support flier

This is a support flier I created for my friend Tamice; who is working with the International House of Prayer as a missionary intercessor and going to school to learn more about leading musical worship. She wanted cards to pass out as she is asking people to help support her. This is what I came up with.

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last for class.

This was the last piece for the class. Clearly I don't like waking up to my alarm, especially when I had gone to bed only a couple of hours before.

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final product

Here are the last stages of my paintings. I'm thrilled with how they turned out and want to keep painting for God. I'm sure in time and with practice I'll get better and faster. I'm already working on my ideas for new works.

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my life

This assignment is still two versions, I'm not decided on which I like better yet.

For this piece I tried to get back to the overly absurd and epic text matched with a (for me at least) very normal everyday activity. In case you can't read the text because of it's small size, it says; "WANT & CRAVE
two words that are too weak to carry the weight of my yearning desire to taste you again. My Love. My Strength. My Life."


I'm trying to evolve my work by breaking out the of the border and changing the size and scale of the image as well.

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WHAT?!?!

I am very proud to announce that my piece, "Prepare for Battle", which was accepted into the Juried Student Art Exhibit in the Anderson Gallery was also BOUGHT! I am totally stoked! nothing like this has ever happened to me before and it feels wonderful!

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in process

One of my professors was talking about how he is often more interested in the steps taken in the works of artist he likes, then the finished piece, so I thought I'd post my progress on my independent study;

This piece was inspired by the Bible. Exodus 17 verses 8-13; " 8 The Amalekites came and attacked the Israelites at Rephidim. 9 Moses said to Joshua, "Choose some of our men and go out to fight the Amalekites. Tomorrow I will stand on top of the hill with the staff of God in my hands."10 So Joshua fought the Amalekites as Moses had ordered, and Moses, Aaron and Hur went to the top of the hill. 11 As long as Moses held up his hands, the Israelites were winning, but whenever he lowered his hands, the Amalekites were winning. 12 When Moses' hands grew tired, they took a stone and put it under him and he sat on it. Aaron and Hur held his hands up—one on one side, one on the other—so that his hands remained steady till sunset. 13 So Joshua overcame the Amalekite army with the sword. " also Mark 2:1-5 " 1A few days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, the people heard that he had come home. 2So many gathered that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and he preached the word to them. 3Some men came, bringing to him a paralytic, carried by four of them. 4Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus and, after digging through it, lowered the mat the paralyzed man was lying on. 5When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, "Son, your sins are forgiven."

I felt like this has been how my life was for a while, especially when considering the emotional impact of dad's cancer on my life. I was getting so tired of watching, waiting and praying. and I knew that I would really be relying on my friends and also God to get through this time.























































This piece is inspired by my life. Of the time in between when you know God's will for a situation and him acting upon it to change your situation. My friend David is the model, he is able to relate to my situation a little too well.

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modern inconveniences

This is my latest piece.

Since "Prepare for Battle..." was selected for the Juried Student Exhibition, I've been thinking about what makes that piece better then my others. I think it may be the absurdly epic text, so I'm going to try and play that up more in my pieces from here on out. I'm planning on next week project being about caffeine intake. I need to decide whether is about the consuming or the purchasing. Opinions are welcome.

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affirmation

Greetings. (I was told that "hey ya'll" was absurdly southern... that's were I'm from, get over it.)

This Friday was the opening night for the Juried Student Design Exhibition! My Piece "Prepare for Battle..." will be displayed along with works from many very talented people. It's an honor to have been selected to be shown with them. It was so great to get this bit of affirmation, especially as I'm about to go look for a career doing this sort of thing that, yes, I do have what it takes to succeed in this field.

The exhibition runs only until the 30th I believe, so hurry over to the Anderson Gallery, which is in the alley between the Financial Aid building and Hibbs and prepare to have you face melted off!

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Createathon on Campus

Last week I participated in the school of Mass Comm.'s Createathon on Campus. This is something that has been happening in the professional arena for 10 years now and this was the first one on a school campus. Design firms would rally local non-profits with little to no marketing budget and for 24 hours would do pro-bono work for them. It was rough at times, but it was really cool too to see a bunch of people rally together and use the gifts and talents we have to help the non-profit companies help other people. It was a awesome feeling to know that I was helping to impact dozens of lives, maybe even more.

My group was working for Jackson-Feild Homes, which is an organization that helps neglected and abused girls in the Foster care system. These girl's stories are incredible! One girl never got a birthday present until she was in the program at 16. Another had her second kid at 17, and her mother didn't even go to the hospital in Petersburg to see her, even though the mother lives in Richmond, because she didn't feel like riding the bus! WHAT?!?! But despite their previous lives, and because of the work of the staff Jackson Feild Homes, these girls are incredible strong in character and are getting the tools and skills they need to make the choices that can break them out of this cycle.

Our assignment was to make for them a promotional video, which was made difficult because we weren't allowed to video tape or record the girls. So we created videos of other volunteers reading scripts from these girls' lives. We focused on their hands to address a more creative presentation and also to keep that idea of anonymity. We started at 9 am and finished all our work at 3:30 am the next morning, having completed not just one video but 5 different video clips and suggestions for their homepage.
I designed this homepage and also a suggestion for a mini page that could host blogs from the girls. The donors have been very active in Jackson-Feild and also the lives of these girls and we thought a blog would be another way that the donors could participate, keep in touch, and also see the effectiveness of their donations. I don't know if the videos are online yet, we suggested that they put them on Youtube, but I don't know if that's happened yet.

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For more information about Jackson-Feild Homes check out;
http://www.jacksonfeild.org/

new logo, new look

hey ya'll, well I had a pretty cruddy day yesterday, I tried all day, but I got nothing accomplished all day. So I thought I could at least make a post to have something to show for the day, go figure that the site was having issues and I couldn't post anything. But today is a new day, so this might work now.

This is my new logo. it hasn't been officially approved for my senior studio, but I've already been signing pieces with it, so it's fairly official.

I figured there was no better time to start trying to get my name out there, then when entering a contest, so I put the signature logos on all four of the pieces I entered into the student exhibition for this spring. I really want to get in, especially now when I'm trying to look for a job, it would be a great encouragement and validating experience to be selected for the show. The competitions really tough, we have a lot of very talent people in COAR, but I think I have a fighting chance.

You may be familiar with my entries, I submitted a photo of the portrait of my dad (yeah, a photo of a painting, that might not fly, but it still looks nice, especially if you don't know that it's a photo of a painting.), the senior project "Cheaper than Dentures" and also "Prepare for Battle..." I also quickly finished the corrections I was going to make to the third piece "This sucks."

I didn't make all of the changes suggested in class, but I did change some of the things that I thought were major problems. The text reads "cleanliness is next to godliness but chores are for suckers."

When prepping for the submissions, I was short on time (I learned about it that morning) so I tried the best I could.

we'll see how this goes.

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attempts one and two

These are my two newest senior project pieces. I didn't really like this first one, I think it just had a lot of problems with it, so I redid the project for this week. I'm still not very happy with the response I got for this one. I'm gonna bump up the color patterns and also fool around with the text some more. I think this one is a lot better though so I'm moving in the right direction. I get frustrated when I think I understand what I'm doing, what makes an idea work, and when I try to do it again, I still miss the mark. ARGH!


I was getting some conflicting feedback on this during crit. what people disliked about the text in the first image, that there were two type faces and they were disconnected, was suggested in this piece.

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coulda shoulda woulda...now i can.

These are some images that I wasn't about to post earlier;

This first one is another one of the images that kinda introduce my work. This was a exercise for digital drawing using references.











This is another piece for my senior project class. I did this one before my last post, but I wasn't able to upload these because I had the wrong color mode. Thanks Hannah for clearing that up, you're a genius.

It was my second attempt at this idea of brushing teeth. The first was awful! I was actually embarrassed when getting it printed. Don't expect to ever see that one here. I had chosen the wrong elements to combine and emulate. This was really the first image for the class that was really successful in the way I merged my two inspiration sources, Art Nouveau and Ukiyo-e. For that reason I'm really proud of it. After that brutal crit., I took all the feedback and tired to really concentrate on the comments to make a better piece.


I think I might also be too cautious about posting, there are lots of things that I could post, but haven't because they aren't "good enough". But without a record of what I've done, how will I know how I've grown as an artist? or even as a person? I'll post more things soon, promise.

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on a roll

This semester has been kicking my butt, but at least now, my work is coming together well. For senior projects we had to pick a theme for the semester and have one finished project each week. I choose to illustrate everyday activities that we don't think about too much, in a style that references Art Nouveau and Ukiyo-e prints. My first one was close, but kinda missed the mark, and my second one was awful, to the point that I was actually embarrassed when I had it printed. For the third I took all the suggestions from the critique and re-did the project and it was much more successful. I wanted to post that one here, but for some reason, Blogger changed all the colors around, it was very blue, and when I uploaded it it came out all red. any ideas? this is my fourth project that I submitted this afternoon, and only needed some minor changes.



Thank GOD! After these two crits. I feel much better about myself. The second crit. was brutal (because the art was bad) and I was having serious doubt about this diploma I'm supposed to get in a couple months.

For this piece I wanted to take a pretty mundane action, like putting on shoes, and use type to make it incredibly epic. I hope you enjoy!

Today I also had my new logo approved! It's very clean and simple, so it'll work great for my design style, but I'm gonna mess around a bit to find a way to make it look good on more painterly projects. I should get that up in a few day at the most.

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one small step

Hello everyone, welcome to my blog, though I guess technically, no one is actually here...

I've created this blog as a way for me to display the work I do; as a student, an illustrator, a graphic designer, and just a person who likes to communicate with pictures more then with words. I'm a little all over the place, visually speaking, so that will inevitably be reflected in this blog. I love Vermeer and Rembrandt, and also Mucha and James Jean, so my style differs when I'm doing a piece for class or as a personal work for myself. I also really enjoy working with my hands so maybe I'll even post some pictures of the things I've been doing in my ceramics class too.

We were asked to bring to class some images of work that we have done in the past, to help us identify our style, themes, and help introduce us as artist to the professor. I think that might be a good idea here as well.
This is an image I did for personality profile I did on my dad. Most of the project was about his battle with cancer, so I wanted to reflect that in the image.











This was a final for the Sophomore painting class. The assignment was to paint a painting that was 3' x 5'. I decided that if I was going to be spending that kinda of money and time on a project, it was gonna be about something worth while. Jesus.

I was inspired for this piece from Ephesians 2:13 "But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ."

I got this image not long after I was told that Dad had cancer again. So for me it was really about how nothing is outside of Gods control. Before Jesus died on the cross for my sins, he declared "It is finished." and I believe that with every fiber of my being.



This is just a painting exercise.












I'm excited to see where this takes me and hope you enjoy the ride.

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