i’ll sing no more now til i get a drink
The Drawing-Drought-Followed-By-Hundreds-Of-Sketches-of-Naked-Ladies you've all come to expect.
I am going to start pronouncing it "Drow-FT" to show off how incredibly cultured and sophisticated I am. Stay tuned!
Cartooning the revolution
Hello hombre!
This summer has been nutso. You saw how many things i was doing? So many. We'll, know I have managed to find one of them elusive "Jobs On My Field" (also known as a "What I Went To School For" or "Grown Up" job) which feels so much like trying to grab a lizard by it's tail.
Speaking of reptiles, in addition to a new job I also have acquired a snake! A glamorous movie star snake. My internship with Wandering Eye Productions ended up (slash so far??) involved a mostly pre-production art department, prop building and sourcing, and most of the graphic prop design. (I just started working seriously in film this summer, and i'm pretty sure in the film industry it's just called "graphic design", but that's confusing when your education is in illustration where "graphic design" is usually layout & composition for print.
This is an illustrated comic of my Saturday:
It's not intended to be funny, which is why it's not. It's on purpose. I made this picture for reasons. Many of them.
I also made this comic plot of my plans for the next three months:
Not included:
I am going to draw pictures for you. I am unfortunately not going to be participating in the Difference Gaming Engine, which sucks because I was really excited about it. I'm going to try to get involved with it when I'm not adjusting to so many new things that I think are really important to do well at?
a variety of applications of the same ideology.
I have a lot of things to catch you up on today, but first: one of the few images I've made lately that isn't intended to be cannibalized into something larger than itself, except my general confusion about how the hell cynical old me managed to find herself in a thriving, respectful, silly-ness driven romantic and creative relationship when so many of my cohorts for some reason feel like they need to settle with people who make them feel like they are being slowly lobotomized.
I have been EXTREMELY busy this summer, which always hits me like a pile of bricks. I keep myself busy through the winter but forget how many opportunities rain from the sky when the whether warms up.
Like the song says. It went from hovel to useful space over the course of a few weeks thanks pretty much entirely due to the construction skills and insight of JJ Tebrake and Misha Snyder. The ghost pictured above is illustrator Erin Ornstein, who is, in fact, a ghost lately, in that I do not see her nearly as much as I should in person and who really needs to be putting more of her stuff on the interwebs.
So far the studio is pretty much set to go, if we get our screens exposed elsewhere, but we are ambitious types and have dreams of building our own on-site exposure unit. We don't have the funds collected to complete it yet, but this past weekend we gave it a run through anyway with the materials we did have: christmas lights in the place of a uv safe light, fluorescents rather than blacklights, bits of random stuff we had lying around to cover it, and a chunk of slightly tinted coffee-table glass we found on the side of the road. (Eventually we're going to find a good price on a chunk of 2'x4' plexiglass.) Our images exposed but a lot of the detail was lost, . It was a crap-ton-o-fun. (For serious!) With a little more money and experimentation we will master it! The picture above is JJ, Kat Verhoeven and I, lurking over our in-progress exposure unit, which seemed to get more ghetto as which realized how many supplies we were short. (That's why you do a run-through, right?)
We've already got an awesome handful of artists contributing to the studio, but we're hoping to meet some cool people through it, other illustrators and artists looking to do some screen printing in a space that's nice and big and well-ventilated! If you're looking to do some screen printing this summer, you should contact any of the people mentioned in this here blog post (myself included) to let us know you're interested!
All the details were lost of these when we exposed them but I'm keeping them for the next experiment. That type was a lot of fun and I'm pretty sure is going to look amazing printed. I love type. Type type type. These were made by painting in thick, thick ink directly on acetate. I didn't get a picture of Kat's but she did hers on rubylith, which I am EXCITED to try at the next opportunity. But the straight ink on acetate has a wonderful quality, the ink clings to it so beautifully, and I hope someday when I get through my already ridiculous list of projects I want to do i get a chance to experiment doing some shadow puppet animation playing with bending acetate and filming the shadows.
Dear other multimedia artists out there: if you decided you're going to produce a stop motion animation, do it in the winter. Especially if you don't have air conditioning. You can't have windows open or a fan blowing when working with a medium that registers to slightest movement shifts. Stick to digital animation for the season so you can work on your laptop in some crispy coffee shop.
I HAVE LEARNED THINGS. Growing as a person right here. (I am going to finish this animation if it takes me all year.)
Misha and I went for another Drawn Dinner, you can see Kat's review of the Toronto restaurant WVRST. Which was amazing, in my own words, and I hope to go to again Trevor is threatening hosting his next birthday there. Fingers crossed!
Also at that dinner was Jenn Woodall, an artist I lived with for a while and have had the wonderful chance lately to work with more closely lately. She's been extremely lovely in introducing me to the wonderful world of the live-action film industry. And I wanted to link her website again because I recently updated it to wordpress. 
So that all is a bare, hobby-shaped morsel of what I've been working on this summer so far! There's a lot more: collaborating on web design with a trio of talented humans, sticking my thumbs into as many independent film pies as possible, madly canvassing for an internship which seems like it's looking to go my way real soon. (I am really hoping this will make my resume and my general brainset settle from "Brave Wanderer" to "Focused Multimedia Enthusiast.") I have some hilarious stories from a few jobs I've applied for showcasing the, uh, interesting personalities who advertise for free help on craigslist. It wouldn't be professional to gossip about it online, but let me tell you this creative professional business has some characters. (Luckily, many of these characters are fifty-seven shades of awesome. I have met more people that I want to keep knowing in the past two months than I have in the last four years.)
I was going to include in this post a list of all the films I've worked on this summer that aren't mine, but as they're all being produced with the intention of being submitted in festivals I don't want to mess anything up for anyone by "leaking" things about them online. Oh well. They were all awesome and you should go out of your way to watch every one of them.
ETA: We now have an Indie Go Go fundraising platform (as well as a name!) for our screen printing studio. Check it out! Every little bit helps!
a lot of doodles.
And by wicked, I may mean kind of lame. There's a few I really like and will revisit, but a lot were really, really rushed. I was a busy, busy lady this month.
same i always was.
I don't know if these are accepted stereotypes or anything like that, I'm just basing these archetypes off of the impression I get based on the names attached to work I see. Most of the work I see that I find really innovative and exciting seems to come out of Europe, which makes me really jealous, and I wonder where they get the money to make things. The north american stereotypes are mostly based on everyone here insisting that you HAVE to go to the states if you ever want to get a real job. Working for a big studio doesn't sound all that appealing to me.
I'm taking a stop motion class at OCADu, here is my progress as of a few hours ago. I was experimenting with yellow backlighting because it's the bulb i happened to have in my lamp, so now my characters have been relocated to the PITS OF HELL. (Or, possibly, the barren surface of the sun.)
she was some kinda lady.
Joys of masking fluid.
Kind of based on a poen I wrote a few years ago.
ye olde eggsack face revisited.
I'm cleaning up pictures for some mini comics I'm making. It's an interesting and absorbing process. I do it with most of my images at least a little bit, but nothing to thorough or in such bulk as what I'm doing right now. I'm making mini's based on subject matter rather than personal preference, which means I'm attempting to resuscitate pictures I thought were worthless just because I think they add something thematically.
Original
cleaned up.
ince the majority of the black-and-white ink drawings I post here are done in my sketchbooks, they tend to be only about an inch or two big, sketched quickly to capture an idea. I tend not to be very happy with stuff I try to redraw bigger "for real", since it looses so much of the energy I get when I'm working small. I generally chafe against digital drawing but I'm really liking where some of this is going, keeping my original lines but being able to zoom in on a lot of the little disgusting details. the original of this picture was so small I could have blotted out the face with a thumbprint, but now I can go in and paint teeth inside of the ragged cheek. NEATO.
My partner looks over my shoulder a lot and seems to usually like the originals over the clean-ups, that I'm still stiffening a lot of the life out of them. What do you think? I have a hard time judging my own work. It's hard to tell the difference between what makes your work different than other people's in a good way, verses what just makes it crappy and amateurish.
I'm making mini's to bring to TCAF, but I don't have a table! So I am not sure how to go about getting them out in the world. Guess what this one book is going to be about! Tee hee. I think I will probably carry them around in a big envelope labeled MINI-COMICS FOR TRADE OR PURCHASE: ASK ME HOW. With my name. Which is GILLIAN BLEKKENHORST, by the way. I have short hair and a paperclip in my ear. I will probably be wearing a blue polyester dress. Maybe someone will let me leave my mini's on their table.