Dug up some old stuff...

Here's a Lichtenstein-esque version of my sis-in-law that I did a few years back. It was long forgotten, but somehow came into conversation recently so I dug it up and decided to throw it up on a post. I think she may end up using it as a facebook profile pic instead of an actual photo of herself if she decides to part ways with the stock icon they provide. We'll see. :) Well, happy Friday everyone!

The Results Are In!

My first attempt at printing with the gocco DEFINITELY didn't turn out as perfectly as I'd imagined it would, but isn't that the way with most first attempts? I set out to produce a set of prints to send out as Christmas cards and the experiment was full of lessons learned and questions I need to ask. Even though the prints didn't turn out as beautifully as I'd hoped they would, it was still fun to make. Here's a quick look at my process and my result.

First, I sketched up the initial design, scanned it in, then cleaned it up and played with colors in the computer. After a bit of playing, I finally ended up with this.I wish we had one of those little guys to take care of our shoveling for us! Least he has friends to make the work more fun.

Next I split the colors into 3 separate black and white compositions to use to burn the screens for the 3 different colors I wanted to print. I needed to take the compositions and have them printed on the laserjet printers at Kinkos because I needed carbon in the ink. Laserjet prints contain carbon, but my home inkjet printer does not. The first printout is what I used to burn the screen for the light blue color, the second for the light green, and the third to burn the screen for the dark green. I wasn't sure if there was too much detail in my illustration or not, so I was very curious to see if the detail of the shingles and the texture on the wall of the house would show up. I was pretty impressed by the results.

Insert blue filter then screen. The blue filter keeps the print from fusing to the screen when you burn it.Screw bulbs into housing then fit into top of the unit.Press down firmly on the front of the unit which will cause bulbs to flash and burn the screen. (I added a little flare to this photo for fun, cheesy I know, but hey this photo just didn't do the flash bulbing step justic)Here's a closeup of the middle screen. Check out the detail of the thin windowpanes and the ironwork. Pretty cool that the mesh is fine enough to pick all that up.

Once the screens were all burned it was time to print. I didn't have the color blue that I wanted, so I decided to mix my own. First lesson, I should have started with white, then added the blue. It was impossible to get it light enough once I had all that blue on my screen. Even after I printed all of my papers I still had TONS of ink left on the screen. All the ink was good for a nice even print though.Once you ink the screen, you lower the plastic sheet attached to the screen and fit the screen back into the unit facing the same way as when you burned it originally. Next step, place your paper on the rubber base, lower the lid and press. Then just lift the lid, the paper will stick to the screen, then you just peel it down gently and admire your print!
So, the colors couldn't really be further from what I'd originally envisioned. I decided to just roll with it though and deal with the brightness. Honestly, I dont mind the saturation, that crazy fluorescent green is kinda fun. I think if the blue was just a bit lighter and the dark green just a bit darker I would have been more ok with the overall look of the print.

I also learned that registering 3 colors with this model gocco is super difficult. Lots of mess-ups for sure.

The final point of frustration I had was knowing how much ink to flood the screen with. It seems to vary from color to color. I dont know if maybe the inks I have are different ages or if it has something to do with the pigment, but the dark green gave me ALL SORTS of agitation. Whenever I'd peel it off the screen I'd end up with certain areas with a heavier ink buildup than others. I was running low on the dark green ink, so I wasn't quite as generous with it as I was with the other two colors, and I wonder if that might be the culprit? If anyone has had similar experience with this kind of trouble, please share! Once I ran out I threw some black ink on the screen and it didn't give me that trouble... or maybe it did, but wasn't as noticeable because black is more opaque.

Does anyone have any tips on cleaning the screens? It seems impossible!

Overall, the experience was fun, and I cant WAIT to get more supplies for another project. I'm still unsure if I want to send these prints out as Christmas cards, or if I should just get the original illustration printed at kinkos or something to send out. I feel like the quality of this first run isn't necessarily what I want it to be to share with others, but then again is part of the charm in it's flaws? You can CERTAINLY tell they're hand-made. I'll have to live with them a bit longer to make my final decision.

So that's my first gocco experience in a nutshell! Hopefully there will be more to come.PS: I'd also recommend having furry helpers near by to give second opinions on the prints. Mylo was super helpful, especially when he laid on my feet to keep them extra warm.

My Etsy shop, La Grisette, is up and running!

I'm trying a little experiment. I've purchased many a hand crafted item off Etsy over the past couple of years, and I always thought to myself, "Someday, I should post a couple items for sale and see if there's any interest". Well, today was that someday. I've opened an Etsy shop online and listed my first item for sale. Sure it needs finesse (the look, the wording, the information), sure I need to add more items to sell (photography prints, illustrations, gocco prints, tshirts), but for now, it's a start. So without further ado, I present 'La Grisette' my little shop on the web. Just one framed illustration for sale now. More items to come.

The Basement's Crowd Surfing Game Launched!

Well, our flash game for KFC finally launched. This was the first flash game I personally had been involved with, and I am continuously amazed at the cool things that these code people can do! I was responsible for the illustrated assets, the character design, background, and menu design, then handed it off to the rest of the team to make it do all of the cool stuff. It was such a fun project and it's really cool to see it live. Hopefully this will lead to many more great game projects.

You can play the game at www.surfthecrowds.com

There are also links to it on www.kfc.com, www.kfcrocks.com and www.ign.com

Character Design

Two of the characters I designed for a national flash game we will soon be launching. More details to come. Rock on!

Wishful Thinking

This is a sketch I did per the request of Ashley for her Fab For Less house. She gave a group of us a common theme and asked us to create a 6" X 6" black and white work of art based on the theme "wishful thinking" I guess I went SUPER literal as it related to her project, but I just couldn't get the imagery of the little girl, the victorian house, and the windy stairs out of my head.

Generally my style tends toward the more simple, flat, clean line, and graphic, so this time I wanted to experiment with perspective, and try using marker technique and a sketchy pen technique.

The markers dont come naturally to me at all. I definitely want to keep experimenting with them. I put this sketch off until the 11th hour though, so I just needed to finish it and get delivered to the house. I'll post pictures from the house later and explain more about the project.


These are just some sketches I did as I was experimenting with the look of this piece.

Lebfest Goes To Camp!

This year we decided to take Lebfest to the great outdoors. We stripped away the competition and added canoeing and camping at Blue's Canoe and Livery down in Edinburgh. I'm excited to see everyone. It's become a reunion of sorts for many of us. It's also nice to have it at the camp grounds because we can open it up a bit more and encourage our friends to bring friends of theirs that we haven't met yet. Here's this year's t-shirt design.

No red or blue, we went with a neutral color and decided to make it seem like an old school camp tee. It was fun to play with texture instead of color when faced with a 2 color challenge. This is one of my first projects considering that.

Concept Art

Just a quick post to show some in progress concept art for an internal animation. No real details available yet.

Bored Bird

Rawr... oh look.... i'm ravaging the city... it's so... tiring.

Just a work in progress... working mostly with character personality, no color or attention given to environment style yet.


After some mouth tweaking it went off to Brian who developed the color scheme and placed him in the city environment. Here's a sequence of his animation that will serve as the opening for our demo reel.

Elizabeth's Story Animations

Here's a quick preview of some Elizabeth Story animation progress.

Oh The People You'll Meet

In between a few After Effects CS3 tutorials today, I took a break from staring at the computer to sketch a bit. The three heads on the right seem like they could all be part of the same adventure.

More!!!! More?

You know how it is. :)

This is a sketch I just finished and I think it would be nice to do a series of em on canvas with ink and acrylic... well... at least next time I'm feeling a little more like sketch 2.

Sorority Anti-Hazing PSA Illustration

Here's an illustration of a sorority girl that I did for an anti-hazing public service announcement. We do a lot of simple vector-y illustrations here at work because most are used to be animated in flash. It would be fun to drum up some work that allowed us to do illustrations with more texture and depth. For now, we'll just have to work on some of those outside of work.

Old Pencil Drawings

Another area of the old HD contained a few pencil drawings of my family that I did many moon ago and the tea diffuser I did in metals and jewelry making. The roof is a lid that lifts off so that you can insert the tea leaves, then you place the tea diffuser into an entire pot of tea. The tea diffuses out of the carvings on the side that were made with a very tiny little coping saw.

Here's a more recent sketch I did for an art swap we had at work.

Old School Work Archives

Very old Photoshop work. (Photoshop airbrushed illustration of Edgerin James, an airbrushed illustration of a girl viewing the streets of chicago from her car window, a collage design using some photos I'd taken around Lafayette, and a scientific illustration of a garden spider)

Old segment intros I did for a college show I worked on called CG-TV. They were created using Illustrator, 3D Max, and After Effects.

An old flash project I worked on for ITaP one summer. Created the characters and animation using Illustrator and Flash.

Tonight I found my old external hard drive from school. I had to search through boxes of cables to find a power supply and cable to hook it up. I found some of my first photoshop projects, an old ITaP flash project, and a couple of little animated intros that I did for this computer graphics tech tv type show we did back then (You can see Alex and Kindari as hosts at the very end of the Tech spot intro). It is so embarrassing to look back at most of this old stuff, but it's all part of the process so we cant just pretend it never happened! Although, I'll admit, there are definitely things too terrifying to see the light of day that will remain on the hd for the sake of anyone actually viewing this blog.

Armadillos are fascinating!

They jump straight up in the air when they get surprised! Unfortunately this seems to be a cruel involuntary defense mechanism to give a creature who needs to cross busy intersections. Poor lil fella.

Aquaphobic Octopus or Supersoaker Sniper

Ok.... so the title is a groaner and could use some help, but here's a little colored pencil/sharpie drawing I threw together for an art swap we did here at work. I was in the mood to do something semi-colorful on a nice dark deep colored paper and this is what it evolved into. I love very organic twisty imagery and octopus legs just sort of formed from my squiggles as I was planning it out. Before I knew it I had a very terrified looking octopus and ended up adding the little fishy as his aggressor. The paper was textured, so I decided to work with it and see what kind of result I could get using the textured side. I couldn't quite get the colors of this scan representative of the original, but oh well, close enough.

Everyone who participated in our art swap brought in a piece of art. There was a ton of variety from quilts, to photography, to paintings, to re-purposed ready made art, to quick character sketches. We all drew numbers and swapped based on what we drew. It was a lot of fun, I ended up with a very cool "burner" that Dan did, and Frank Tai got this piece.

Other old sketches.

Speak Easy Invite Illustrations

Earlier this week our illustration/animation team started compiling a bunch of illustrations to put together an illustration reel. I bounce around between so many different things, I had to dig way back for some actual illustration work that I'd done and I came across this old Speak Easy invite that we put together for Suros. Mike Rendel, a fantastic print designer here, put together the layout.