Art Critiques

Based off a thumbanil crit between my teacher Mark Tocchet and fellow student Doug Krueger.

Just Hangin' Out With Rachel Lesser

BTW, these are all based on real conversations gone awry.

Offensive

Beware. I take stereotypes and maul them.

I'm horrible. Hyuk hyuk.


And I finally had an epiphany of what direction I want my art to go in... and mediums to use. Holy freaking crap. Big thanks to looking at Jimmy Tierney's process and newfound teacher Tim Gough for showing me channels and working with just line and stuff.


SERIOUSLY, WHERE HAVE CHANNELS BEEN ALL OF MY LIFE?

Posters all the time

Yeah, a text update to just tell you all what's to come because I'm pretty excited.

So, school's begun and it's already relentless. School assignments both being posters; one's a band poster (I'm doing Neutral Milk Hotel even though they don't exist anymore), and a poster for the free library fest (which my new teacher Tim Gough did the real poster for).

But what I'm super excited about: My friend Lauren Monaco over at NYU contacted me to do another band poster-- this time for MAN MAN, one of my favorite bands, on March 4th. Fucking killer. Hopefully this'll be much better than the Atlas Sound one, especially since I'm actively being taught about poster art making.

So I'll probably be updating with the Neutral Milk Hotel thumbnails soon cause I really like them.

I think this is the first band poster I've done.
Lauren wanted it to be a mind fuck essentially; a 'bad trip', and everything to be completely filled. Whew.
Bird god and cherub godlings are afoot.

And of course blogger rapes the shit out of the color and resolution. A lot of the crispness is lost. Sigh.

And word from Lance, he definitely received my pin-up and it will be published in the Seduction of the Innocent book sometime in April. It's currently going through the editorial process-- how exciting, amirite? There is supposed to be a lil blurb about me (and all of the other respective artists) towards the end I think. Heh. I'm such a no name.

Baby of an update!

My friend who is with the music committee over at NYU contacted me to do a band poster for the upcoming Atlas Sound/Neon Indian show, Atlas Sound being Bradford Cox of Deerhunter's solo project, which is pretty fucking cool. His music's pretty intriguing; it's made through stream of consciousness, making it very atmospheric coupled with the instruments and special effects. It's sort of like being at the beach at night; very intangible. Some of the vocals remind me of Grizzly Bear.

Neon Indian, to take a quote from Pitchfork, is "Kind of like MGMT on a ramen budget-- and with less face paint." But way cooler than MGMT because MGMT is, well... I just had to delete a paragraph's worth of ranting.

But I can see similarities between NI and MGMT. Actually, I think Neon Indian might be more comparable to Hot Chip, especially because they have an affinity for remixes. Neon Indian's got more character because of the lo-fi feel, but then again I'm a huge fan of the lo-fi vocals on anyone's album.

I should stop talking about music.

Nevertheless, I'm very excited to see what is going to come out of it.

I'll be having that up and about within 2 weeks!

Edit: I probably will do the poster for the Man Man show that's coming up after that if I have time during school. Yippee skippy.

Excuse the poor quality as I am using the house scanner and not the school one.

The type is really unstellar; I totally rushed the shit out of that shit, but even though I did the ilustrations quickly, I'm pretty pleased with them. This is really the direction I want my illustration/art to go in, I think. It's what I used to do in my sketchbook when I actually had time to draw in my sketchbook for fun. (Ah man, I need to buy a new one. So much for putting that on the Chrostmos lost.) I have to be cleaner with it though. I don't know. I'm really kind of wrestling with myself as far as what I want out of my art.

Anyhow, great news from a few days ago! For those of you in tune with the underground music scene (did you catch that pun there?), there's a site called Tiny Mix Tapes out there and they recently did an article about the the top 25 album covers of this year. If you take a look, you'll see something that looks very familiar to what I posted on this blog! That's right, the cover I did for Perkasie back in November 2008 was #8 on the list of the top 25.
I guess the CD was actually put out early this year...

How excitinggggggfdh.

Time to go and wrap some gifts and clean the bathroom for the 31 people who are piling into our house in the next 14 hours.