My submission for the Sketchbook Project 2012

Just this past Fall I learned about the Art-House Co-Op's annual Sketchbook Project from a good friend, and I decided to try it out and participate in the 2011-2012 round even though I wouldn't have a terribly large window of time to work on it. For the sketchbook project you pay to enter and have a sketchbook sent to you in the mail, and you choose a theme for the sketchbook which you can follow if you want to - my theme was Heroes and Villains.
Once you receive it you can do anything you like with the sketchbook, provided you don't make it too thick or have dangly bits hanging off it or such as that. Once you're done, you send the sketchbook back, and it is thereafter housed in The Brooklyn Art Library and can be checked out by people there. It's also brought on a tour with all the other sketchbooks submitted that year to cities around the world as an exhibit.

If you pay a little extra, you can also have your sketchbook scanned and shared on the Art House Co-Op website. I decided I definitely wanted to do that, since I live nowhere near Brooklyn and the tour isn't coming to the Midwest either. The scans of my sketchbook just went up on the AHCO website a week or so ago, but I'm making this post to share the images of it here instead of simply linking to the scans there because to view them on the AHCO website you have to make an account there. I don't want to force people to go to all that trouble just so they can take a quick peek at my derpy sketchbook doodles, so while you can go look at my profile on the AHCO website if you like, I wanted there to be an easier and more convenient viewing option.

So here's my sketchbook, with some commentary and description for each of the pages. It's mostly a big pile of silliness, derping about and experimentation because I didn't really know of any grand idea I wanted to do with it, so I just had did what came to mind and had fun. I hope you enjoy it! (or at least find it amusing)

 

Here's the front cover. I was planning to paint a whole bunch of different characters of villainous or heroic nature from pop culture on it to fill up the cover, but it was a very painstaking process and I had a time crunch and had to drop the full idea. But at least I got in Harry Potter, Voldemort and Nagini; the Last Unicorn, V from V for Vendetta, Toothless and Evil from Time Bandits. I consider that to be effort well spent.

Here's the inside cover of the sketchbook, which I spruced up with a short poem, and the first page, which I made into a sort of introduction.

The page on the left is of Ralph Bates as he appears in Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, which I had been watching and decided to draw from. The page on the right is observations about the sketchbook's characteristics (mostly how smeary pencil gets on its smooth paper) and testing out  drawing with different pens on the paper.

The leftmost page had some bleed-through of sharpie from the opposite side of it, and I couldn't think of anything to do with it so I just tried painting it over in a messy black chaotic way. The drawing on the right was created by scribbling on the page with pencils first, and then I found shapes in the scribbles and made the face. Actually, it ended up being upside down in the sketchbook, so I rotated it here for clearer viewing.

Odd little shape doodle characters on the left, a drawing of my foot on the right.

Lots and lots of gesture drawings here! I found some good websites for them with interesting models and set to work. On the left page I tried to convert the gesture drawings into characters to fit my Heroes and Villains theme, but it ended up not generating fantastic results, so I just loosened up on the page on the right. The gesture drawing dance party depicted there was almost completely drawn from 3D models on Posemaniacs, a site that I heartily recommend. There is also a sketch of one of my cats sleeping near the top.

Because I had a hard time of brainstorming ideas for what to put in this sketchbook, I decided to ask my younger brochacho Dante to draw me some interesting heroic, villainous or monstrous characters in his unique drawing style that I could redraw in my own style in the sketchbook. The above two sets of pages are his and my sketches of one Sgt. Bones, and below there are each of our sketches of a bat-like character called Draven.

These pages were just me whipping out my crayons and having some fun with color and swirly/swooshy lines, which has always been something I've enjoyed playing around with.

These two pages are experimentation and playing around with drawing using ballpoint pen. For these I started with scribbling all over with the pen, smearing the ink with my fingers and working my way up from there with layers of texture until I decided on what images to make them into.

A bunch of sketches! On the left are some drawings of the fabulous and renowned onnagata (man who performs female roles in kabuki theater) Bando Tamasaburo, who has the most gorgeous costumes. There are also more sketches there from a couple of movies I was watching at the time. On the right I did a bunch of studies of clothing and hands done in ballpoint pen.

For these I decided to go even more experimental with the ballpoint pen. I created these images by only ever touching the tip of the pen to my finger, and then either smearing it on the page (like on the right) or tapping it on (like on the left). The leftmost image is supposed to be a werewolf, and the one on the right is a girl dozing off.

The leftmost page is goofy drawings of hipsters, done because every good sketchbook needs hipsters. The page on the right is just some random person, looking serious and making some weird faces. Don't know who it could be. No idea at all.  Nosiree.

THE END

So yep, that's my derptastic sketchbook which is set to travel the world. Creating it was certainly an interesting experience, one which I might consider repeating in the future. Hopefully next time I'll have a clue about what I'm doing and have a cool idea for I want to put in the sketchbook.

This sketchbook was shared on the Art House Co-Op website under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, and I think I've fulfilled the requirements of sharing this. I've attributed it to Art House Co-Op, I only changed the images marginally (overall cropping and brightness/contrast tweaking), so I hope I'm in the clear and AHCO will be fine with me sharing the images from my sketchbook here.

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.