marathon day

the new york city marathon is streaming past my home right now. i love it. i take my dog out and cheer them on for a while. inside my home i listen to the din of cheering and the high school marching band.
i am getting ready for my second journey to asia this year. in the spring i went on a two week trip to hong kong, hanoi and danang. this time is three week vacation to kuala lumpur, hong kong and tokyo. i'm very excited but i think not working for three weeks and being without my dog is going to weird me out a little bit. i'm not very good at relaxing, but i love to travel to new places. i will do my best to post while i'm away. cheers.

more spring 2006 shows drawing

vectorized ink drawing of dresses from rochas spring 2006 collection

the spring 2006 fashion shows

vectorized ink drawing of a spring 2006 balenciaga dress

vectorized ink drawing of a spring 2006 max mara dress

i normally don't find the spring fashion shows as exciting as the fall shows but this season was a pleasant surprise. the paris shows had the most interesting clothes via Max Mara, Rochas, Balenciaga, and Lanvin. i can't remeber what city they showed in but, i liked the spring collections of Fendi, Junya Watanabe, Miu Miu and Project Alabama as well. i'll probably be doodling the new clothes for a while, so the next few posts will be fashion-y.

22 spetember 05

more inks converted to vectors via CS2's live trace. this was actually only the beginning stages of what i had planned for this image, but i like it this way.

it's good to be focused.

another good lesson from dogs.
today is my dog's third birthday.

live trace III

well, i think i am confident enough now to leave the bitmapped contours lines behind when i do this style of illustration. this image is completely vectors. live trace is just what i needed to work my drawings the way i've wanted. the top image is the finished product, but i love clicking the layers on and off, so i thought i'd share that too. my next step for this style is to incorporate backgrounds more.
if you are interested in my earlier tries, see my live trace and more live trace blog entries.

sip & bite

this fall's three in a box promo has been sent 'round. this was my contribution.

13 september 05

the ease of blogging makes it easy for me to procrastinate updating my website (not that i've been updating my blog lately). on the other hand, i like how the blog makes me want to update it all the time - i.e., i sketch more often trying to come up with postable images. well, here's one. just inks right now. i'm going to play with the whole vector/ink/trace deal some more. and my site is updated. pretty much everywhere, little nips and tucks.

i went to the semi-permanent conference(?) this past weekend. i've never done one of those events before. the speakers were interesting but it's hard to sit in a dark theatre for mucho hours two days in a row. i thought it would be a space where i could doodle while i listened to the presentations. i fidget too much to sit still for so long. fafi was my favorite speaker. i liked her matter-of-factness. plus i had recently bought a drawing of hers, and it's always nice to get to hear the voice of someone who's art you own.

ink coat

go banksy!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4748063.stm

vacation sketchbook

i'm still perfecting my perfect travel kit for art supplies. lately it's been a 'watercolour wheel stack pack' by koh-i-noor for chartpak. it's a small travel set of pan gouaches. the koh-i-noor colours are hardly my favorite (which are schmincke HKS colours) but schmincke do not seem to come in travel form. i have enough trouble finding the schmincke tubes in the states. my travel brushes are also not my favorite (which are winsor & newton series 7) but the japanese pentel neo-sables i use are great travel brushes because they do well with both my abuse and the abuse of travel. and, of course, good ol' pencil and paper come in handy, partnered with my beloved japanese tombo and e-knock mechanical erasers by mitsubishi. i use them regularly. all erasers travel easy anyway i guess. here are some items, finished and unfinished, from my sketchbook taken along to the beach this past weekend:

hair of a boy

while bumbling about nyc's financial district looking for a new mobile phone, i saw this asian guy with the most impressive hair. he managed to successfully put together a fauxhawk and shaggy caesar mix. in my hurried sketch he looks sort of emo or goth. really he was sporting the 'i'm a rich hipster' thing.

promo season part II

i'm on someone else's promo. *grin*
my friends, the talented artists and photographers, tiffany walling mcgarity and john mcgarity have a new agent, veritas management. i was tickled to find out that images from a few photo shoots i posed for are on the veritas website and their new promo card. check out their work at their website and on the agency website. i'm the chick in the red hat and pink hat (tiffany likes to stick these vintage hats on my noggin') in the 'wallingmcgarity' section of veritas under 'portfolio'. i'm also pink capped at the very bottom of their promo shown here. and! from the pink hat photo shoot, the red piebald dachshund is really my pup, nathan. (and yes, he really had a cage on his leg back then.) i love having stylish friends adept at lighting and retouching.

"This is Your Chance!" 2oo5

this year i got to help judge the annual illustration contest, "This is Your Chance!", hosted by (one of my agents) CWC Tokyo.
check out this year's finalists.

promo season

i got my one of my fall promotional projects finished. i'll post them when they're printed. in the meantime, here's a image that i liked that didn't make the cut:

more live trace

having an idea block for my latest promo due in less than two weeks, i decided to spend my time experimenting some more with my inkings style vs. live trace in CS2. with these i made my inks a little tighter as best i could, and where i couldn't i just touched them up in photoshop after scanning them. this time, after applying live trace to the inks i was even more pleased with the conversion than last time. i was even surprised to find the default conversion was my favorite. different than last time, i kept the entire vectorized image. (usually i dump the vectorized contours and keep just the white areas which i then color - so it ends up vector colors over bitmapped contour lines.) the file sizes of these two are grossly smaller than the other way i do this style of illo but i still prefer the output of the other ones. they seem more luminous or something. i'm sure i'm the only one who can see the difference.
and here are the results:

this one was actually another thought i had for a bastille day illo.

july and france always makes me think of cherry earrings.

ten points if you can find the bunny.

14 Juillet

bonjour. happy bastille day! voici un autre dessin.

i love my neighborhood. i live in a brooklyn historic district called clinton-hill. it's full of mansions from the founding family of the pratt institute and about every other style of house. today when i walked out the door to get a baguette, there was live african drum music a half block away at a playgound. they were performing african dance for the kids (and anyone else). how great! i get to walk around and do my errands with a soundtrack. it reminded me of bali were gamelan drifted through air constantly. what a nice day.

more doodle

i was dreaming of lollipops. more gouache.

des griffonnages

these were done with sumi ink and gouache in my sketchbook.

ephemeral nyc

even when an art show is going on for several months in my own city, i can still manage to be so busy i miss it. a new year's resolution in the making. in this spirit, here are a couple summer things that shouldn't be missed.
at the japan society, the takashi murakami curated "little boy" exhibit is only open for a few more weeks (ends 24 july). despite it's lack of groovisions art this time, i like "little boy" even better than the "superflat" show i saw in LA years ago. also not to be missed, the chiho aoshima murals inside the union square subway station and the chinatsu ban sculpture at central park.
today was the opening for the swoon installation at deitch projects (through 13 august). my favorite part was the subway hallway and how you sort of rode the subway from the airless city room to the hyper air-conditioned coney island room.
for those you who like the williamsburg scene, don't miss john mcgarity's show of new works opening 15 july and showing through 14 august at brooklyn fireproof.
and while this isn't ephemeral (although it's contents can be), i'm excited and dismayed about the new new york branch of giant robot's store. i'm only dismayed because now that it's in my state i have start paying new york city sales tax (8.625%) on orders. otherwise, yippee!!

less asphalt rant

this is a doodle expressing how i've been feeling. and here is the more marketable version:

i travel a lot, by choice, but am so sick of airports and flying. i mean the arbitrary security measures and increasing difficulty in getting visas is bad enough but now we (and by "we" i suppose i just mean america for this example) are creating our own flying problems. here's my example; i was flying home to new york a few weekends ago and had a connecting flight in atlanta. my flight to ATL got delayed because of thunderstorms - plane wouldn't be able to land there. not the first time this has happened to me flying into ATL. so while i'm trying to amuse myself in the airport i find this blurb in the june national geographic as follows:
"In burgeoning Atlanta, green space is giving way to asphalt and other artificial surfaces that absorb daytime solar heat, then release it at night. This heat fuels thunderstorms downwind of the city."
so there you have it. we are creating our own bad flying conditions, making ourselves have to sit in airport, making ourselves miss our connecting flights. or maybe i can just blame the whole thing on atlanta and make sure to books my flights through other airports from now on.

live trace

i'm done working on this image. i'm not sure if it's finished, i'm just done for now.

my conclusion is that, while live trace and live paint in AS CS2 are not the magical tools i was hoping for, i think this is as convenient as it's going to get for me. i wanted either live paint or live trace to work like the paint bucket tool in photoshop. i didn't see why there was never a vector paintbucket tool. well, live trace did the best it could for me (i gave up on live paint after reading the tutorial and discovering you can't use it with transparency and billion other useful options). when i draw using traditional implements (for me usually pencil and eraser [i draw with erasers as much as with pencils] on paper, then inked using sumi ink) i tend to leave gaps, like so:

with the live trace settings i prefer to use, these gaps make for one continuous vector object - like a big ink spill over one's drawing. so i have to draw the color fill objects by hand. oh well. live trace does help. some of my contour lines are closed so i no longer have to draw all the objects by hand. i get tired of tracing my work over and over. i draw in pencil/eraser, then trace in ink, then trace digitally for colors...snore. however, i realized i do not want to change my inking style, so this is the way it is.

les giclées par moi

i have finally begun to put together the 'market' section of my website. currently i am selling limited edition giclées of my work. i have a new one at the printers right now. it should be ready in a week or two. it will look like this.

blogshock

ha! i thought this blog thing was dummy proof. i didn't realize i had to hack the code to customize it. thank goodness i know how to do that. but it'll take me a while to find the time.
i just got a new gig so i'll be really busy the next few days, so from now on it'll be learn as i go for CS2. but so far, i love it. it fixes so many things wrong with CS1. love the saving situation. the new tools are fun, tho' not particulary useful to me yet.
this is what i have done with it so far. it's an ink drawing on paper scanned in PSD CS2 and colored in AI CS2



new news format

i am replacing my 'news' section with a 'blog' section. same difference right? but maybe i'll post more this way. stay tuned, i am currently futzing my way through AI CS 2. comments so far: definite improvement from the first CS (damned legacy versions), but not the miracle software i was hoping it would be. we'll see how it goes. my hope is that i'll love it enough to finally ditch AI 10; my current favorite drawing software.
the old news page can be seen here.