This year was sure fun! Although The surgery part was totally not cool but I’ll explain more of that later. I started a pumpkin carving tradition a couple of years ago. Every year I decided to carve my pumpkins like something from a Tim Burton movie. Two years ago I did Sally from Nightmare before Christmas. Last year I carved Emily and Bojangles from Corpse bride. This year I was planning on carving a couple of characters from Beetlejuice but I didn’t like any of the patterns I saw and wasn’t up for trying to make a pattern for one this year. So I found an amazing pattern for Sally from Nightmare before Christmas and a new pattern for Scraps from Corpse bride. Aside from those two pumpkins I had one more to carve so I thought it would be fun and really nerd out on it. I drew out Nightmare moon from the new My Little Pony Friendship is magic TV show from the Season 2 episode 4 Nightmare Night. They were a lot of fun to do and I wanted to share them!
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Costume review
Yoko Littner
Wow this was an experience from painting and cutting boots to building a gun out of PVC pipe. Everything was complicated to make because her costume wasn’t very easy to remake.
Bought parts: Neck scarf (Anime store), belt (college sales merchant), Socks (sock outlet store), uncut gloves (Halloween store), wig (online), and chop sticks ( japanese store)
First of all I really didn’t want to be wearing a bikini top so that had to be altered. That was a challenge to make the flames on a “swimsuit” type fabric because it would lay well and stretch where it needed to. After making the shirt came the gloves. Those were made in two separate parts. The gloves were made from two long gloves with the fingers and back of the hand cut and sewn open. Then I made the cuffs with fabric sewn over folded foam and velcro it around my wrist with glued on beads. The shorts weren’t too bad because I found a pattern and altered it to work for the costume. The boots were definitely the second most challenging part of the costume. They were originally white, vinyl gogo boots that went up to the knees. They had to be mid-calf length with large zippers on the side and with flames on the toes/heels. So after painting the flames on the boots I had to cut them to the proper length and while doing that I accidentally cut off the zipper pull. while trying to get it to go back on the bottom part of the boot the pull broke so I removed the old zipper from the boots and put in a new one by hand. That was horrible, but well worth it! After that i cut out the outer side and made a zipper looking part with pieces from the upper boot and foam for the zipper pull. The other piece that was hand-made was the skull clip. I made a large skull form out of skulpy and Then painted it and attached it to a comb which stays in my wig really well.
The gun is a whole different story. I had a friend help me make it because he has done something else that called for a lot of attention prop wise. The gun is made of PVC pipe with plaster and hot glue holding things together. After cutting everything and constructing the gun it had a whole smooth layer of plaster over it. Once that was complete it was time to paint. While working on getting it home i noticed that it was crumpling a little bit so I wrapped the whole thing in black electrical tape and that really reinforced the outside. Then the gun had a whole layer of black matt paint covered with black shiny paint and a clear seal to really make it shine. After the paint dried my amazing boyfriend rigged an LED inside the scope to give it a realistic feeling. To lug the thing around I made a special tightening strap around the barrel of the gun so that a shoulder strap could be attached and it would be easily carried around on my back. The whole thing stands about 6’5″ when it is sitting on the floor. The gun also comes apart at the magazine and barrel for easy storage and travel. A major thanks to my friends who helped out with this thing and my boyfriend for his wiring talents.
One day I thought this girl up and all her background information. The interesting thing is I really have a lot of problems when it comes to making new characters and sticking with them. Another thing i have noticed is the fact that I make characters with blonde hair the most because they look similar to me. That is something i need to work out of because i will have issues making other characters at some point. I was very excited when I came up with this new girl because her hair isn’t blonde and a single color and she isn’t all primped and proper without tattoos and piercing. She really was a stretch for me to create because she pretty much is everything I’m not and that is why I really like her!
Her name is Alison she is a scene girl that likes hello kitty, monster and checker patterns. The image of her is more of a stylized artsty image of flat colors. I will be working on an image of her with regular colors. I’m very excited because she is the first character I have created that isn’t anime related, doesn’t have blonde hair and is very different. I plan to make some full images of her and have her just as something different in my gallery.
I finally decided enough was enough with the way I was doing art so I felt like doing something else. After drawing up a couple really awesome works I felt like drawing a unicorn… yeah i know kinda cheesy but honestly i love them. They can be all kinds of different shapes as long as they resemble a horse in some way. Another artist inspired the colors for the image but the style of the unicorn is purely mine. In comparison to the work I have this is very different. I also tried a different way of coloring than to just do many layers and fade the colors together as I went along. Some of the colors are faded into each other some are just as is. I also did flat colors because they are fun to do from time to time.
Its kinda hard to know what to say about this piece because it just happened. I wanted to draw a unicorn and so I did. I wanted to make the colors look like the were from a dream. It was very hard to not make everything super bright and vivid but soft and bright. The color changing hair was a new thing for me. If I ever do that again I plan to do something special if I want to shade and highlight it. So here it is one of the girliest pictures in my gallery.
Today in class one of my classmates showed me her body of work and I though “well damn, no one is ganna take me seriously when all I do is anime art and fan-work”. So I thought of some new things I wanted to draw. Sometime when I have more time available to myself I want to work on some traditional media art but for now I’ll keep up with my digital since its easily accessible. So after class was over I rushed home and sat down for a while imagining what I wanted to draw. After a while I finally worked up my courage and drew something without reference! I am so stoked at how it turned out! Then I drew another one!! XD I haven’t ever been on a role like I was tonight and to top everything off i drew out a stylized unicorn! I can’t wait to work on coloring that. I haven’t drawn a horse-like creature since the dragons i have been working on and those aren’t even close to the same design. I’m really hoping this inspiration will keep going I am thrilled to be drawing work that is completely out of my head and looks really good in my opinion!
The second picture I drew out may become a series and if all goes well i may turn it into a small zine-type thing with all the work collected together. I think this kind of stuff will be good experience and who knows maybe someone will like to buy a copy of my work? Optimism for my artistic skills is back in my life and I can’t express how happy I am to be feeling that way again! LET THE ARTIST INSIDE ME LIVE ON!!!
Art 118 presented a project to make a booklet of something related to Portland. Of course the first thing I thought of was Voodoo Doughnuts! This book has digital work and constructive work that are used together to create a feeling of being hand-made. While the book idea was being developed I made a little voodoo man out of felt, foam and thread. This helped me develop the feeling I was trying to portray in the book. The first thing I was inspired by was Disney’s Frog Prince because the colors feel very iconic for a voodoo theme. Color was my first thought that shaped the project. I knew that the book had to be purple and green. Although as I researched I came to realize that one of the things that Voodoo Doughnuts was famous for was their pink boxes that the large packages of doughnuts were delivered inside. So after working things around I managed to work in that pink color that represented the doughnut boxes.
The outside cover is made of green paper with hand drawn text. The doughnut on the cover is made of three different papers. One is a textured brown paper and the “frosting” is hot pink with a transparent white paper on top. The sprinkles are made of foam paint. The whole book is hand stitched together with violet thread.
The inside is a compilation of all the research me and three other friends collected. We went to Voodoo Doughnuts and bought 6 doughnuts of different kinds and ate each one giving our opinions. The point of the project was to encourage people who have not visited the shop to get their butts over there and try it out!
The first page is a spread of images of the shop with a little info of where the shop is located, when they are open and how you can get to the shop easily by Max train. As you flip through the pages you can read the fun facts and info about each doughnut as they were consumed by 4 consumers. The last page is a collage with a bunch of fun images of the doughnuts and the vicinity. Of course to top off the book the last page has a while through it with Voodoo Doughnut’s most famous slogan “The Magic is in the Hole”.
Hello!! This is my first ever blog and I am sure hoping to get this thing up and going! I want to share artistic experiences with you and tell about the cool things that are happening at my college.
When I was taking classes at PCC before I arrived at PSU I took some selected Lab/Science classes. astronomy was the last Lab/Science class I took and really enjoyed it. In the beginning of the term our teacher presented a project that we had the whole term to gather the information. After all the information was gathered our teacher wanted us to pull the information together in whatever way we chose. I choose a more artistic route.
This book is made from information I gathered over a period of 4 days spanning 3 months due to weather conditions. Each day I have specific information written out about the weather conditions, my location and the equipment I used to gather the information. After I made the day/weather page each page after has the information of how to find the constellation and what it looks like in the sky.
Even though the teacher wanted something simple I felt like this would be a fun opportunity to do something super fun! The construction of the book is 5 pages of a thicker black paper hand-stitched with leather cord down the center. The front cover is made from scrap-booking materials ( sticky/shiny star paper and stocky letters). The stars are hand-drawn on each page with a white out pen and white colored pencil to indicate which constellation i am presenting.
The funny thing about the project is when my teacher turned our projects back to us she left and note saying that she wanted to keep my project! What do you expect from a science teacher when they get a project that is overdone by an art student? Please feel free to ask whatever you like about this project.
Cat Margiotta 