GirlMeetsArt » Drawing

make mine a double

Chris Raymond — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 22:08:08 +0000

I was among the 28,000—yes, you read that right—who signed up to take part in Project Sketchbook, a national creative effort sponsored by the Art House Co-op in Brooklyn. I spent the winter break working on mine, with the theme “Make Mine a Double.” At first, I was intending to play on the cocktail-related meaning of that saying. Then I decided to do spreads that were two takes on my dearly departed sister, mother, and father.

Over the weeks I was letting my ideas marinate, I’d been jotting down visual vignettes of my family members: how my Dad had a huge sweet tooth, my sister a fixation on shoes, my Mom a love of dressing up and wearing fancy costume jewelry.

When my father died last spring, I acquired a cache of old family photos, and some of them inspired my spreads: Dad at Bethlehem Steel Plant, Dad holding my hand in front of a big shoe, Mom in what looks like a hat made of white feathers.

From these inspirations, I used markers, colored pencils, collage, and image transfers to take a trip down Memory Lane. In the bargain, I learned to work with media I had been unfamiliar with, and to let go and plunge into the journaling process.

You can see the images, with detailed captions, at my Flickr photostream. Find out more about the Art House Co-op here.

2011 Sketchbook Project experiments in media

Chris Raymond — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 21:54:37 +0000

I signed up for Art House’s Sketchbook Project a few weeks ago, and was disappointed, like many others, with the thinness of the paper in the Moleskine sketchbook that participants get. After reading about other people’s experiments with materials, I decided to do my own. The test page on the left combined several different markers and watercolor pencils, along with image transfers of photocopies using a heat tool.

For the page on the right, I used water-soluble oil pastels, blended with a rag, to create a background. Then I experimented with drawing over the oil pastel with pencils, markers, and crayons.

I really like how the oil pastels look and they don’t bleed through. The heat-tool image transfers really only work for graphic images; even high-contrast photos didn’t work well with this method, though later on, I started experimenting with gel medium transfers.

My theme is Make Mine a Double. I plan to do spreads that are “double-takes” on my Mom, Dad, and sister. Since my Dad passed in April, I find myself recalling a lot of vignettes about all my deceased family members, and I plan to convey those vignettes through a combination of words and pictures. At first, I had planned to do more collage and layering, but the paper’s qualities would make that a frustrating challenge, so I will focus more on text and drawing, which will be its own challenge since my drawing skills are limited and my hand-writing is godawful!

Becoming a businesswoman

Chris Raymond — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:42:46 +0000

I have had my Climacterica postcard set printed and offered for sale at Big Cartel for a couple of weeks. Every sale gives me a thrill and a great sense of affirmation, naturally. It’s much different than feeling satisfaction from nailing a design for a client, because in that case, my work is done to please someone else and solve someone else’s communication problem. Personal work, by contrast, is done strictly to my own desires, esthetic values, and vision.

Now that I’ve made my first sales, I have started thinking like a business woman: keeping track of customers, setting prices, finding the most economical packaging, and of course, thinking about spin-off products.

It’s a whole new world!

Dispatches from Climacterica

Chris Raymond — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 22:23:15 +0000

As I mentioned in my last post, I spent the last week of August taking a workshop, “Illustrating the Personal Narrative” at the Penland School. I began the week with trepidation: I’d never really worked in watercolor or pen-and-ink, my drawing skills left much to be desired, in my mind at least, and before even arriving, I had already gotten very bad vibes from the instructor, a brusque New Yorker with no experience teaching the mixed-level classes that define the place.

My week lived down to expectations about the instructor, but exceeded expectations greatly as to the work I produced: a series of postcards from the mythical country of Climacterica, where all the residents are female, minds go absent, lists get lost, and intentions often go far off track.

Like most artists I know, I am REALLY hard on myself and nitpick my work to death. But I have to say, the set of postcards I created please me greatly. They hit my sweetspot of combining concept, humor, color, and writing. And several fellow students are in line to buy these once I get them reproduced.

I’m now researching the best way to reproduce the set and getting tips on selling my work from colleagues; so in a way, this could be one of the more transformative weeks at Penland for me, if it finally nudges me toward selling my work.

UPDATE October 27, 2009: My Climacterica postcards are now available for purchase, for keeping in touch with friends, giving as gifts, or framing. View the details and order at my Big Cartel storefront.