Tagged with Drawing …

Apr 27 2013
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ART

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity

I’ve been dreaming a lot lately. About a lot of things. I usually am able to trace back the origin of dreams to some distant connection in my waking life, but lately they seem unrelated. They’re the kind of dreams that come back clearer as the day goes on and you begin to realize all of the horrible nuances and implications embedded in them.  Those kind of dreams. Not too sure how to fix it.

I’ve been missing life drawing lately. I need to get back at it. I have some ideas I’ve been keeping in my sketchbook that I want to finally bring to life. Here’s a close up of one of my figure studies from a few months ago. Love the body, but I’m not crazy about the hair and face. I’ll get ‘em next time!

Courtney Larsen- crouched figure study

Courtney Larsen- crouched figure study

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Nov 20 2012
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ART

Photoshop fun

I’ve been trying to get a little better a photoshop lately, which is turning out to be slow process. There are so many buttons! So many possibilities! I totally do everything in photoshop the hard way.  I’m pretty sure that’s due to many, Many years of using Microsoft Paint for all editing purposes. Here’s a poster I made for an upcoming exhibition:

I’ve entered this show a couple times now, unsuccessfully, but hopefully this’ll be my year! Things are going to be different, I can feel it! Hahaha But really, I’m really hoping one of my pieces get chosen. I feel like it’s personal now. This is my last chance to enter before I graduate.

After making this one, I started messing around with some filters and changing things around, and this is what I came up with. I think I like it, it’s kind of eerie feeling. I want to keep playing around with the text, but it’s at a good stopping point.

ALSSSSSOOOOOO, I did some logo work for my talented friend, Anna Christy, so I’ll be posting more about that soon. My first commissioned logo! Ahhhhh!

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Oct 30 2012
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ART

Work in progress

Here’s a the start of a piece I’m working on right now for screenprint.  I just thought that all the the tracing papers looked so beautiful scattered on top of each other. In the future I’d like to do some kind of transparency piece utilizing this concept of layers.  It’s so magical how some layers just fade away.

Closer look. For some reason, I drew this pattern by hand, tracing from a portrait I found of Madonna. But the picture really only had 2 good pattern sections to trace from, so I had to keep moving it around to complete it. I wanted the sketchy, hand drawn look, but the amount of time it took to complete this was probably not worth it.  Especially because I planned to make this a super super light peach that would blend into the background…. So essentially I could have done this on a computer and finished in a quarter of the time.

Magical.

My first two layers printed.  Here’s that ghastly lime green that keeps popping up. I swear I will have that tub of lime green paint for the rest of my life. Anywaysssssss I’m trying to switch things up a bit, and try new color combos that I don’t necessarily think will work. The pink and salmon one is supposed to be my real piece, and then I’ve made a couple green ones and a couple mauve ones, which hopefully turn out cool.

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Oct 28 2012
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ART

everything

Finally! The finished product! This is a piece I made for my screenprinting class.  It’s meant to be a chaotic piece in which things look jumbled and messy and a little overwhelming. I came up with the phrase after being prompted with the word “Obsession.” It forced me to think about what I am obsessed with. Which is more an obsession with thoughts and letting myself have the same conversations in my head over and over, to the point that it consumes me.  This idea of perfection (personified by the flowers and the colors) and achieving perfection and greatness that overwhelms my mind (as exemplified by the intertwining ribbon and the spastic lines of color). And all of the text is drawn by hand, even though I probably could have done it on the computer. I wanted that human touch, and the ability to tweak the font to make it fit the piece better.

Courtney Larsen “Obsession” 12″x16″ screenprint

And then here is my second version. I really like it, but I don’t think it has the same finished quality as the purple, like it needs one more thing to make it look complete. I have an insane amount of lime green ink that I am now trying to use on every project in order to get rid of it. Turns out a little lime green goes a long way….

Courtney Larsen “Obsession” v.2 12″x16″ screenprint

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Oct 23 2012
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ART

New Graduate Show at ASU- My poster design

For one of my classes we had a poster design competition for the upcoming New Grad Exhibition at ASU, and mine got chosen!  I spent WAAAAAAYYY too much time on this poster.  All the text is drawn by hand… I realize a computer probably could have done this, but it would lack the love.

It’s actually a combination of hand-drawn and digital work.  I drew all of the letters and border in graphite, then scanned it into my computer and inverted the colors.  I took a chalkboard image I found on google as the background, but as I messed around with the image, it turned out not to be quite chalkboard-y enough.  So I layered another, dirtier looking chalkboard image behind it and erased part of the image out using photoshop. Then it was just a matter of getting the text to be white enough to pop against the background.

Here is the finished product, and some of the before images:

Before photoshopping (you’ll notice I took out the “THE”, which I think was the right choice):

Detail of the beautiful swirly ribbon:

Here’s the link to the ASU Herberger Institute’s page with more details on the show, and dates and all that good stuff.  There are some really inspiring pieces of art, and impressive new graduate students.

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Oct 09 2012
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ART, Music

Drawing is better than doing other things

Tracing paper is a girl’s best friend.  And so is procrastination.  I have been putting off all “real” work in lieu of drawing on layers and layers of tracing paper for my screen printing class.  I love it.  BUTTTTT it’s a bummer to have put in hours and hours of work on something as fragile as tracing paper…  I think I’m going to take advantage of the light table in studio and make this same drawing in black and white.

Here’s a sneak peek on what I’ve been working on.  The text is all hand drawn, which I was really proud of… until my teacher told me how much faster it would have been to just do it on the computer…. ugh!  I am a complete believer that there is something special about doing something by hand, something very genuine and personal and intimate, that cannot be replicated by a machine.  You will undoubtedly get perfection, but what’s interesting about that?

The piece is kind of bubblegumy and sherbet-y, but not quite as overwhelmingly as the pictures make it seem.

Current type obsession: Pistilli Roman. OOOoooOOooOOoOoOOo! Gives me goosebumps just thinkin about it!

On an unrelated note, Band of Horses is coming to Tempe in a couple of weeks, and I’m super pumped.

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