HOLLY BALLS

best night ever.

Fickle....

an older drawing of mine. I happen to really like this, for both its qualities as a drawing, and what it means to me. It's not done, i doubt it ever will be. It's in a sketchbook i finishes, and i dont think ive ever revisited a sketchbook after i've finished it.
This was done in ballpoint pen, marker, colored pencil, and gouache.





Tis' funny how love works. For better or worse...

work-dump, finally an update.

so everyone has harassed me into finally updating again. not for any lack of work, just more laziness to type and format images, ect.
but yes, here they are:

this was done for my advanced drawing class. The emphasis had to be on hands. I kinda took it in my own direction. This is about 9''x20'' and entirely done in colored pencil. I think its one of my better drawings for this semester.


this was also done for my drawing class. The emphasis on this one had to be on a reflection. The was done the night before it was due and the idea and method came more out of frustration then anything else. I actually really like it now. this is done in cut paper, colored pencil, and crushed vellum.


and this is an extension of what seems to be my epic takeover of the 9th floor. Ive made a few shirts like this for friends and have now moved on to see if i can sell them. Any color monster, on any sized shirt. the only shirt color i have right now is white, but that will change soon.
if you bring me an article of clothing, i will put a monster on it.
a scant $20 for a custom shirt, $18 if you bring me the clothing.
if any of you fabulous readers out there want one, email me your desired color of monster and shirt size to alex.carlson@mac.com or comment on this entry.

bye for now!
-alex-

monsters and marcus Aurelius

I've been quite busy lately.

between work and school my days have spent either at Dick Blick stocking shelves and wowing people with my awesome knowledge of paper and paint, or working on this and that in the studios at Massart. I have today, two things id like to share with you all.

both of these assignments are for my Advanced Drawing class.


this first one here is for assignment simply entitled "cast shadows." i wasnt really to excited for this project until i stopped caring about it. We were supposed to have shadows tell a bit of a story and be the main point, but through some extensive critiquing and mulling over my ideas, i reached this one. the shadows are there but are not really the center of the drawing, which im totally okay with.
I love my monsters, they have really become a huge part of my work recently between my drawings and the cutouts. I've also become quite known for them here as well.
This drawing was done in graphite mechanical pencil on tracing paper.


this assignment was more of a personal based assignment. we drew many everyday objects and then picked out favorite drawings and had to give that chosen object a new life or meaning. i chose a stool i drew. many of my original drawings were anthropomorphic in the fact that i had drawn the original stool with legs or fins. The idea i had before mister Aurelius here was a derby race with stools rather then horses, but i though this was far funnier.

graphite mechanical pencil on Canson marker paper.

Epic Procrastination, Part One

oh five page english paper, you torment me so.


A drawing of myself based on a conversation between Beto and I.

WIP.

Cardboard Minions pt3

it seems these little guys have been collecting across the studio. Ive been having a number of requests from other people in the studios to do them.
Sometimes i feel if im going to get famous it will be for all the wrong reasons, ha.
Click the images for a larger version.





The little eskimo looking man is named Walter. He now lives with Adam Tibbets in the studio. He's a bit smaller and on a thinner board.
The Little batman was more an exercise in anatomy. My friend Dave had been giving me pointers of superhero physic. it mildly succeeded on some aspects, i still need work though. Black paint with white china marker.
Catasaurous was made for my buddy Ben Z who works next to me in the studios. Due to a recent mouse problem, i found it appropriate to give him the Catasaurous. I ran out of cardboard when i made this, so he is made of a thick craft paper.
LOL Batman was derived from one of my lessons from Dave in which we drew on my desk and a sketch of batman was born which i then put a silly face on. Adam decided he wanted a big version of that, thus this cutout came to be.
lastly, upon request from a friend of mine, Nick, the last cutout was made. His name is steven and he's the tallest of the small monsters.

if by the end of the year (or even semester at this rate) if i have a good collection of these guys that are mine, i want to put them in professional looking mattes and try and get into a gallery with them.
Im beginning to wonder what other things i can apply these guys to. There is a world of design beyond cardboard after all....

all finished

with the goat mask that is.
(Click for a larger picture)


It is completly hand sewn. There is fake fur as the base of the mask with yarn woven into it. The horns are real Ram horns held in place by foam rubber and a headband. I made little cloven gloves to go with it :-)
i did my face paint right before class and i guess that turned out alright.

i think some of my cardboard cutouts are going to be in a studio/gallery space the first week in october in West Roxbury. I'll be sure to update about that.

my first big MassArt project! WIP

after a long and tedious process of actually getting into the illustration class i wanted, i was pleased to no end to discover that the first project we were to do for illustration was to draw concepts and then build a mask. Now, i love masks, so you can imagine how excited i was. I drew up four concepts, two of which im uploading, because i cant find the other two on my computer right now. There was one more ram concept, and a lion mask. i settled on the wooly ram.



with my concept chosen, i braved the wilds of two bus lines and the night time wonder of West Roxbury with a friend to go to joann fabrics to get material. Successful trip, by the way.

the mask is made entirely by hand. Its fake fur, yarn, and felt as of right now. A pair of real ram horns will be a later addition. Each piece of yarn has been tenderly placed and set by hand, and its taken quite a bit of time hunched over in my studio thus far. For critique next week, i will be doing face make up to mimic a ram (stylistically) so, another pic will come later on.
peace!

Cardboard Minions prt. 2

Another installment of my cardboard takeover of the ninth floor of MassArt.





Two more little fellas. I have a little bit of a cardboard axis across the studio, it seems. A guy from across the studio asked for a piece of cardboard from me to make his own cutouts. We laughed about having a war ensue from the two parts of the studio. In that idea, i made my et tu brute hoplite.
the little squid fella was just a small gift for a friend who moved into his studio today, hes only about ten inches tall and on a thinner board. The bottom two are just ideas that formed while doodling on the masonite board that covers my drafting table. the little one eyes king is kind of a reoccurring thing. if you look back to an older post you'll see a little alien man making a burger in a spaceship, his name is Sid. The guy above is named "King Sid" pretty much the same idea i guess. The anteater alligator strange thing is named Walter.

It was a good day today. The seniors moved into the studios yesterday, and the juniors moved in today. Its nice to be surrounded by all the people i'll be calling peers from now on. I cant wait to see the studios full with work. Im feeling very inspired by the change in scenery and city, and people.

Cardboard Minions

so...
its been awhile since i touched this thing. Between moving back to boston and the start up of school, its been hectic and the amount of work ive been doing has been less then satisfactory. BUT, now that i am in a studio at MassArt, ive managed to do a few things.
As a junior i get a desk and cubicle like area on the ninth floor of the building with the rest of the illustration juniors and seniors. I managed to get a good desk thanks to a freak encounter with some existing students and maintenance workers.

I felt the need to make it feel a bit more like home, and remembering back to the last time i had a studio in my senior year of highs chool, at Walnut Hill School For Arts, an idea came rushing back to me. This also was in part discovered by my reawakened love for Dave Johnson.

Cardboard Cutouts!

i had a few in my old studio, and to my great pleasure, someone had put about 10 large untouched sheets of thick cardboard in the 'freeshare' pile in the studios, so i claimed them as mine and have been enjoying the labor intensive process of cutting things out and then coloring them.


(make with the clicking for a larger image)



God only knows what the lizard thing is. just a small drawing in my sketchbook that turned into the above. The 'i like to watch' guy is something that actually began its roots in highschool. i had done a similar thing in one of the bathroom stalls in my highschool but he got taken down and eventually stolen. This guy is just his senior i guess, but looks much different. And of course, the all mighty and super sexy Hellboy.

i want to make more, i feel like this is going to become either a deep addicting problem that takes over the department (or at least my suite) and pisses off my studio mates; or in a better outlook, maybe someone will like them and take them off my hands after awhile.

They are each about 3-3.5 feet tall. Oil based sharpie paint marker for the black areas, acrylic paint and white out pen for the whites. Hellboy has some crayon and china marker on him as well.

even more robots!

again, another drawing i did. for this one i wanted to put together more organic forms with the mechanical. maybe next step will be mechanical forms over organic forms or vice versa. some greater integration of the two.
This was drawn with a ballpoint pen and colored in photoshop.



(click the thumbnails for a larger picture)

more robots!

another venture into the land of the mechanical for me. I've been looking through books trying to concentrate on more realistic moving parts and joints. I dunno how well i succeded with this one, i think the arms are looking alittle less cartoonish then ive drawn them before, but i did have fun with this guy.
He's a Terrain Recovery Bot, hence his big wheels. He's able to rotate his body while remaining stationary 360 degrees and can overcome most rocky or steep earth. He's meant to recover the parts of destroyed equipment and vehicles.
Im including both the original drawing and the colored version of this drawing below.

the original sketch was done in bic ballpoint pen. The sketch was scaned and brought into photoshop where i did the coloring with a graphics tablet.
enjoy!

post 15

Robots!



these were some doodles i did for fun a few days ago (along with some marker testing in the center of the page) that i scaned in and decided to make into finished illustrations. Ive been folling around alot more with digital coloring and making textures and personality to coloring. IE rust and dirt. I want to start looking at some actually machinery like the landing gears on planes and construction equipment to get a better feeling of how arms and legs would attach and then move. Also work on lighting conditions and getting a feel for true to life shadows and highlights on a form, especially ones that are metalic like these.

Post 13

For my final assignment in my figure drawing class, we were brought to the Body Worlds Exhibit in milwaukee. Our assignment was to draw a figure from the exhibit and have that interact with another figure.

My level of interaction is the group of kids behind the horse. I was doing alot of studies of the middle and high school kids and all the strange or ignorant things they were saying. Most of them congregated around the horses back end and snickered among themselves about the horses tid-bits.
The linework was done in graphite and ballpoint pen, color was done in photoshop.

post 12

did this sketch in my spare time.
This is the arcangel micheal as a chicken.

i got the inspiration for this in a kinda strange way. I was walking between classes one day and i looked at something from a wet media class that was hagning in the hallway and a swore that i saw the arcangel micheal as a chicken. i did a double take and walked to it and it was nothing like what i though. Taking that, i decided to take it upon myself to draw what i wanted to see.
This was done in graphite, ballpoint pen, ink pen, gold paint, and marker.

Post 11

an assignment for school. we had to design an olympic poster in a year and city of our choosing as long as the city had not hosted the games before. We also had to have a landmark from the city, mine is the angel pillar that also acts as the I in Kiev. (written in ukrainian.)
i drew up the yak mascot, his name is Kubec and they are skiing. Done in adobe illustrator.

Post nine

been awhile since i updated. Havnt really been doing to much ive wanted to upload, but ive got a few recent things to put up now.
This first one is a page from my sketchbook. i had an assignment for my illustration class to do a magazine cover that depicted a famous person with either an animal that relates to them or the person displying the animal likeness. I chose to do Jack Horner whi is a palientologist who disovered the Maiosaur and also came up with the theory that dinosaurs were good parents (among other things.)
These drawings were my studies done for the dinosaurs and also ended up being the only part of the assignment i though turned out well . I'm not happy with the final peice, though i may redo it later on.


The next two are some figure drawings i did late last semester. both were done in mechanical 2B graphite. The first one is rougly 18 x 10 inches and the second is 18 x 20 inches.



hopefully i wont go another month without a post.