Cinderella

This painting is more concept art, but this time for the musical “Into the Woods.” This musical, if you haven’t seen it before, takes all of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and combines them into one great big story. Cinderella is a major character in the play, and as you know, her mother has died and she is forced to live with her evil stepmother and step sisters, having no fun being deprived of her right to attend the ball/festival. You may not know, if you are only familiar with the Disney version, that Cinderella doesn’t have a magical godmother, but instead she has a magic tree. You see, when Cinderella’s mother died she was buried at a gravesite in the woods. Cinderella visited that grave everyday and cried there, and her tears watered the ground, prompting the slow growth of a magic tree. On the night of the festival, the magic tree speaks to Cinderella while she is sobbing over her mother’s grave, and offers her a dress and slippers with which allow her entrance to the festival.

To execute this painting I dressed a friend up in garb from my extensive costume collection, and photographed her under a beautiful vine covered tree. The whole painting was done in watercolors, except for a few small details in the magic bubbles which surround the tree.

Field Watercolors from Sicily

I addition to keeping a sketch book while in Sicily, I also did a lot of sketching in watercolor. Sometimes a camera just doesn’t capture the full experience. When a camera takes a picture, the lighting is always a little different from what the eye is seeing. A camera focuses on everything instead of letting one focal point really come out. The camera doesn’t take into account the air and the wind and the smells of a beautiful scene. The camera is a tool that captures an image without any sense of awe or emotion. This is why we paint!

A painting may not represent every minute detail to the finest degree of accuracy, especially if it was sketched out in a matter of minutes, but a painting talks about all of the things that a raw photo does not. A painting points out what is most important in a scene, and what made the biggest impact on the artist. A painting captures colors in low light the a camera would turn into muddy grain. A painting captures an emotion ambiance that the camera is not sensitive to, and a painting preserves the physical conditions that took place on site in the way that the brush laid down the paint on paper. You can see the energy, delight, pain and discomfort of the artist’s hand in the brushwork. Whereas the camera removes the physical prescience of the artist in her work.

In this post are the field watercolor paintings that I did on-site in Sicily. Balancing my block and pallet on one arm and my brush in the other, I painted standing, perched on rocks, sitting on hillsides, crouched on a curb, and all sorts of other less than comfortable places. Some paintings took only five mints, while others I worked on for an hour. Each sketch only took up half or a third of my block so that I could paint multiple sketches a day without having to remove the paper and worry about storing and protecting the loose sheets. A the beginning of each day I would prepare a fresh piece of paper on my watercolor block, sectioning it off with tape, and at the end of the day I would remove the finished paintings and tuck them away in the hotel rooms so that I wouldn’t have to take any finished paintings back out into the field.

The sunrises and sunsets in Sicily were gorgeous, and a favorite subject for all of the painters and photographers on the trip. The trick to painting the moving sun is to do it quickly. The light of a sunset can change in a matter of minutes.

Speed painting is great practice because it keeps the paintings loose and decisive. There was no time to mess around over-working or over-thinking.

You can view these and all of my other sketches from Sicily in the sketchbook gallery.

Sketch book from Sicily

So, as my frequent readers know, I went to Sicily over my last spring break as part of a course at the University of Hartford. But because my semester was so crazy, I never got a chance to post my sketch book from the trip.

Here, finally, are my best sketch book pages from my time in Sicily.

Pen and Watercolor Washes of a hillside

Mt. Etna spewing smoke from its summit.

Meat in the market at Catania

Ink and Watercolor washes of mountains and hills in the distance.

Fish at Catania Market

Scenes from Catania Market

Pen & Ink and watercolor washes of stones and flowers outside an old church.

People from the market.

Pen sketch of theatre at Taormina

View of Mt. Etna

Temple of Hera

Sketches of the Aphrodite

Another Sketch of the Aphrodite

Little Shop

For the next few weeks I will be blogging about the individual pieces that made up my senior exhibition. In no particular order, I would like to start with this re-imagining of Audrey II, the monster from the musical ‘Little Shop of Horrors.’ For my senior project I choose to make a large chunk of art about theatre. This piece is new concept art for a classic musical theatre character. Audrey II has been interpreted on the stage in many different ways, but in my opinion, the large costumes always felt a little too stiff for the character; bulky is a word that comes to mind. I wanted to reinterpret Audrey II with a more fluid, animated look. Longer, leaner vines and a totally new silhouette makes the plant feel more graceful in its movements even if the mechanics of operating a costume like this will always be a little awkward. Audrey II is a predator, and a very smart one, and so I think he should like a smooth and cunning carnivore.

I also wanted to take more visuals from actual carnivorous plants in my design. I have seen Audrey II on the stage with huge, white, shiny teeth, which clearly belong to an animal, not a plant. I don’t care if he is from outer-space, I think that this intelligent plant should look like it took a similar evolutionary track as our earth plants, and the big shark teeth just aren’t working for me. So I did a little research, and adapted the ridges, grooves, markings, colors, spines, and vines from carnivorous plants alive on earth today.

The painting itself was executed with watercolor on cold press paper. For reference, I built a model of my initial sketches with clay, then lit and photographed my sculpture. Overall I had a fantastic time painting this piece. Painting monsters is liberating because they can look anyway we want them to; there is no right or wrong with a monster. I never paint very scary things but I think I may want to continue incorporating supernatural creatures into my work.

You can view this and other brand new illustrations in my color illustration portfolio.

Senior Show was a Great Success!

Two weekends ago my classmates and I celebrated the culmination of our art education with our senior exhibition. Our show was titled Vignettes, which represented the different worlds each of our work peered into, but also how unified the work because under one consistent method of presentation.

In order to exhibit in the senior show, each member of our graduating illustration department had to complete eight illustrations over the course of the semester which would make up a new portfolio for the student to apply for his or her dream career. We could work in any side or medium, but everyone had to include a self-portrait in their body of work in order to unify the show.

This year I served as class representative/student liaison/show coordinator, which meant that I had a hand in every aspect of planning the show. Everything from advertising, fundraising, food, music, styling, and managing people, I had to organize and delegate tasks for. Therefore it was especially rewarding for me to see the show go show go off without a hitch. The night was a huge success and our show of twenty-four exhibiting artists looked clean and professional.

We filled a huge gallery with our art and with people who came out to the opening reception. I do not know exactly how many people showed up, but we had light food for 500, and that went in the first hour and a half of the three-hour show.

For the most part we kept the styling of the show very simple so that the work would stand out without distraction from flashy decorations. However one fun element that we did put together was the salon style picture wall of all our self portraits. Each exhibiting artist was required to make a reproduction of their self-portrait and fame it in a decorative way. We then hung the pictures salon style on the first wall of the gallery which can be seen from the entrance, surrounding our show title. This wall introduced visitors to the flavor of our show, and represented each artist in a really stunning fashion.

Overall I had a fantastic evening dressing up, mingling, and talking about my work. I am so thankful to everyone who came to the opening to support me and my peers. I am also thankful for having such awesome classmates, without whom there would have been no show in the first place. Everyone did a great job this semester, and all biases aside, that was the best gallery opening I have ever been to!

You can view all of my new work, which was featured in my senior exhibition, in my color illustration portfolio. I will be posting about each piece in detail for the rest of the month.

Thanks for reading!

Senior Show in One Week!

I know it doesn’t look like much right now, but there is my senior show, all packed up in the corner of my dorm room, ready to be installed in the gallery next Thursday! The end of the semester is almost here and my senior exhibition is the culmination of my entire art education up until this point.

In addition to preparing my portion of the show this semester, I was also appointed student representative and show coordinator for my department. This means that my responsibilities for the show don’t end until after the show comes down from the gallery. So even though I have all of my work ready to go except for a few printed things, I have to make sure that the rest of the show comes together smoothly.

I have so far coordinated the paperwork, gallery deposits, gallery layout, advertising, food, music, the decorating plans, and label printing. Thursday we hang the show and I will be busy all day laying out the gallery for real and distributing pedestals. Right now I am also working on additional signage for the show itself.

The opening is going to be amazing! My department has produced some fantastic work and I can’t wait to see it all up on the walls. We are the school’s largest department with 24 students so we are going to fill that gallery with work from top to bottom.

The opening reception will take place one week from today on Saturday, May 5th from 5pm – 8pm at the University of Hartford. We have all worked really hard on this show and I would really appreciate it if you would stop by!

Hey You Know What’s Adorable?

These old men outside of the Market in Catania, Sicily who decided to sing for our tour group.