Here are some other pieces from school that I'm pretty happy with, they were done for my narrative class with Blair Drawson (an excellent professor and a truly amazing illustrator). The assignment was simply to create our own narrative of any sort and to illustrate it. I chose the theme of duality and wrote some poetry - sentences that just bounced off each other in interesting ways, attempting to address some of the concerns of life in the modern world. This was also a much more natural process of working for me, and once again involved bold, simple drawings and the creation of a textured, collaged, painted surface to work on.

This piece is for a group show with a bunch of my fellow Sheridan Illustration grads. The idea was to create a deck of cards each designed by a different illustrator, with no limits or guidelines as to content. I was given the King of Clubs, and decided to do a piece about modern royalty.

So it's been five months since I graduated and I haven't been able to get much of anything done. I've done a lot of drawing/sketching, and a whole lot of thinking, but not much in the work department.

It's not for lack of trying.

I've really been struggling over how, why, and what I do in my process in order to create a piece. Looking at the work that I've done over the past couple years in college, while proud of how far I've come and all that I've learned, I am unsatisfied with the pieces themselves. They seem too restrained to appropriately convey the ideas I am attempting to represent, or my own passion and intensity about these ideas. What's more is that when I think of this summer - the prolonged, frustrating, fruitless search for the perfect idea, the perfect little sketch that would be worthy of actually painting... and it mirrors, in a prolonged fashion, the same process I went through time after time at school, and which led to the creation of pieces that I am ultimately unhappy with.

As I look back at my work from school, the time when I was truly just doing what I wanted to do, no strings attached, was in my third year life drawing class. We were encouraged to experiment with media and mark-making, and to attempt to create some kind of narrative or idea within the piece (the course was called "illustrative drawing and painting")

I would spend hours creating these prepared backgrounds to paint on, and just get lost in the creation of these textured, colorful, interesting, intuitive pieces. I often got nervous about drawing/painting on top of these surfaces, as they were already so cool.

It didn't take days and weeks of contemplation to create something beautiful, something that satisfied both my urge to create a "finished" piece, as well as something that represented myself in a much more honest fashion. The drawings themselves were each done in a three hour class; they are far from perfect - they could have been pushed further, planned better, etc. This was me just doing what I do, without worrying about all the extraneous factors. I am an artist and I wish to create art - and I believe that it is through the process itself that I will be able to find and create meaning. I know what I like to do and now it's time to do it.

So anyway here are some pictures of these inspirational life drawings from my third year.

Visual Dialogue

These were all done for my Visual Dialogue class. It was all about attempting to push visual communication as far as we could, in addition to dealing with some "controversial" content, pushing the boundaries of what we would typically be allowed to do. The first and second images from the top were based on the sins of wrath and greed, and the bottom two were "social awareness" images, based on corporate exploitation. I suppose because of the weird concepts that were encouraged in class, my drawings got a little weird there for a bit. It produced some interesting results though.

Old Stuff

This is some stuff from early this year, it's all based on the theme of communication and ideas... the way what we say and think about the world are often different, and how that is almost always different from the way the world actually is. I had some fun with the theme, but the whole word/thought bubble thing got old for me pretty quick. I didn't really take it as far as it can go for sure, but as a device to really drive my illustrations by itself, I got fed up pretty quick. I do intend to explore that device in future work, I just don't want to base a whole series around it.