Tuesday, July 21, 2009

For Your Information

This blog is moving to a new address:

http://keep-creating.blogspot.com

I will no longer be updating at this address, at least for the forseeable future. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

City


This was my final project for Intermediate Animation last semester. I apologise for the size, but I hope it can still be seen. 

The animation was made with a combination of 2D and 3D techniques. Essentially, I used traditionally-drawn textures on a "flattened" 3D landscape. The bird is a 3D jointed character with a hand-drawn texture, and the cat is a sequence of still images, drawn in Photoshop with a traditional feel. The buildings originally had animated textures, but the technique was too complicated to work well with the rest of the animation, and would have distracted the focus from the characters. Perhaps I will post some of the studies for that part as well; they were a big hit in class...!

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Boston

Have some pieces of Boston.















Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Sketch Meetup



I had a great time last night - I got together with a couple girls I met during the pre-MoCCA event and we sketched and had chocolate things. I worked on a new character (based on the one in my current banner image) and will be posting some more images of her soon! For now, here's a quick photo of the page I filled in my new sketchbook:




Sunday, June 21, 2009

City Pieces


Sketches



Some things from my sketchbook:


Tuesday, June 16, 2009

New Creations!




I got some pictures back of some recent projects:
First, a Cute!

I also made some hair clips, and pins made of painted bottle caps!




More things to come later, after I get a camera of my own...

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Watercolor

I'm going to post some drawings from MoCCA soon, but in the meantime have some cities.




Saturday, June 13, 2009

Map Drawings

I'm thinking of doing more map drawings and having them printed as greeting cards/postcards. I think it would be pretty cute.
If I did more screenprinting I could put them on scarves or something, but at the moment I'm limited to paper. What other applications would be good?

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

MoCCA Comic Con and Renegade Craft Fair

This weekend was busy! Saturday and Sunday we went to the MoCCA comic book convention, which was pretty inspirational. The night before I went to an event for women comic artists held at a bar on Houston Street, so I got to meet some of the artists beforehand. It was a bit silly to be going up to girls and saying "Hey, remember me from last night?" Wink. But it was lots of fun. I met two very talented girls who'd gone to comic book school in Sweden. Åsa Ekström (took me a while to find those special characters!) amazed me by drawing in an incredibly authentic manga style. Who knew that was popular in Sweden? 
I also met a couple other women there whose work I later looked up:
Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan, who write a cute slice-of-unusual-life webcomic with mythical beasts;
and Natalie R, who has an impressive deviantart account and was very supportive of my drawing efforts.

I also ran into women I recognized at the con, like Bree, who has a fun webcomic that sort of takes the same direction I intended for mine. I wish I had a working scanner so I could keep posting! I have a few things from the weekend that I'd really like to put on it. 

We also saw Randall Munroe (surrounded by fans) and I talked to Jeph Jacques for a while about drawing inspiration. That was pretty much a highlight of the con for me. And he gave me a drawing of Hannelore. 


Then we went to the Renegade Craft Fair, which was huge and full of all sorts of things. I found a lot of the crafts to be similar, and even saw some of the same belts and headbands at different stalls. I feel like maybe the fact that everyone reads the same craft blogs and magazines means that they end up making similar things, or maybe buyers just generally want the same products. But there were a lot of cute things. I'll post some links when I find the business cards I took from the event.

I'm waiting on some photos, and then I'll post some of my new projects, including a Cute...

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Tech meltdown completed

There will be a break from posts, as all of my methods for turning real objects into images I can post on the internet have all failed. I just don't see a detailed written description cutting it, so posts will have to wait until I'm technologically bailed out somehow.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Long Island City Open Studios

Several large studio buildings were holding open studios today, so we went around and looked at artwork. I work for a ceramicist in LIC Arts Center, so it was nice to go say hi to him (I'm starting work again tomorrow), and there were a lot of other artists who were interesting to talk to. I didn't see a whole lot that I found especially memorable, but it was the conversations with artists that were more valuable to me. It seems that as a young artist people are very interested to talk to me and excited that I've chosen something that I really want to do - some of them came to it from a job they were less passionate about and so they envied my course. Although, we'll see how it goes!
Artists who caught my eye:
Violet Baxter, who does beautiful paintings of New York
Karen Dimit, who makes votive-looking assemblages of stone, wood and metal 
Charles Birnbaum, who makes amazingly detailed ceramic pieces and is very influenced by Lee Bontecou
I also spoke with Yukiko Kobayashi, who besides being a talented artist might be interested in helping me practice Japanese!

I'm excited to go to more events like these, and pleased that there are so many inspiring people here!

Saturday, May 30, 2009

Manhattan

I found some great things on my walk today. We went up through Little Italy and Nolita, across 8th over to the Meatpacking District and down the west side on Hudson Street. Almost every street we were walking on had some kind of street fair. It was amazing. 

We found a couple cool arts fairs, too, which was exciting. One was "Art in the Village", which has been apparently going on for 79 years. It seemed to be mostly fine art (drawing, painting, photography), which I guess makes the vendors enough money to pay off the stall fee...

I was even more excited about the "Young Designers Market" at my old elementary school, the PS 3 building on Hudson by Christopher Street. There weren't many stalls, but what I saw was pretty interesting. Of note were bags made of knitted strips of plastic bags, and some handbags and purses in cute patterns.

I'm really excited to see what else I find this summer! If you know of any good craft fairs, please post in the comments.

Doll Project




On graduation, I got a sweet little doll from Fran at the costume shop. She had a heavy winter dress on, so last night I decided to update her.



Friday, May 29, 2009

Chickies

Also some cutesy things. I made these Easter chickies from a pattern my friend had. After making three in quick succession, though, I was pretty sick of the pattern.... It works much better with stretch; the head is really huge and kind of a strange square shape. I don't know why they didn't try to make it a ball shape instead of a prism, but I suppose you use fewer pattern pieces this way.

Twig Houses

For my senior show at Brown I made a lot of slightly architectural twig sculptures. I really enjoy making things like that, but the problem is that they really can't be transported. So when I left, I had to get rid of some of them, and so I went around and planted them outside:

It's hard to photograph it well, but it looked nice in the stones.

Intro

Not to be confused with clockworkcities.blogspot.com, which was my travel blog from my semester in Japan. I like to keep these things separate, but I think it will be helpful to have a place to put all my various projects. 

For now, check out my website at www.emilygarfield.com to see some of the slightly more art-related things I've made. (Slightly).