Skull Girl

I had quite the obsession for a few months of an idea of a woman in a lovely dress with an animal skull sort of serving as a mask.  It took me a while to realize it, but I think the idea came from the ballroom scene from the movie Labyrinth.  It's my favorite movie and I've seen it way too many times, so I can see why this idea was so firmly lodged in my subconscious.

This one took so much reference photo research, I kind of don't want to talk about it.  There are also several photo-shopped versions of other women and other skulls that just weren't quite right.  Ultimately I settled on this combination because it presented the least amount of problems where lighting was concerned.  Ideally, I'd just like to have a collection of animal skulls and take these kinds of reference pictures myself, but I don't hunt, nor do I have the kind of money to just buy animal skulls online whenever I want.

This image isn't ideal because I was imagining a more feminine dress and just more of the woman shown, but I'm a bit of a slave to my reference photos and don't like to invent anything if I can help it.  I wanted the colors to give a cold, austere kind of mood, which I think it mostly does, but it is rather monochromatic.  The paper I used was a higher grade, but it still couldn't take quite the beating I'm used to doling out on cold press, so the background's a little streaky.  Ultimately I do like this painting if I just appreciate it for what it is, rather than comparing it to what I had originally intended.  It seems like my resources end up making a lot of my creative decisions.

Skull!

So I'm kind of in love with skulls and I just really wanted to paint a  no-frills human skull.  I took another swing at being more loose with watercolor and putting wet into wet over masking fluid with the background.  Then after removing the masking fluid, I painted in the actual skull in my normal, anal-retentive way.  This was again using my crappy paper, so after putting so much paint in the background, I actually couldn't remove my masking fluid, so I had to use a wet paint brush to dilute the layers of paint over the masking fluid and sop them up with paper towel.  Not a huge to-do, but still annoying.  This is the last piece I did with my crappy paper, so in case anyone thinks paper quality doesn't matter, take it from me: INVEST IN GOOD PAPER.

So again, not totally successful.  My wet into wet got so saturated that it's kinda hard to tell it IS wet into wet.  And the skull, while not exactly mono-chromatic, still feels local color-esque and not all that dynamic.  It's not a bad skull anatomically, though, and overall the piece is kinda neat looking.

Watercolor on cold press.

Beauty is Pain

I had this idea a few years ago for a school assignment.  I was trying to think of a theme for a series of paintings and I was looking at old make-up and clothing ads.  I wanted to re-create the ads with more sinister elements as a commentary on using fur and animal testing for beauty products.  I ended up not doing the series, but this particular idea stuck in my head, and I decided to paint it in the spring of '12.

I put the original ad underneath as a way to compare and contrast.  The idea for the bladed glove came from Paul Outerbridge's Woman with Claws, which I saw years and years ago.  I remember the website I saw it on referred to the gloves as old meat-packing gloves, but while doing research for this painting, I couldn't find any other references to these gloves as meat-packing gloves, so who knows.

I'm mostly happy with this painting.  The colors aren't quite right, and I had a hard time making the blood convincing, but I'm happy with how close it resembles the original ad.  The paper I was using for this painting wasn't exactly ideal, so there was a bit of puddling and that was a bit frustrating.  I also wish I had done the lips more like how they appear in the ad.  I honestly don't remember why I painted them differently.

Watercolor on cold press.

Bird Skull

This is the first piece of art I made since graduating from art school last May and was completed March 7th. I wanted to start with something fairly easy and I also wanted to use a technique my friend had told me about. The technique is to make an image using shadow blocking, except you're blocking in the highlighted part. Then you cover that highlighted area with masking fluid and then do wet into wet over the whole thing. I was a little miffed with myself for not having thought of this on my own since I use masking fluid a lot and I love shadow blocking. I chose a bird skull as my image since I've always liked bird skulls. I think they're really pretty for some reason.

The drawing was by far the hardest part since the reference picture I was using didn't have very dramatic lighting. There was a lot of squinting and erasing going on. The wet into wet isn't the greatest since I'm so rusty and the paper I was using wasn't as high quality as I usually use. If I were to try it again, I'd put the masking fluid on thicker and give myself a bigger area to work with and just let the paint pool and splatter where it wants to instead of cropping in so tight with painters tape.

Watercolor on cold press.

Anatomy Triptych

So there was Aokigahara, and then there was a piece that turned out so bad it will never see the light of internet, and then there was my triptych. All of these pieces attempted to marry forms occurring in nature and human anatomy.

My triptych started with the idea that lightning was a very organic form and resembled similar forms I had already worked with, like blood vessels and tree limbs. I'd been wanting to work with bronchial tubes in some way for a while and I came up with the idea of replacing the bronchial network inside some one with lightning. After that I decided I wanted to make a triptych of the same image with different natural forms inside the lungs. I'd also been wanting to use mushroom gills and decided that that would be part of the triptych. Coming up with the third was a struggle and had originally been something else entirely. I thought that the bronchial tubes resembled coral and settled on that.

The color choices came from the subject matter of the natural forms. I imagined the lightning on a deep blue sky and blue became the palette for the first. Then I chose a brownish/green for the mushrooms since I thought it felt earthy and also kind of rotten at the same time. The coral I wanted to use the actual color coral, but wound up with more of a pinky/dusty rose.

I'm pretty happy with this piece. The coral lungs ended up looking just like what the bronchial system looks like anyway, except pink and speckled, so that ended up not being different enough. I also wish the color was more orangey/brown and less pink. I also wish I had a better title. When I originally thought of the lightning as bronchial tubes, I came up with the title "Rapidly Expanding" to refer to the way lightning makes air rapidly expand, and to the idea of lungs expanding with air. That title only referred to the first and therefore couldn't fit for the piece as a whole, so I decided on something bland.

Watercolor on cold press.

Aokigahara

This piece is from the spring of '10 and was my first attempt at total creative control. I don't do well without an assignment. If I'm given parameters, I can flourish within them, but when I have no limits, I'm just completely overwhelmed by possibility and nothing's ever good enough.

Over winter break I did research in order to have some idea of what I wanted to do for the class, and I read about a forest in Japan called Aokigahara, which is apparently the 2nd most popular place to commit suicide in the world, after the Golden Gate Bridge. There's even numerous signs in the forest urging people to reconsider and seek counseling, etc. This forest reminded me of the forest of suicides in The Divine Comedy, which led me to woodcuts depicting the forest of suicides. I basically just fell in love with the idea of depicting the human form as trees. Unfortunately this is pretty well-worn territory and usually executed in the same way (person standing vertically, arms raised and becoming branches). So then it was a matter of seeing people in sad, twisted trees and not having them up and down with arms raised, blah blah blah. This then led to hours upon hours of searching for good photo references and lots of frustrated sketching. Then the sketches look better than what ends up painted, cause I kill my work just a little bit when I paint it. I even did a color study that was really close to what I wanted, but then I basically disregarded it when I went to paint. So yeah, color's bad and forms aren't as good as they were intended to be. It's far from perfect, but it's at least getting closer to what's inside my twisted little heart of hearts.

Watercolor on cold press.

Burroughs

This is another old piece from the spring of '09. It's an illustration assignment and a pretty straight-forward one: portrait of an author. I wanted to include this as a strong piece on it's own, and also because it got in to this last year's juried student art show.

I definitely had a lot of options, but I chose William S. Burroughs not just because I like the book Naked Lunch, but because he writes very vividly, and with a lot of imagery. It seemed like a good choice for a visual interpretation. I'm not going to go into every detail, but I will say that I'm using imagery from the book as well as Burrough's own life to show his mental state and suggest a degradation of the mind that creates as well as destroys.

Watercolor on cold press.

Ophelia #5

And now we have what Ophelia is famous for: drowning. Ophelia drowning (or about to drown) are the most common images of Ophelia, so I wanted to use a different view point and a more dynamic composition to set mine apart.

The sheer garment she's wearing is problematic since I had to make up a lot of the folds. It comes off as more of a stylization of fabric, in my opinion. It's something new and different, though, so that's good. The bubbles were also very hard to render realistically. I like the idea of things underwater, but my executions are never very...watery. Her face isn't quite right, despite working from a photo-reference. I do like her hair, though.

Watercolor on cold press.

Ophelia #4

The title of this piece is Rue. Ophelia stands at the body of water she will eventually drown in while holding rue and reflecting (literally and metaphorically).

Out of all the Ophelia pieces, this one probably has the most thought put into it. I was reading a lot of essays about Ophelia to get ideas, and many people thought that Ophelia was pregnant. When Ophelia is mad and handing out flowers, each flower has a symbolic meaning. The flower Ophelia gives to herself is rue, which in Shakespeare's time was used for abortions. The word rue also means regret, which I think is an appropriate emotion for this scene. I made a reference to the Arnolfini Portrait in Ophelia's dress in order to suggest her pregnancy.

Watercolor on cold press.

Layers

So this assignment was about layers. We needed something from our past, something from our future, a pattern, and a historical reference. I wanted to incorporate all of these in a coherent and fairly straight-forward way, since I'm not so great at more abstract images. The pattern and historical reference are the stained glass window, the past is me as a kid, and the future is the piece of origami I'm folding.

This piece is another self-portrait...that just sort of happened by accident this semester. The concept is me as a kid being bored in church (as I always was) and amusing myself. I'm actually glad now that my parents made me go to church, because there were so many beautiful and colorful things to look at and make up little stories about in my head. It was a really good creativity exercise.

Watercolor and ink on canvas.

Branching

Another anatomy piece! As you might've guessed, I wanted to draw parallels between the way our veins and arteries branch and how that same branching often occurs in nature.

I really like this piece. I like the way the colors turned out on the tree limbs and all the little details are really fun to look at. The one thing I don't like is how I couldn't get the sky to blend very well at the bottom.

Watercolor on hot press.

Albert

The third and final installment of the iconic images/anatomy series. Despite the fact that I had a lot of fun rendering a brain, I'm pretty luke warm to this piece. I don't like working without a concept, and this piece has zero. The technical execution is also pretty bad.

Having the face be sort of transparent to show all of the brain was risky, so I'm not really unhappy about any problems concerning it, but the hair is really bad. I'm usually not that bad at rendering hair either, so I can't really excuse myself. And his mustache looks like a purple caterpillar.

Watercolor on hot press.

Ophelia #3

This piece is about Ophelia losing her grip on reality. My illustration professor gave me the idea of showing her backstage in a theater. We can't forget that Ophelia IS a character in a play, so it's rather clever to show her divorce from reality as her sort of breaking the fourth wall during the play. She's also arranging the flowers she's about to dole out.

The blending is a bit better in this one than the last piece. I'm mostly disappointed in how Ophelia turned out. I had a really great reference for her crazy face, but it just didn't make it through (probably because I work so small). I also wish her hair had been more disheveled. The flowers also read as too dull.

Watercolor on cold press paper.

Rosie

Second in the iconic images/anatomy series. Rosie pulls back her sleeve to reveal the muscles in her arm.

I know it's probably because I didn't live during WWII and I'm a girl, but I've always read the Rosie the Rivetter poster as empowering to women. So this was kind of literally showing the strength Rosie is advocating women to muster up. I also think it's funny that I rendered the flesh of some one who doesn't actually exist.

Watercolor on hot press.

Ophelia #2

This piece shows Ophelia right after her father has died. The three empty doorways represent the three men in her life that are now gone: Hamlet, Laertes, and Polonius. I really wanted to drive home the point that she's ALONE.

This painting gave me a lot of technical problems. There are lots of layers that needed to be blended together, which is never an easy task. It's just hard to go back in to a blended area and try to re-blend with more paint.

Watercolor on cold press paper.

Marilyn

First in a series of anatomy studies. I wanted to do fun or interesting images that incorporated human anatomy. I thought using famous or iconic photographs would be kinda nifty, but I couldn't really attach a concept to it. So despite however obvious it seems that this is a painting about celebrity or self-image, it's really just me having fun painting a skeleton.


Watercolor on cold press paper.

Ophelia #1

This is the first in a series that focuses on the character of Ophelia from the play Hamlet. This piece takes place at the beginning of the play and shows how Laertes and Polonius influence Ophelia's identity. It is meant to take place at Ophelia's vanity, hence the reflection. I think the symbolism is pretty obvious.

This piece is much larger than I usually paint, and on hot press, which I don't like using. Also, I couldn't for the life of me get Laertes to look right. I re-drew him several times, but had to give up once the paper started to get icky. I like how Polonius' face turned out, though. And even though it's a bit bizarre, I like the colors I used for the flesh tones. I wanted an eerie feeling, and I think that comes across. The clothes are abysmal, though.

Watercolor on hot press paper.