Monday, September 30, 2013

Personal Work: The Messenger


I've always been fascinated by pre-columbian cultures, the Inca in particular. While usually the Inca sacrificed guinea pigs to the gods (which is cruel but also kinda funny), when things were really bad they would occasionally sacrifice children. These children were revered as special messengers to the gods, and after being drugged and knocked out, they were left on high mountaintops.



In 1995 the frozen body of an Incan girl was found on a mountaintop in Peru. In this illustration, I'm not trying to glorify child sacrifice, only trying to imagine this girl's last moments from her point of view. Maybe she really did get to see the sun god and intercede for her people. That would make her a hero.


I hope she had a happy ending.

Friday, September 27, 2013

Scientists uncover the secrets of "drawers"

"Since the dawn of human art-making, the divide has been clear: There are people who can effortlessly sketch an object's likeness, and people who struggle for hours just to get the angles and proportions right (by which point the picture is scarred by eraser marks, anyway). What separates the drawers from the drawer-nots?"

So begins this inane article from Live Science. Apparently, after much research at the University College of London, the researchers concluded that, while some people have a better sense of visual accuracy than others, practice is also important!
The devil is in the details, and the researchers are still working out the interplay between all the factors that affect drawing accuracy. However, they can all be learned. "There is no doubt that practice is an important component of being able to draw," Chamberlain said.
 Great job, science!

Monday, September 23, 2013

Sketches of The Lonely Village


When I told my Korean friends about the tiny town where I am now living, they began referring to it as "the lonely village." Anna gave me a classic black moleskin as a going away present, and I have been doing some sketches in it lately.


The beagle in these sketches is my new buddy Dash. His owners, my in-laws, say that he has become attached to me faster than he usually does with humans. "Probably because you're both timid," my brother-in-law said. The other day Dash and I walked down to the creek and I doodled as he poked around nearby. It's hard to draw a moving dog, but I think it gave the sketches some energy.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

The roaming artist


Last week I moved away from my beloved San Francisco up north several hours to a town with a population of about one thousand.

My husband and I both work from home, so once I graduated from school it didn't make sense to live in the expensive bay area any more. The third most expensive zip code in the country, Atherton, was right in our backyard. So we're temporarily living in my husband's tiny tiny hometown to save up some money.


My husband gave up his high-paying computer programming job to pursue his lifelong dream of creating his own video game. Meanwhile, I gave up my low-paying office job to pursue my low-paying passion of illustration. So while our skills (and pay grades) are very different, we're both artists. We would rather live out here, in the middle of nowhere, with just a few possessions, in order to do something we really care about.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Old Houses


I was practicing drawing old houses yesterday. Buildings are hard to draw. I discovered that an important part of making a house look old and abandoned is adding overgrown foliage around it.

Speaking of houses, in a little over a week my husband and I will be moving from our lovely two-bedroom apartment to a single room. I don't mean a single room apartment, I mean a single room. So I have been reading a lot about minimalism to help me in paring down our possessions. This book has been very inspirational:


This week I have been recycling and giving away a lot of debris from art school, including art supplies and portfolios that my professors insisted I had to buy. It's very liberating.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Equation for purpose


Today I found this quote by Jess Lively and I thought it was profound, so I made a graphic for it.
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