September is for Florals

I've been combining hand painted material with the digital process and came up with a few new patterns:

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Summer Internship 2011

I had an internship this past summer at Anthropologie, making displays at the Wayne, PA store. I loved every minute of every day there. I would be incredibly happy to wake up every morning to make displays for one of their stores! I'm sad that the summer is over, but hopeful for the new projects coming up!

Some of the projects I was involved with:

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Wild Countryside

This past summer, I spent a lot of my free time on nights and weekends hunched over on the floor painting this giant 50" x 50" piece with gouache! It took up all of my floor space, but was well worth it.

I've decided to start making separate colorways for past designs and mapping into spaces in the near future. Look out for it!


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Geometric Abstractions

Final Critique in my Design Studio class ended last week! What a relief! I'm going to be able to get some travel time in before the Fall semester starts. Until then, here are some of the last pattern designs from the summer. They are abstracted images from observational drawings.

From a close up view of a multi-tool:

From a box full of skeleton keys:

I'm currently in the process of digitizing a giant hand painted 46"x48" pattern. It was hours of mixing gouache, painting on my floor (the only space big enough to do the work!), and hard work, but well worth the effort. I've scanned all the pieces in and now I'll have to tile the images and reconstruct the whole thing in Adobe Illustrator. More soon!

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Brimfield Market, Massachusetts

I went to Providence, RI this past weekend and my friend took me to an amazing antique market in Massachusetts! There was everything under the sun there, including, but not limited to amazing mantlepieces, antique hardware, jewelry supplies, and I bought an awesome new tool: a hatchet/hammer/crowbar.

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Lightness and Weight opened last Friday

My submission for the show is a screenprint on tracing paper, paper, and a transparency. Real life photoshop.

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Weekend of Markets

This weekend was packed with the crafty shows: Flag Day Festival in front of the Betsy Ross House was quite an event! It was my first official craft show and I had all of my goods displayed under a tent (which came in handy when a quick rainstorm came through!)

Print your own t-shirt along with my other wares of the day

There were so many different people there, from craft vendors to street performers. I loved the guy in the next tent in front of the Betsy Ross House. They hired a soap sculptor to recreate Betsy's likeliness in soap. The excess soap was given away for donation towards the Betsy Ross House.

Awesome Mustache Soap Sculptor

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Summer is for Studio Daze

This is the first time that I've had so much uninterrupted time to work in the studio and it feels GREAT. I've been juggling multiple projects like making a piece for the Lightness and Weight show put together by the Soapbox Gallery and making a ton of stuff for the Flag Day Festival in Old City on Saturday.

Today, I've been dying fabric and articles of clothing, sorting out materials for the print-your-own table I'll set up on Saturday, and printing on fabric!

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See the 2011 Sketchbook Project online!

The sketchbook I submitted for the Art House Co-op's 2011 Sketchbook Project has been digitized!

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Strange Garden Color Board

The color board for "Strange Garden", which is the fresh garden with an Alice in Wonderland twist. The board is made of layers of imagery that stick out. The orange and green protrude from the board the most, the blues are a second layer, and then acid pink and yellows are the bottom layer.

Matchmaker

Does this screen print look like the sketch?

print on fabric

VERSUS

pastel on paper

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Lightness and Weight

Making some new work for a print that will be in a show at The Clip Art Gallery (put together by the lovely folks that bring you The Soapbox Gallery!) called "Lightness and Weight"..

I'm exploring more clouds and moving further towards some buildings.

Carving Stamps

I've been preparing for Flag Festival, a Victorian-themed festival in Old City, Philadelphia on June 11. I've been creating hand-carved stamps, carved out of rubber and mounted onto pieces of wood that were branch pieces. The images include, hot air balloons, ladders, gears, and feathers so far.

In the next few weeks, I'll be getting together prints and other goods for sale and will have a print-your-own-shirt station for the festival goers! Come out and join the fun!

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Sweet Summer Shirt Dress

I love my Japanese pattern books. They are full of endless and easy clothing possibilities, which is just what I need since I've decided that I wouldn't buy any more clothing and commit myself to making clothing.

I made a new summer shirt dress from Sweet Dress Recipe:

zigzag!

Even though I can't read Japanese, the book makes everything super easy with illustrated steps and good pattern layout. All of the patterns offered in the book are on one big page overlapping each other. In some books, it is impossible to find all of the patterns pieces and Sweet Dress Recipe makes it easy for your by organizing patterns by page number.

Sketch -> Print

I am going to attempt to make an exact replica of this sketch from my sketchbook of the PECO area in Gray's Ferry, Philadelphia into a screenprint without any digital processing. We shall see how this turns out...  So far, I've been armed with a filme opaquer marker for obvious non-textured line work and making china marker rubbings on acetate to simulate the pastel/paper texture.


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Going Up

I've had a long obsession with ladders. It reappears in work over and over again, which is odd because I have an acute fear of heights and it specifically focuses on going up ladders (don't ask me to go up more than 3 rungs on a ladder).

"Going Up" was made specifically for the First Flight show, in celebration of the advent of the spring season, at Masthead gallery and print studio, 340 Brown Street, Philadelphia - The show opens on Saturday, March 12, 2011.

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Celebrating Spring

This is the beginning of a new screenprint to celebrate the advent of spring! It is all hand drawn linework at this stage, but will soon be transformed into a repeat pattern.


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Business Cards: I'm for real

I've decided it is time. I am finding my way across many invisible bridges as an artist. A business card is a valuable tool that any artist needs.

In the business card, I wanted to show the hand drawn quality of my work and voila! Here are my cards, printed locally at Fireball Printing:

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Dahmer's Altar

This is the second print that I did for A Nation of Evil Men: Dahmer's Altar. When Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested, the police found a lot of disturbing things in his home. Things like parts of dead bodies rotting in vats, a human heart in the freezer, and a collection of skulls in his closet that was painted in a craft paint finish to look like stone. This collection of skulls was interesting to me since it was like a small shrine that he built to remember the people that he murdered.

The closing reception is on February 26, 2011. Masthead Print Studio is at 340 Brown Street, Philadelphia.

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Pterosaurs in the Sky!

These critter are pterosaurs swarming over a swirling ocean! The screenprint is for "Age of Reptiles", opening at Paradigm Gallery next Friday, February 25 at 2020 South Street, Philadelphia. I had a hard time coming up with the idea, since we don't really know what dinosaurs looked like. Pterosaurs are one of the most diverse dinosaurs, ranging in small to gigantic sizes, fur, beaks, and pretty much everything since they migrated far and wide. Deciding to go with a more graphic approach, I used the pterosaurs silhouette to create a pattern design.

Experimenting with colors was a crucial part of the process:

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Shibori-Esque

Two yards of 36" silk, folded into four sections, ruffled by machine, and painted with brilliant red dye paint and then soaked in a black dye bath to produce a gray-ish cast on the once pure white silk. This is for a collaboration project with Mitchell Noah in Louisville, KY at the O.Z. Gallery, which opens on February 25, 2011.


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Shout out from Philebrity.com

WHOA! I've been honorably mentioned on the superblog, Philebrity.com about the Nation of Evil Men show. Among the favorite pieces chosen, my Dahmer piece was one!



My piece is on the bottom right on the green paper.

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Drape Drape: Sewing Japanese

Surprisingly, I've had more free time the past month than I had anticipated. 

I'm even doing TWO different prints for the ANOEM show, which opens this Saturday, February 5 at Masthead Print Studio, 340 Brown Street. My last minute print was an idea to do a piece on Jeffrey Dahmer. A Nation of Evil Men, indeed.

The upcoming Age of Reptiles show will open on February 25 at Paradigm Gallery, 2020 South Street. I plan on starting on this project ASAP. Weather prediction: screen print with a chance of repeats.

Most importantly, I've been chipping away at more of my Japanese pattern books lately. Although, I have not committed myself to making all of the garments in this book, Drape Drape, it looks as though I will complete a good amount of them by the time we reach the Spring/Summer seasons! Hooray!

This book is completely in Japanese, but this guide by label-free comes in handy when determining measurements.

A peek at the Drape Drape book, photos from lulalouise:

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A Nation of Evil Men: Elizabeth Bathory

The show, A Nation of Evil Men, curated by Sam Heimer and hosted by Shawn Hileman of Masthead Print Studio, includes depictions of infamous evil people throughout history. The show opens on Saturday, February 5 at 6pm at 340 Brown Street, Philadelphia.

History Lesson, please!

Elizabeth Bathory was born in Transylvania in 1560, married to Count Ferenc Nadasdy at the age of 15, had four children between the age of 25 and 35, and widowed at age 51. She was known as a beautiful, intelligent, and well-educated woman in Transylvania, but also obsessed with remaining that way. She believed that the blood of young women was the secret of eternal youth. For four years until her death in 1614, she abducted, tortured, murdered young women in the area for the purposes of bathing in their blood. There are implications that the story of Dracula is strongly influenced by Elizabeth Bathory's obsession with blood.

She is gruesome tale and has now inspired this piece, hundreds of years later:

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Sketchbook Development

I've been recently developing a sketchbook for my most recent class project, sketches of Philadelphia. This class demands a lot of drawing from observation and the usage of color - Most of these things, I do not practice on a regular basis. I've enjoyed my experiences so far: I've gone to the zoo, gotten a lot of the urban landscape of Philadelphia, the library, and most recently the Wagner Museum by Temple University's campus.

I'm hoping to start a trend of visiting a new place every week for this class. Anthony Pedro has accompanied me on some outings, who has an incredibly keen eye and an effortless drawing style. 

Some sketches from the past few weeks: