Continuing to work on this, because I need to work a lot on my portfolio and this being the cover image for both the physical and digital versions, that goes doubly. Still a lot of work to be done to correct the areas that still look flat, and to correct anatomical issues. I'm going to need to take a stab at also painting highlights on the coat from the light because those look damn cool, although it's not something I've cultivated any skill in.

Posting the original reference photo of my filly side-by-side once again because I don't recall if I've done that since my major do-over of the legs and I know there are still quite a few issues horrible, horrible flaws in my illustration. Still, it's beginning to loose that flatter-than-year-old-opened-soda look my work has tended to get stuck on, so there's something.

Tags: my vocation, w.i.p.'s

I love these random things where code rifles though the contents of my livejournal life at random and then rolls it into a cookie dough of weird significance which is them baked into cookies with a hankering for the drums. Mad-lib individual-specific carols are the best.

Tags: random weirdness

An excellent lecture on advertising; and real and perceived value, that I've been meaning to share since it appeared as part of a guest lecture this semester. Features such genius as marketing a new diamond version of square cereal — and more.

Tags: a prism of rational thought

You know how sometimes people on your friends-list post about stuff going on in their life, and all of a sudden you think "Wait a minute? Since when were they working THERE? Since when were they dating HIM/HER? Since when???" And then you wonder how you could have missed all that seemingly pretty standard information, but somehow you feel too ashamed to ask for clarification because it seems like info you should already know? It happens to all of us sometimes.

Please copy the topics below, erase my answers and put yours in their place, and then post it in your journal! Please elaborate on the questions that would benefit from elaboration. One-Word-Answers seldom help anyone out. (:

1. Name
Tegan
Like 'Megan', not the beverage.

2. Age
21.

3. Location
Perth.

4. Occupation
Technically not unemployed, because I haven't been looking for a job within the last month, but I'll be starting to look for one once i get back from the States. So for the moment my occupation is 'sponge'.

5. Partner?
None, although I'm finally getting to a stage in my life that I think I just might be open to fitting in a relationship.

6. Kids?
I could go either way on this one, but it's not something I think about because it's not in my five year plan.

7. Brothers/Sisters
I have an older sister Kate (23) she's currently studying post-grad medicine. Our relationship is reasonable, but it's something I haven't been investing effort into because I've been busy with university. It'll be nice to have the time to go out with her some more over the next year.

8. Pets
An aviary of 19 budgerigars is shared by my father and I, I also have three horses — Vandal (22), Arwen (11), Arwen's daughter Mango (4) and two cats; Spider (6) and Gulliver (1). It's a lot of pets for someone my age I know, but my parents pay the bills of most of them. This coming year though I'll be starting to take over some of the cost of my horses in paying for my younger mare.

Spider I got in high-school when I first started having issues with depression. She's a short-haired torby (tortoiseshell/tabby) we saw in a pet shop, and at the time she was our first non-oriental cat but now she's the oldest of our four cats of no particular breeding. She gets very paranoid when people look directly at her for any real length of time, so taking a photo of her is generally a trial. Spider is highly neurotic, has an unadventurous diet and always eats kibble that's fallen out around the bowl first.

I've had Gulliver since the Sunday after the 2008 Assorted (Curtin Design Graduate) exhibition. My parents let me bring him home because he has congenitally deformed front legs, was starving and was one of 12 kittens at the stables at that time. Had we not brought him home he would have died (and his fellow runt did, causing my Mom to buckle and bring home his brother Mowgli who is my sister's cat) because the vast majority of people are quite fucking apathetic indeed, and actually bemoaned that I was able to convince my parents to let me have another kitten.


Gulliver's an exceptionally sweet little boy and was the companion cat to our chocolate-point Siamese, Pippin in his last year. He's also been a great Auntie Gulliver to the three kittens we've fostered within that time. Like many little boys though he is quite the brat at times and likes to gently but adamantly nip people when he feels they are not paying enough attention to him. He totally regards me as his mother though, which I would be a lot cooler about if it didn't mean such insane devoted attention, and if he hadn't also decided that it was okay for him to never learn to clean his own nose because he'd always have me around to do that for him (it's tragic, he actually treats it like a routine).


Gulliver is also highly domestic and likes 'helping' with chores such as loading and unloading the dish-washer, pegging out thr laundry, and sweeping.

9. List the 3/5 biggest things going on in your life

• Working on my portfolio because I would like to make a career in illustration.
• Horses.
• Trying to be a productive and healthy individual.

10. Parents
Mom and Dad, still married — met in the United States at a party and my Mom claims Dad lied both about his age (he's two years younger than her) and his height. The fact that she was apparently able to believe a lie about his height when the first time they met was face-to-face kind of gives it away that they used to like to party hard.

11. Who are some of your closest friends?
Siobhan, Ros, Niina and Katie. Although I'm totally the laziest friend ever, sorry y'all, I'll check my calender and arrange that belated hang out I've been promising.

Tags: family, kittens, meme

Not to begrudge all the sundry other fabulous cards I've received over the years, but this is like, my favourite card ever. It's an American Greetings card (illustrator unlisted) that I would estimate to be from '96 perhaps? It's from my maternal grandparents Tudda and Dunder. I thought I'd share it here because it's just so awesome, more so without my bad crop.

It's a stellar example of how not everything in an image needs to be awesome for it to be a fantastic piece of work. The reason this particular piece has been on my mind a lot recently is because I'm thinking of trying to do my own take of an illustrated card featuring horses in the same vein as this, although probably a scene with giant cacti or canyon spires instead. My portfolio is totally lacking in scenic pieces with more complex compositions, so it would actually fill in a gap somewhat and give me another opportunity to show off my familiarity with horses. And possibly cacti as well, I love those too.

I could ramble on forever about the fabulousity of this piece, from the awesome arrayal of cool-warm-cool cloud colours and the more illuminated farther palomino pushing the focus into the middle ground (which follows an old landscape painting rule of setting the foreground in shadow — read more about this convention, and breaking it — here), to the awesomely cool use of fuchsia and blue gradations, to the wicked starry sky and the totally happening castle. What’s not to love?

Also, did I mention the horses running into scene from stage right? Oh the dynamism.
Totally sweet matching blue and green breastplates as well.

Tags: master artists, my vocation

I decided I should probably make a new piece for my portfolio just so people don't think I have some haunting fear of drawing people. At the moment it's looking kind of terribad and both eyes need a lot of changing, and possibly enlarging (and I suspect I'll have to open the far eye up since I can't really thoroughly examine the muscles at play when someone's winking when I need it done like, now) the skin tone is as icky as bad fake-tan, and I'd like to continue to push it further away from the reference image I was using, and make it look generally more cool.

I also need to rock out the Art Deco aesthetic more, because I've realised with my messily mocked-up border detailing (intended to mimic the earrings) that I am TOTALLY CHANNELING STARGATE.

If anyone has any suggestions for more cool retro-stylings for this I'd love to hear them.

Tags: my vocation, w.i.p.'s, why yes i am a geek

Hot damn I've actually made some progress today. I expect this piece to be finished tonight, which is great because if I can just get one piece a day finished off then I'll be able to actually have a reasonable portfolio put together, albeit one printed as a rush job. I'm planning on doing it up as an A5 booklet as Niina did last year, and if they can do it fast enough print copies up at Officeworks or something like that, if anyone has any suggestions I'd be very grateful for them.

This is the pattern I originally started on for the Pelican magazine earlier this year, originally working with an Irish Elk bull, but I was just never able to get a strong design out of it. It still doesn't look fabulous yet and this is just a brief mock-up, I need to do actual MATHS to create the repeat for this (I swear the amount of maths I have to do in my designs is kind of unseemly), and there needs to be more colour cohesion and finesse - but I'm very happy that I can actually see a direction to take this in now. Plus I can comfortably totally plunder all the Scottish imagery I like (outside of clan tartans), because it makes up about an eighth of my background, from my Nan's parents. Yay.
Although obviously I have Siobhan to hit me if I break any faux-pas.

So now it features a she-elk of indeterminate species, although a lot of my references were of Roosevelt Elk (the largest still living North American Elk). I kind of need to give her some more legs, and I'm thinking of making some discreet plaid background possibly, featuring some greens, and perhaps some mauve. Good idea; y/n?

I've also had the thought of possibly turning that Mango (my younger mare) rainbow illustration into a pattern as well: same as above, good idea: y/n?

Tags: my vocation, w.i.p.'s

So I always feel a bit weird about my love of Foo Dogs (or Foo Lions, or Fu Lions, or whatever the cool kids are calling them these days) because I'm like, isn't this cultural pilfering? I feel uneasy about the appropriation of imagery from other cultures in my own illustration, and of my possibly seriously improper love of re-interoperations of other's cultural imagery from an outsider perspective, such as the Witch Doctor. Or hey, witch doctors in general. I always thought they were super cool. I'm sure it's got derogatory connotations of course, and is demeaning to other cultures and their practices, but I always loved the whimsical magic and medicine wielding character it represented.

This is like with Chinoiserie, the outsider interpretation of Chinese design aesthetics and imagery. I am so darn guilty of this and it always makes me very self-conscious. I can't help loving Foo Dogs though, most of my earliest memories are of my grandparent's house in Pittsburgh and they have a lot of cool stuff from all over the world including Foo Dogs from when my grandfather was in the navy (and yes he paid for them, as opposed to other invading soldiers of the time). There were a couple always staring at me from the breakfast bar, which is also where the Andes mints are kept, so it's a location I've spent a lot of my time in that house in proximity to.

What this latest bit of introspection is leading up to is my concern of if it's cool for me to use my Foo Dog illustration on my business card? Is it cool for me to even occasionally illustrate Chinese imagery? I come from two colonial cultures, there's a lot that's scorched Earth which is always going to be off-limits to me because of the whole my-race-oppressed-your-race-ultimately-marginalising-your-culture-for-going-on-hundreds-of-years-and-driving-your-culture-to-the-fringe-and-generally-seriously-fucking-things-up-for-y'all-forever thing, and I'm just in general wary of how much right I have to use any particular mythical imagery.

I mean, the Chinese embassy did grant me a Visa, could that qualify as some sort of it's-okay-if-you-take-in-some-of-our-cultural-mythology-and-artistic-preoccupations-by-osmosis-and-recreate-them-in-your-art-to-share-with-your-culture sort of thing?

I have a sticky mind, it's hard to resist adopting cool things.
:(


So here's my possibly-very-inappropriate-use-of-foo-dog-illustration-on-my-business-card initial mock-up. Disregarding the cultural implications for a moment, I'm working a little further improving the final details of the piece for this, and I'm likely to re-crop it and rotate it on a tilt as well. Also, the back is still boring and it possibly needs a doodle or something but I'm afraid of appropriating any more imagery to make a doodle to go along with the image on the front. Also, my doodles are generally as ugly as my typography is boring.

It turns out that yes, rainbow graphical background really is the way I want to go. The nebula will instead be used on the contents page, or somewhere else possibly involving under-sea creatures, maybe making some parallels to the similar mystery of uncharted regions in the deep sea and in space. This is kind of just a quick mock-up of one graphical rainbow idea, but I'd love suggestions (and if you feel like giving those suggestions via doodle, all the cooler).

Tags: i'm insane, my vocation, personal projects, university work, w.i.p.'s

Tags: personal projects, w.i.p.'s

Sorry, if this is incoherent it's because the first drat of this post died, and I'm fiendishly tired.

Less than two-weeks to the graduate exhibition, good time or the best time to be totally and utterly un-productive?
Seriously, I'm working so slowly and ineffectively it's bloody ridiculous, especially because OH DAMN I actually need to allow time for printing my business cards and a copy/copies of my portfolio, which I haven't really figured out anything about yet other than Niina's handing out of portfolios last year looked very cool?
I'm so screwed.


I have a strong, vibrant temptation to scrap the Lupins I've been working on and instead replace that idea with a strong graphic background of rainbow, so I may have already snapped.It's a serious Lisa Frank kindergarten flashbackPossibly it's just rebelling against my intentionally bland 50% black background, possibly it's a lingering stationery (or 'Imagionationery' as one Lisa Frank line was branded) obsession from my Design in Context essay and my long-held desire to rule an empire as she did back in th '80s/'90s.

Or perhaps it could be neat to pair the two together, one strongly graphical, one strongly realistic in an atypical combination compared with the more colour-the-damn-horse-rainbow strategy employed by Lisa Frank (althoguh she used no other palette) and Rainbow Brite.


I also wish for a rainbow snow-cone. I too wish to tastes the rainbow, even though that much syrupy sugar would be so bad, but so very rainbow for me.