Commission: Logo for Village Players Community Theatre

Sorry for neglecting this blog for such extended periods of time, but as always I've been incredibly busy working on school and art for my upcoming gallery show, which I plan to blog about soon.

But anyways, that's not what I'm planning on talking about in this post. This post is going to be about a commission I did for the Village Players Community Theatre earlier in the spring. They needed a nice logo to go with their new, revamped website, and I ended up getting notified about it and I decided to try coming up with some ideas. They liked one of the ideas, and within two weeks I'd completed the logo. They said they were very happy with it, I got compensated nicely, and overall it was a very pleasant experience. Below is the finished version of the logo:

And here's a link to their new website, which features it: http://villageplayerscommunitytheatre.com/  Go check it out!

Art Swap with Dante Alberti

Because my younger brother Dante Alberti also likes to draw, I decided to do sort of an art-swap with him, for which I'll redraw something of his in my own style and he'll redraw something of mine. So the drawing on the left was done by him, and depicts a character he created, and the drawing on the right is my version of the character wearing a long coat per Dante's request.

Sketches: Fall 2011 classmate studies

To make up for my long hiatus, brought on by the busy-ness of school and finals, here are a few scans of miscellaneous doodles and rough sketches that I drew in various notebooks during my classes this past fall.

My Research Paper: Symbolism within the Tarot and Comparative Visual Analysis

The paper that I wrote as the culmination of the undergraduate research project I've been working for the past year and a half is finally finished and published online! I can't quite believe it hasn't even been two full years since I first began planning and preparing for this project; it feels like I've been working on it for so much longer than that.

I'm pretty sure that most of the people I know who are likely to actually bother to read this blog of mine already know all about my project, because I tend to get very talkative about things I'm excited about with people I believe to be willing to put up with my long, passionate ramblings. However, on the off chance that by some miracle someone is reading this who is not one of those people who I've already told all about it, then I will explain it as simply and briefly as I can, so you can choose whether or not to read it.

It's a proposal of a relatively practical, comprehensive method of how to conduct an in-depth study of the Tarot through a progression leading from objective visual analysis of individual cards (from any deck), to comparative visual analysis of multiple cards, to broad research, ending in the synthesis and interpretation of all that has been learned.
As someone who finds the Tarot to be incredibly interesting and rich topic of research, I want to encourage others to discover how fascinating and rewarding it can be to engage in a serious study the Tarot, whether undertaken for academic purposes or to learn how to perform readings of them, or both. I hope this paper can be a resource that can help inspire, guide or somehow assist in the learning of those who might be interested in studying the Tarot, even in the smallest of ways.

My paper is shared on the University Digital Conservancy and is free for anyone to read. Here's the link to it: http://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/116801 It can be read or downloaded in PDF format.

iPod Doodles and Sketches from Early Fall

Sorry I haven't been updating much lately, but school's in full swing and I've got a lot of irons on the fire all the time now. However, despite all the busy hustle and bustle I have been able to keep myself doing art regularly, with the help of my new iPod touch and an app called "Artstudio", which is pretty much like a basic version of Photoshop, and it's just brilliant. I've been sketching and doodling on it during my classes, instead of a on notebook like I was before. It took a bit of getting used to, but it's really fun to work with.

So here are some of the little works I've made on my iPod. There are some silly little low-quality brainfart pieces, and also some sketches of random classmates.

Sketches from Class: Early September

Sorry I haven't been a very active blogger as of late - I'm afraid both the end of summer and the beginning of the school year have been a mite hectic. I haven't been doing  too much art lately, but school has afforded me the wonderful opportunity to have lots of artistic subjects that I can draw discretely while they're distracted by a teacher. Here are some of the sketches I've made during my lectures.