The SCAD Sidewalk Arts Festival was a week or so ago– and it has made me miss my SCAD friends terribly. I really wanted to go, but instead I took part in new Cyberwalk Arts Festival, for those poor souls like me who couldn’t attend the real thing. It involved drawing on a virtual sidewalk square with virtual chalk, and was actually pretty fun! Without being able to zoom in or out, change chalk size, or use more than 6 colors, it was quite a challenge.

I wasn’t expecting too much, as there were plenty of gorgeous entries, but I was lucky enough to win third place! Nobody notified me of this– I ended up discovering the fact on an obscure local newspaper web site. I have yet to discover what the prize is, but I’m hoping it’s something money-like .

Here’s my entry:

You can check out all the entries here. Make sure to check out Tran Ngyuyen’s piece–  she won first place and it’s pretty amazing!

I started up a MySoti account to sell t-shirts. Stay tuned for more designs!

Check out the designs here!

I don’t think it has fully “hit” me yet, but as of Thursday my time as a student at SCAD is officially OVER! Crazy. I have an apartment here in Savannah until August so I’m not leaving the city yet… but my time spent now will be toward self-promotion and hopefully real jobs rather than classwork. It is kind of terrifying I guess, but no moreso than a pack of wild locusts.

In other news…. wait! I don’t have any

I posted a while back about Wendy the Moth on SCAD’s web site, and it seems her rise to fame is increasing! I just got an e-mail from Adobe with a contract to show Wendy on their web site feature of SCAD as well as a video! Exciting! I always liked Wendy in all her nudist glory (if not that particular picture of her) so I’m happy others seem to like her as well.

In other news, I’m poppin’ out these Pooch poses for Piedmont Healthcare like rabbits in the spring so I’ll attach a couple more for your viewing pleasure.

I’m also working on a BIG children’s book project (my own for class, nothing published yet, sigh) and I’ll be posting some process pics soon!

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SCAD is amazing when it comes to not notifying students when using their work for their web site. I guess it’s understandable because they own everything up to our spleens, but yeesh! It’s always a surprise. I went to the Illustration section of the SCAD site today to find that what I thought was one of my most mediocre drawings ever is being used as the page header for all the world to see. I think it is even in the catalogue now! Hell, I never even saved that piece to my hard drive. I guess that goes to show that a piece you don’t like could be a gem to someone else.

In other news, I just saw on the SCAD blog that Shiho Hoshino got into CMYK mag– Hooray Shiho! Her work is awesome: Go see her at http://www.shihohoshino.com!

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So this weekend featured the yearly Artist Alley, where we students set up booths to sell our pathetic wares for pennies. I was dying to enter last year but missed the deadline, so this year I decided to go all-out with a cat-poopin extravaganza! I ended up making about $100, mostly selling buttons and bookmarks and magnets, though I was also selling dirt-cheap prints. My leftovers will be for sale as well, through my web site and Facebook. My site is in desperate need of a revision– it’s almost time for the “Shop” section!

Here are some pictures for your viewing pleasure of my booth and such. My lovely boyfriend took them. Woooooooooooooooooooooooo!

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See that black hair? That’s really just a combination of about 543,000 lines.

This quarter I have revamped a lot of my old work, because there are a ton of old ideas I like but which are a bit outdated technique-wise. So I decided to use my ancient drawing of a sphinx “self-portrait” for my printmaking class. This time we did dry point intaglio, which was great for convincing me I do not want to ever be a printmaker.

First we ruined our wrists carving line after line into a sheet of Plexiglas, then we slathered the whole thing with ink, mashed it in for about 10 minutes, and spent 20 minutes rubbing all the ink off that we just mashed in. Then we took a sheet of paper which had been soaking for the last day, and pressed the ink onto it using a buttload of pressure. This doesn’t sound too bad, but doing it 12 times gets rather time-consuming. Then there is the joy you feel after pulling a print and realizing you didn’t rub quite enough ink off on one corner, making the whole thing worthless as they are supposed to be exactly the same.

In the end though I really love how my sphinx came out. Though it was freaking hard to print, it was a lot faster than hand-drawing 12 of the same image! And now I can give all the rejected prints to family and friends as Christmas presents. Oh joy.

Classes just started, and it seems like they will actually be useful this quarter! I’m very excited. In portfolio, we had our work torn apart and had to write up a list of our weaknesses, and our interests in markets and topics. Then we create six projects that utilize this information in repairing holes in our portfolios.

Here are the things I want to work on in the months to come:

1. More variety in people — especially more males. Also old people, and multicultural people. Children’s Book publishers want to see this wide variety.
2. More variety in subject — I get stuck on themes, (boobs, cats, sea creatures, babes,) and I generally avoid drawing the things I hate… like cars and architecture and oatmeal.
3. More black and white work — A lot of children’s magazines and older kids’ books have black and white interiors.
   
4. Work on colors/lighting — I’d like to find a way to keep my colors very bright and, er, colorful, without the image seeming disjointed and losing all the tiny details. Also I was told I need stronger changes in value, and I agree. I was also told my compositions need work and while I don’t exactly agree, I’ll keep it in mind.