Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Acornhead Short Story

Acornhead Short 01
Acornhead Short 02
Acornhead Short 03
Acornhead Short 04
Acornhead Short 05



Short story I wrote for my Graphic Novel Lit class. I used the main characters from "The Legend of Acornhead" my in-the-works graphic novel. This situation may or may not show up in the actual narrative.

Some of the inking feels kind of rushed. What do you think of the style/tone/character design?

Monday, March 19, 2012

Notebook Sketch => Screen Print

I have been doing ink drawings in my sketchbook while in classes. Here is one that could lead to a new illustration style and perhaps a new business direction.

Notebook sketch. I tried to make this page work as one whole piece of art instead of separate drawings that are all on one page.

Here is the colored version of the previous sketchbook drawing. I was going for a 3 color screen print feel.

Anyone interested in buying this as a screen print?

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Sample Sketch Pages

 Still plugging away at each page. I have almost finished drawing sketchy pages from the thumbnails. (I blow up the thumbnails and print them out lightly on regular paper. That is what I'm sketching on.) These are 3 of my favorite pages.

 Once I am done with these, I am going to print them on 11x17 paper and do the final pencil drawing on them. After that, I'm on to inking experiments!

6 Degrees of Separation

Is she "La Presidente" or "La Presidenta"?


For my Theory and Criticism class I was asked to take one thing from this weeks readings, look it up and then go 6 steps of links to see where it took me. For better or for worse I started with Wikipedia and stayed there the whole time. This is what I read about:

I took the term "Mountain Arapesh" which is a term for a group of people in New Guinea. The section from our readings was discussing study of cultures and contamination of those cultures. The Arapesh group was used as an example. So...

1. I looked up "Mountain Arapesh" and got this link on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arapesh
It briefly discussed the Arapesh languages.

2. I then went to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger-Congo_languages
This was a longer article about the many languages in the "Niger-Congo" group.

3. I was immediately interested in a short section about "Noun Class" so I went here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class
I learned that noun classes are varied and pretty odd in many languages.

4. Because I learned Spanish about 15 years ago, I am particularly interested in "Grammatical Gender" so I clicked on that link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender
I was only vaguely aware that there were other ways to classify nouns than gender because the only other language I have learned was so heavily steeped in gender assignment to nouns.

5. So, of course I went right for the link about "Grammatical Gender" in Spanish:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender_in_Spanish
I find it very interesting to read about the actual workings of Spanish. I learned it by speaking with natives so I often didn't learn the rules behind grammatical gender exceptions until much later. Often then rule comes from an old version of a word, or it's origin from another language.

6. Finally I ended up in "Gender Neutrality in Spanish and Portuguese":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutrality_in_Spanish_and_Portuguese
Because Spanish (and Portuguese) have only 2 noun genders, male and female, they run into linguistic problems that other languages with a neuter gender (or some other system) don't ever face. In English, "Stewardess" has changed to "Flight Attendant" and "Mail Man" to "Mail Carrier". In Spanish, each word already has a gender, so they have tried different ways of making words gender neutral. One of the interesting ones I learned was an effort to use the "@" instead of "o" or "a" at the end of a word to keep it neutral. I find that really funny because I have no idea how it would be pronounced. I also find it interesting that some politicians are now saying using both the masculine and feminine forms (Señores and Señoras for example) when linguistically the plural masculine form also includes all females as well. Spanish already has one word that means both ladies and gentlemen, but might start using two words in order to sound fair and unbiased.

It was a pretty fun exercise that reminded me how much I loved learned Spanish and then using what I learned to communicate with native speakers. It would be great to do that again.

MFA Logo Slightly Animated

MFA Logo Slightly Animated from Mike Laughead on Vimeo.

As an exercise in my Digital Culture class. I used Animata to slightly animate my MFA Logo. I find it really creepy.