this fact. It felt great to get these emotions out visually, however. I am so used to drawing realistically because it is basically the only style I have used when drawing and I have a lot of experience doing so, but after getting inspiration from artists who use a lot of expression and loose styles, it was really surprising to see that I could go this route also. I used colors that I wouldn't have normally used, got crazy with exaggerating the facial expressions, and even incorporated nonhuman elements into my drawings such as a leaky pipe to represent how I feel when I am sick. Drawing this way feels a lot more personal since I can use whatever style and color that I want and that I feel seems to get my exact feelings across. I also feel it is a lot more fun and interesting to create and view these types of drawings compared to more realistic drawings.

For next week, I plan to add more characters to my collection to represent my emotions for the beginning of the school year. I also plan to experiment more with my style. I want to see how crazy I can actually go, maybe to the point where you can hardly recognize the object as a human and you can just see a great amount of emotion being conveyed. I want to play around with more medium also, such as pastels, markers, and ink with brushes.