Senior Thesis

So midterms are quickly approaching, and I have yet to blog about Senior Thesis! I've been working on making box constructions that will be used as illustrations for a Russian folk tale: Egor the Brave.

My hope is that these will be readable as illustrations, but also interestingly esoteric and strong enough to stand alone as individual artworks.

This is my messy studio. I get lots of splinters, and occasionally glue in my hair.

The first two boxes I've completed are actually the third and fourth pages of the story. They both occupy the same construction, though for the final presentation (which will be in book format) they will most likely be seen as separate pages, like so:

Page Three, Egor's torture and imprisonment scene.

Some details:

Page Four, Sofiia the Wise appears as an apparition, setting Egor free.

And some details:

If only blogger didn't make all my photos look extra washed out. 

Oh well, more on Egor soon!

Wrinkles

THE MIND

IT'S COMING

The Customizer, Goachified

Last post, plus paint, plus Catfink!

The color gets messed up no matter what I do to it. Damned web colors!

This was for a group project with eight of my classmates. Check out their work on the website that Angie Ahn made!

The Customizer

A sketch illustrating someone who customizes everything. It will soon get all goache-y. 

Ed Roth, eat your heart out! (jk ily)

Mare e Monti

This is an illustration for a menu cover.

It's modeled after a pizza called the "Mare e Monti," which means "Heaven and Earth," respectively.

Though I don't dislike this as much as I thought (I've been spending some time with the print-out of it, which turned out much too dark) I think I might try to go over it in traditional media. Digital just feels so soulless to me anymore.

Charm City Art Space Exhibition

This post belongs in August, so I pre-dated it.  A couple weeks ago, I hung up some work at the Charm City Art Space. 

I just got a new digital camera, so I snuck into the Art Space to take a few pictures of my little wall.

Some of the items on display I've already made posts about, like the R2D2 illustration and the Heartless 7inch artwork

(though here it is shown in its original, non-digitally altered colorway).

Below are my last two Star Wars drawings.

The above piece is something I made while I was thinking about ideas for thesis (I'll be making box assemblages about Russian Folklore). 

It's not quite finished.

At the bottom right of my display, I had a small selection of my promotional matchbooks. They were all gone after the first week! I dropped a few more off when I took this photo:

Classes started this week (I'm typing this on September 2nd!) and my Shakespeare and African Art Forms classes have already gone well. I'm excited to get started on my Thesis work... Senior year. Oof.

Turkey Mountain Panthermouth

A dump-post of a couple of older collage pages from one of my sketchbooks.

    

These pages AND MORE can be found in my zine, HAM SAMWICH (which is much more well organized than these random images). I still have a nice little stack of zines sitting in my room.  If you would like one, please let me know! (egmaatman@gmail.com)

Star Wars? You want some mores.

     So, as I mentioned in a previous entry, I've been doing a lot of Star Wars drawings lately.  The following illustrations were produced for an RA training handbook for this year's RAs at MICA.  I was really excited about the whole Star Wars theme, so I took advantage of having some extra time, and I ended up being able to make the drawings pretty detailed.

Each is the header page for a different section of the book.  Some of the terminology may be strange to outsiders, but the RAs will get it.

      Hilariously adding the names of the actual Residence Life staff to their respective Star Wars counterpart. Scott Stone, Director, is George Lucas, birthing his employees from his powerful brain (read: neck.)

And last, but not least, (actually, probably my favorite drawing of all) here is a little spot illustration of a motivational Ewok.

      Today I'll be hanging some artwork at the Charm City Art Space!  This will be the first show at the new Space, so I'm definitely excited to show some stuff. The show, curated by the lovely and talented Veronika Volkov, is called "Front Porch Stories." I plan to throw some Star Wars drawings in there, along with some other new pieces. The show opens tomorrow, August 12th!  Stop by CCAS within the next month to catch it.  Or just kill two (sick sick) birds with one stone, and go to one of the many awesome shows happening there soon.

Star Wars and Hardcores

Hello again, I've been quite busy lately.  Here is a tentative (I say "tentative" because it hasn't received the official "OK" from the band yet) cover for a 7inch EP by the band Heartless from Pittsburgh. They play some super heavy hardcore, and I was definitely excited to work with them, especially when they told me I could just do whatever I wanted.

I'd been looking to put some collage into my work portfolio, as I've been playing with it as a sketching method for a while now. A punk/hardcore EP seemed like the perfect avenue to break that out. We'll see what the band thinks (an updated version may soon follow.)

This summer I've been working at school almost every weekday.  Recently I was given the task of doing several illustrations for a training book for next year's RA staff.  The theme is Star Wars!  For the sake of ending on some words of wisdom (and for the sake of saving some updates for later in the week,) I'll just post one of the little spot illustrations, to be placed creatively somewhere among the text:

Surroundings Shirt

I think I'll call this... Manbasket.  A shirt design for local Baltimore band Surroundings. 

And for good measure, another shirt I did for them about a year ago can be seen below:

Seeing any themes, here? Trippy, maaaaan.