Portfolio Review: The Final Frontier

 "Primary Me" 

"King Maximus"

So today is the final review of my portfolio. Very excited. The only thing I have left to do is print out an attach my Backtis (essentially my name, phone number, email, address, etc) and then I'm done with portfolio. A very surreal feeling is coming over me at this time, an exciting feeling but still one of disbelief. As a sophmore and a junior I watched as the seniors worked in their private studios and put together amazing bodies of work that I never thought myself capable of doing. There was this heavy disconnect between who I felt I was and who I felt they were. It was like being in the presence of demigods and I was but a lowly serf struggling to find my voice. Now here I am, in the shoes of those very same people who I was looking up at less than a year ago, going through the same stuggles they've been through and I do feel changed. I don't think I'm a demigod by any stretch of the imagination but I feel much more confident about myself and my work, and have gained a better grasp on what I'm capable of. If you had asked my last year to try and put together any of what I've put together this year, though I'm sure the attempt would be valiant, I wouldn't have even thought myself able to. Its been a great year, and now I'm about to be judged, given my final cirtique (well, not quite. I have one tomorrow too) and then prepare myself to go out into the real world and put these lessons to work. Very exciting, but to be honest, also a little scary but if this year has taught me anything, its that hard work pays off and its good to be tenacious and if you're willing to go all in and work as hard as you can, you can survive. 

Playing catch-up.

It seems as though I need to learn about the image settings on blogger as the last piece I posted refuses to enlarge. So it seems I might have to get a flickr account or some sort of image host so that I can avoid this in the future. Its funny how alien the concept of blogging is to me now. I had a livejournal site for a very long time but its primary function was just me letting out steam and then it just shifted into amusing videos followed by a sentence post every couple of months. I do see the importance and application of blogging in todays illustration and I guess I've got to re-introduce myself to the idea of at least weekly updates. 

So, I'm working on ideas for the Eighties show thats coming up. For the past two weeks I was convinced that I should do a strictly Transformers piece for it, considering that Transformers is one thing from eighties nostalgia that I still hold sort of close and its' weird in that I remember the cartoon fondly but don't really collect the toys in the sort of semi religious way most Transformers people do. I think if I had the expendable income I might pick up a few of the really cool toys from the eighties that had the best designs or characters I liked but not from a collectors standpoint. I was much more a fan of the cartoon and the comic in that the stories ranged from ridiculous and silly to ridiculous and slightly more serious. The 1986 film is one of my all time favorite guilty pleasure movies and I know it backwards and forwards. So it seemed natural to to a piece on Transformers as opposed to say Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. However, my brain was racked on how I could handle such a piece without making it look totally silly or difficult to look at from the perspective of someone who was not a fan. I was thinking about handling the image like my two comic con promo pieces pictured above. I think though I need to handle the piece as everything about my eighties nostalgia all bundled into one so that I don't burrow myself to deep in my own geekiness. 

Might as well get actually started.

In an attempt to keep this blog timely and get myself in the habit of posting more often I will post my most recent piece, finished fresh today! 

This is to date, the largest piece I've worked on with its dimensions being somewhere between 18 x 19. When naming this particular beast I kept wanting to call it "Monstructor" but I like "King Combiner" better. It initially started as a DVD cover for the series Megas XLR (if you look hard you still might be able to see him..) but then became another piece entirely. I've been looking at the color schemes of the old marvel Transformers comics for inspiration. I think its' working out fairly well. Until next time, 

                                        Graham Palme