Remember the photobomb post? Quick recap of my painting:
And here’s my new one. I like sets of things, so now that there are two, I can move on to something else.
Tee hee hee. I amuse myself.
Archive for the ‘My Art/Design/Business’ Category
Photobomb #2.
Monday, January 18th, 2010Rubenstein D’Grumples. Part 4, The Finale.
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010I finally finished the piece. I’m not totally thrilled with how the frame part came out, but I learned that it is very hard to make small curved or rounded shapes with one stroke of the pen. The pen kept catching on the fiber of the paper and causing the line to sneak away from me a little bit, making this not as close to perfect as I would like. That’s why I was going to scrap the whole frame. But as long as you stand further than 8″ – 10″ away from it, you can’t see the HUGE ENORMOUS APPALLING ERRORS FLAWS MISTAKES AAAHHHHHH sorry, I’m working on controlling that. It’s a good piece. I need to chill.
Failey McFailpants. And life drawing.
Monday, January 11th, 2010First, I have a cold. My nose is polished like an apple from all the tissue-rubbage. Then, you know that big thing I working on for work, all day every day for what seems like forever (about 100 days, in reality)? We didn’t get the project. And last night, I was working on the Rubenstein D’Grumples piece and I think I’m going to have to scrap the complicated frame thing that I worked on for twelvityteen hours. I’ll blog about that later. All in all, a week/weekend filled with FAIL. Which is disappointing. However, during New Year’s weekend, because of work I canceled all my plans to have fun with people – except one. I had found a list of inexpensive things to do in the city, and one was to draw burlesque dancers, life-drawing-style, for ten dollars. So, sure enough, on January 2nd, I headed down to the Slipper Room on the Lower East Side and attended Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art Class. I figured it was only ten bucks and one of two things could happen: it could be a not-very-good drawing class and I could have a cool story to tell later, or it could be great drawing class and I could have some drawings come out of it. It turned out to be a bit of both. A little back history first. I have been taking life drawings on and off for almost twenty years, and I love taking classes. The human body never gets old, and you always come out better than you went in. You improve at drawing hands, or you have a more fluid line, or you can increase your ability to define shadows, etc. Here are some drawings from some of my previous classes.
See? I tried different things with each of those drawings, and in turn I got more gooder at drawin’. Back to the class: I trekked down to The Slipper Room and went in, where I was greeted by a person in a full-body chicken suit (of course! Why the hell not?). The chicken held up a small placard which said, “Welcome! if you are not on the list, it will be $12.” I spoke directly into the chicken’s mouth and informed it that I was on the list. After the chicken found my name, it picked up a second placard that said, “Thank you! Please take a seat anywhere.” (It was an extremely courteous chicken.) I found a seat up near the front where the stage was and proceeded to chat with the girl next to me who was a chemist and had worked for a soy sauce company. The place filled up pretty fast with a plethora of youthful hipsters (I wanted to yell at all of them, “Wash you hair! Pull it out of your eyes! Hey, you ever heard of doing laundry? Look into it!” I am old). Then the people in charge came up on the stage. Apparently there is a theme to every Anti-Art Class, and this one was Disco Bloodbath. For those of you who weren’t keeping up with your New York gossip in the mid ’90s, here’s a short history. There was a club kid named Michael Alig and he threw parties at major clubs in the city. He got into a dispute over money with his drug dealer Angel Melendez, so in a drug haze Alig whacked Angel in the head with a hammer, injected Drano into his veins, and put him in a tub full of ice. A few days later, Alig lopped Angel’s legs off and tossed him in the Hudson. Alig then proceeded to tell this story to EVERYONE HE KNEW, and no one turned him in. It took a while for him to go to prison (where he is now). His club friend James St. James wrote a book about the whole thing called Disco Bloodbath. And Macauley Culkin restarted his career starring as Michael Alig in the movie Party Monster. So that being the theme, the hosts of this event were dressed as characters from this sordid tale, and the model had props such as a hammer, a bottle of Drano, a comically large fake syringe, and a skull. The model was spectacular. Her name is Madame Rosebud, and really, she was the best model I’ve ever drawn. She looks like this.
But she had her hair all spiked up on her head, and she was covered in strips of black and white electrician’s tape (which was very irksome to an old-school life drawer such as m’self; I couldn’t define her edges). She did the standard ten one-minute poses, then five-minute poses, then three twenty-minute poses. And she worked HARD. In one of her five-minute poses she had her tongue out, and she didn’t even drool all over herself. And in one of her twenty-minute poses, she had her arm straight out. For twenty minutes. That hurts so, so much. I tipped her a whole bunch, I was so blown away. I got three good drawings out of the experience. These are two five-minute ones.
And this is the twenty-minute one where she had her arm out. Two things: that is not armpit hair, I had just started to incorporate shadows when the pose ended, and that’s as far as I had gotten. And I learned that when a slim model with spiked hair and no bosoms poses for you, your drawings predominantly look like AstroBoy.
Rubenstein D’Grumples, Part 3.
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009OKAY. I’m almost finished with the frame. William Morris, I take my hat off to you.
Now I have to transfer it to the board that the rest of the piece is on, using the time-tested technique of carbon paper. Which means I have to draw over all those lines, and then, using pen, draw over all of them again. Holy tedious, Batman. But, as I keep telling myself, it will look great when it’s done. It better, or else I’m going to have a fit.
Rubenstein D’Grumples, Part 2.
Saturday, December 26th, 2009Oooooh, so many swirly details. I found a piece of clipart that I liked, and now I’m basing the look of the frame on it. And it’s taking FOREVER. This is what five and a half hours of work looks like.
The black part is the clipart, and the pink part is what I’m building. Five and a half hours. Don’t get me wrong, I am so grateful for the computer, because otherwise I’d be doing this with sheets and sheets of tracing paper, so that’s definitely good. But the art of design still happens at the same speed (SLOW), so that’s that. Just to give you an idea of how much space I still have left to fill, here is the drawing again.
That’s a lotta space still left to fill. Sigh.
I’m makin’ art!
Thursday, December 24th, 2009Well, it’s Christmas Eve, and I want to wish everyone a Happy Merry Holiday and a year filled with positivity and gratification.
Someone asked me how I get my ideas for my work. Usually, it’s from seeing something on The Discovery Channel or on the internet. However, sometimes a thought comes into my mind and nestles up against another thought and – poof! – a delightful piece of art is born. Here’s my latest example: Snorth has a cat named Ruby. Ruby was a very cute, rather friendly kitten when she was wee.
However, Ruby grew up, and now two things can be said about her at all times: she is fat, and she hates you.
And because, like me, Snorth is incapable of calling her pets just one name, Ruby also goes by Rubens, Rubenstein, Beefapotimus, and Harbor Seal. Also, Snorth says Ruby suffers from Teh Bitcheh and Teh Grumples. All of this information came to rest in my head and I decided her full name was Rubenstein D’Grumples. And then I thought that it sounded like a 20th-century upper-crust name (example: William Backhouse Astor, Jr.). Then I thought about those posters that Mucha and Beardsley did (see how it’s all coming together?) So, armed with this picture off of Facebook:
And some research:
And now I have this:
Yay! I’m very proud of myself on this one. It’s pretty small too (10.5″ x 5.5″), so there’s quite a lot of detail in a very small space. I still have to come up with the pattern for the outer frame there and decide if I want to add color to this, but it’s coming along great. When it’s done, I’m definitely adding this to my portfolio.
One of my weirder pieces. And that’s saying a lot.
Friday, December 4th, 2009Y’all familiar with the concept of photobombs? It’s when you’re taking a nice tasteful picture with your best friend or your Auntie Bernice, and then some crazy jackass just pops up in your photo, ruining this heartwarming moment. They’re very popular on the internet nowadays.
Well, I decided, what if monsters photobombed pictures? You know, you pose with your friend and you get ready to take the picture, and then. “blooooorg!” – this thing messes up your nice setup. So I made a painting of what I thought it would look like.
I don’t often crack up when I look at my own artwork, but for some reason I find this concept hysterical. It might be a sign of my impending plunge into mental illness, but it amuses me no end. I’m working on a second painting right now. We’ll see how it goes.
J. Rothman Designs Store.
Friday, November 27th, 2009I finally took the plunge and went live. I got a store out there with things for to buy and whatnot! Now all of the things I’ve been talking about for eons and eons are available. Go. Go now. Oh, and tell all your friends! I work in advertising and word-of-mouth is the way to go. Make me your Facebook status, people!
And if there’s something you’d like to see me create, you let me know. My friend B. asked me for an lunar moth, and working on that project I learned what kind of brown pens I enjoy using. Always discovering new things. So anyway, email me if there’s something you be wantin’.
jessica at design-newyork dot com
You’re the bestest blog readers I ever had. Sniff. I don’t deserve you.
The balance of life.
Monday, November 23rd, 2009This weekend was full of ups and downs. An up was that I organized my studio (which was in dire need of it, it looked like a hobo had taken up residence there), and I started setting up for Thanksgiving. Want proof? You got it:
A semi-downer was going to the annual cat show at the Westchester County Center. I was kind of meh. I didn’t really get to interact with many kittehs, and no owners were particularly odd or outrageous. Another semi-downer was working on my pigeon/rat holiday ornament. First of all (and I blame my Jewish heritage for this), I made the ornament really big. If one tries to put it on one of those little half-size holiday trees, it’s going to look mighty silly. I would love to take a picture of it on a Christmas tree, but I don’t know where there’s one that already set up. So I just took pictures of it around my apartment. And for scale, I tried to take a picture of my hand holding it, which involved me setting up my camera with the timer, sprinting over to the other side of the bed, and waiting for the shot to be taken. There were many failures.
Finally, I got a decent shot.
See? A lovely, happy homage to the netherworld characters of my beloved city.
P.S. I also took a picture of the ornament on my doorknob to show how it can be displayed during the rest of the year.
The holidays approacheth, and so I present to you… Pigeon and Rat.
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009I love, NAY, I adore pigeons. My mom always tells people that when I was a child, she would take me to beautiful European cities, like Amsterdam and Rome and London and Brussels, and all I would care about is the pigeons. I realize they have icky bad things that live on them, but I love them nonetheless. Same goes for rats. Every time I’m in a subway, I stare into the tracks hoping to see a wee furry plump rodent. If I do, it officially becomes a good day for me. So, in honor of this affection for my fellow city-dwellers, I am making a tree ornament with a pigeon and rat.
And the back side of each character has a lovely design that I created incorporating the silhouettes of both the pigeon and rat.
If you are one of those people who likes alternative ornaments on your tree (yes, you, the one with the hand-blown glass pickle), then this might be right up your alley. And since it is not branded Christmas, this ornament looks just as good hanging on the wall, or off a doorknob year ’round. Now, you’re probably saying, “Where can I purchase this delightful trinket that will surely bring joy to my family for years to come and will most likely become a family heirloom, cherished by my grandchilden long after I have shuffled off this mortal coil?” Well, that’s my next surprise. And on Black Friday, all shall be revealed! (It would be really great if you would visual me swirling a cape dramatically around my head while you read that last line. Thanks so much.)
Remember, nothing says Happy Holidays like vermin!