I’ve decided to begin a year of creative challenges! The theme will be gnomes, because I love gnomes.
We’ll see how long I can keep this up – I’m going to do my best to stay on top of the challenges.
Day One: Make something that fits in the palm of your hand
My brother is a huge fan of Jay-Z and Kanye West, so I made him this ridiculous illustration as a Christmas gift:
To continue on the Portland theme, here’s hipster Santa, bringing PBR to all the underemployed boys and girls living on the east side…
I will be leaving Portland for a short span of time to spend the holidays with my family, but I love this quirky little city so this week’s posts are Portland-related.
This image is something I made for my friend who has recently left Portland for somewhere in Colorado, so I wanted to send her off with a slice of Portlandia. I tried to think of the most “Portland-y” thing I could think of. According to my brain that was a hipster elk/deer thing riding a bicycle past Powell’s Bookstore while drinking a PBR.
This is how it turned out:
If this image captures even a fraction of Portland’s oddness, I consider it a success.
Materials used: pens, watercolor, colored pencil
I really hope Megan got this in the mail by now and I didn’t totally spoil the surprise by posting on here…
I was pretty bummed that I did all that work for nada, but you all can view some of the pieces I created. Maybe I’ll try to throw the video up on YouTube or Vimeo or one of those places. I wrote a children’s book-esque script to go along with the video and narrated it myself and used iMovie to edit it all together because I have lost whatever Final Cut abilities I gained in college.
I’ll shut up and show the pictures.
So those are some pictures. I made them with patterned paper, markers, watercolors, and Mod Podge.
As I mentioned in my last post, I was (sort of) working on a little robot art piece. Since I pulled out all the stops at the last minute and manage to finish the piece, I can triumphantly post about it.
Background:
Robo Taco (a Mexican eatery in SE Portland) put out a call for robot art on Craigslist (a totally reputable site to find art jobs) and I saved the post – thinking that I might get around to creating a piece. Usually, I don’t, but this time, dear reader, I did! I made a rough sketch of what I wanted my little robot to look like one evening, and the following evening I drew it out on nice paper, inked it and watercolor-d it, and Mod Podge-d it all together.
So here is the rough sketch:
And here is the finished product:
I put it in a frame I got from Goodwill for $2, and voila! A finished piece. It looks pretty classy in the frame, but I don’t have a picture of that yet.
Materials used: Watercolor paper, Micron pens, watercolors, colored pencils, and patterned scrapbook paper (the background)
Here’s a quick post before I kick off my weekend:
We had a gift exchange in the AmeriCorps program I was in last year (we were a pretty tight-knit bunch) and I think there was a max of $5 you could spend since we were all broke and that sort of restriction leads to thoughtful, handmade gifts. (Which it totally did).
I had some small frames from IKEA that I wasn’t using for anything, so I spray painted them black and made some pen drawings to go inside of them. I figured most people would dig pictures of themselves (I adore a portrait of myself that was done in Paris – even more so because I’ve had to draw myself a countless number of times for self-portrait projects) and pictures of their pets. This particular lady was the first AmeriCorps member I met in Oregon because she let me and my boyfriend crash at her place for a few days before I moved into my house. She has a super cute dog named Pablo, and my then-boyfriend bonded with Pablo because he loves all dogs. I realize I’m getting off track now, so here are the pictures:
I apologize to Megan for this portrait – it does look like her but I did not crop this image well. It makes her look much less cute than she is in real life because of the way I cut her chin out of the picture. I did a much better job with Pablo:
Such a cute puppy!
I think these were drawn with Micron pens, but I can’t quite remember. Woo!
To continue on the theme of my initial post, here is another card that also involves a monkey. Specifically, party monkey.
This was for my brother’s 18th birthday. You can never be too old for monkey cards.
I think I used the same photo reference for this card and the party monkey on the last card. Months and months apart. Weird.
Materials used: Watercolor (very muted), some kind of pen, Artists’ ink & little brushes
Erika Schnatz 