Monster--Kelpie

History of the American West

Bucking Bronco

the dichotomy of ability and understanding

Over the years as I've been trying to improve in art and in other areas, I've noticed a pattern that I thought I'd share. This pattern has to do with the relationship between the ability to do something well and the understanding of how to do something well.

First off, I think our understanding of how to do something is always beyond our ability. As we study, observe, read, etc, our understanding (hopefully) increases.

Our ability doesn't always improve at the same rate as our understanding.

Lets pretend that we can graph ability and understanding, which we can't, but we're pretty good at pretending so we'll do it anyway.

Understainding: -----
Ability: ----

So we're feeling pretty good about ourselves, because we can do art (or whatever it is) about as well as we understand what it means to do well.

Then we study. We look at awesome pictures, take some classes, brainstorm some awesome ideas.

Then our graph looks something like this:

Understanding: -----------
Aility: ----

And we don't feel so good about ourselves. So we work and sweat and stay up all night and fill fifty sketchbooks and try new things.

And then we have a graph looking like this:

Understanding : -----------
Ability: ----------

And we're feeling pretty good about ourselves at that point.

I think this keeps on going indefinitely. Our understanding will pull ahead, and we work hard for awhile to bring our abilities up to that level again. When understanding and ability are close to the same level we might get kind of comfortable. But as we continue to, like, live and expose ourselves to good art and hopefully learn stuff, it happens again, and our understanding pulls ahead. When there is a large gap between understanding and ability, well, thats a pretty uncomfortable place. But it's important part of this pattern.

I feel like I'm currently at the high-understanding/insufficient-ability end of the cycle right now. Not a comfortable place to be. Understand, I'm not asking for sympathy or "your art is so awesome don't say bad things about it" type comments right now. I'm just saying, I feel like I have so many ideas and sources of inspiration and my current abilities just aren't measuring up to the visions in my head.

Not such a bad place to be. But you know what that means?

Time to get to work.

I really liked how this banner for HIST57 turned out, I couldn't wait to share it :D.

Idea for splash of History of the American West

As My Whimsey Takes Me...

Given a little incentive, I finally got around to vectorizing a few of my whimsey designs! Hooray! I've been interested in making these types of embellisments for years and have made dozens, but all have been pen-on-paper and never really brought to the computer. But thanks to Illustrator and a couple hours which probably should have been spent on homework... voila! Fancy computer whimseys!

Barnyard Buffet

We all know what a buffet for humans looks like.... but what about a buffet for animals? This was our first assignment in Senior Illustration Studio. We were supposed to make something that could be submitted to an illustration competition hosted in Italy. The prompt was "buffet" and the entries had to be square. I haven't done much with squares in the past... and now I know why. Squares are HARD. I think the composition worked out OK though. I haven't done many things previously that are this complex, so this was a fun challenge. I've been thinking alot lately about how to lead the eye around a composition, my original idea here was to have the viewer move around the painting in a sort of sideways figure 8 pattern.

Writing for Children Objective banners

Writing for Children Lesson banners

Here are the finished lesson banners for ENGL 320 R, Writing for Children. I was trying to emulate Eric Carle's Style. (As always, open them in a new window to see bigger).

Clown Feet page 2

This was the original image I thought of for the story Clown Feet--the rest sprang from this. I was playing around with the idea of a visual joke, one with absolutely no words required. I think I was successful, as several people I've shown this picture to (and others in the story) have laughed out loud without me having to explain anything about the picture.

Clown Feet

Trying out some really bright fun colors, as opposed to the more muted palette I've been using lately, at the recommendation of Nathan Fowkes, who visited BYU this week and gave us some ideas to strengthen our portfolios.