There are a ton of updates on my Senior Project Process Blog!  Just Sayin'!

However, a fair warning: If you're queasy at the sight of surgery, blood, or things poking into people's eyes, it's sadly not for you)

Mary

First sketch for my senior project!  
My project is to do about 12 illustrations of medical editorial illustrations encompassing the topic of everyday aches and pains.  

The first one is about MIGRAINES!  Which is probably very telling of what this semester is going to be like.  omgomgomg. 

More to come!  I also have started a Senior Project Process Blog!

Mary

I also made these recently for my Editorial Illustration final!  I totally forgot to share!

Mary

Holy cow!   I'm back and break is over.  My first class of my last semester at MCAD is tomorrow.  I'm so excited!  

Also!  There is a lot going on!  I got a piece of mine accepted to The Society of Illustrators Los Angeles (SILA 49) and is going to be on exhibit in the online gallery (www.si-la.org)  as well as in the Nucleus Gallery in Los Angeles!  This is the piece if you remember it!

AND, I submitted a bunch of piece to the Surtex student product design competition to be featured in trade show in New York!

Here are the pieces.  I had a lot of fun with them! 

Enjoy! And wish me luck on my last semester!

Love,

Mary

Okay, day one of three days of finals done.  
I have Hawks and Hippies tomorrow and then I have Type... The dreaded type.  But I got my process book finished and it looks kind of cute.  
After tomorrow it will be very smooth sailing.  I get to work on a zine about kitchen appliances and utensils.

Here is a pattern I made for it!

Love

Mary

I think I'm much too excited for school to be over, to be done and graduated, molding myself into the professional world of design and freelance illustration.
I've looked back on a lot of my old blog posts, and even lots of blogs that I used to follow.
About half of them are gone now.

I also have been exploring old places that I used to frequent, Uncommon Grounds in Uptown and Plan B coffeehouse.
It really fascinates me how places and things that we are so familiar with can dissipate from our everyday lives so quickly.  I mean I used to go to those places everyday, and I associated myself with them in an almost silly way.  

 As far as blogs go...
I remember there was a website that I used to frequent.  It was called myst.com.  Or at least that's what I had it bookmarked as.

And on that website I found the most inspiring art.  It wasn't even a website, more like an archive of drawings and art from an artist that I can't remember the name of (which is a pity, because the illustrations were colorful, hilarious, imaginative...).  I also used to visit a website called tourniquet.com.  It was an illustration website by a French designer/illustrator that I totally loved.  I looked back and realized that their work had changed.  Plateaued at some weird point between expressionism and the grotesque surrealism.  
I also think back to points in my life when I would write in this blog.  I remember being back at my parents' old house in Edina, living in the top room, writing about how much I loved my sophomore year of high school, being in art classes, having every class be easy because I was actually being a good student for once, totally uncommitted to anything other than my own little drawings tucked away in my desk in my room and my excitingly mundane schoolwork that was always finished before dinner.  I was pretty lucky too.  I was the only kid with a computer in her room, and with it I explored countless resources that incubated my inspiration and my creativity.  I had so many websites and pictures saved.  I still have a lot of old drawings that I had done.  I have promised myself to never throw them away, merely because it shows that I started somewhere with my work.  The process of everything that I do and perceive is all kept quietly hidden in flat-files, cigar boxes and portfolios that I think I have only showed to one person and that's all.  

A lot of the drawings are really silly actually.  Communications between my best friend Marianne and I between classes.  It feels funny calling her my best friend now.  Whenever I say it, it's like I'm choking it out.  She really is my friend.  But there is the detached feeling with those two words.  Almost like I say "best friend" in some frantic way to comfort myself, that maybe someday we'll be close again.  Anyway...
In 9th grade, we would pass notes between classes.  And not your common notes.  Not at all.  They were typed up, stacks of paper riddled with codes, pictures, drawings, and little stories that we would trade off on.  They were prepared the night before. Seemingly as though they were more important than our homework.  Because it really was important.  I think I had an early realization of that because I barely talk to her now.  I think we're lucky if we talk for more than five days out of the year.  But the funny thing is that not much has changed between us.  Our peak was in 9th grade.  Definitely.  Then her family moved to Prior Lake and I only saw her on weekends.  College has only pulled us farther apart.  It's sad, but it really happens to everyone, unless you happen to live across the street from each other for the rest of your life.  
Who knows, maybe one day we'll end up living together in France with our fifty cats in our nineties.  

I'm really excited about lots of things.  
But at the same time I'm pretty terrified.

Even though we're living in it, I consider the world to be completely inhabitable.  If I had the choice of seeing what this place was like, what the people were like compared to some other place, I'd easily go with the other place.  A lot of what college has taught me is that there are a lot of intolerable people in the world, and if you are good and fair, you're not going to go very far.  It's a simple fact it seems, but is also sad and unavoidable.  
I just hope that I can continue to be the person that I am, thinking creatively, being patient with others and fair and reasonable.  I want to remain kind and loving to everyone.  I hope I can stay that way, because everyday I feel like I'm becoming more and more bitter to the world around me.  
I feel that I want to curl back up into the memory that was my room in 10th grade and sit at my desk in the top room, with my window open, listening to the summer breeze rush through the trees in our old backyard.  Laying on my floor and simply creating collages, drawings, paintings simply for the sake of creating them and then putting them away and moving onto something else, possibly something better.   

Often times I feel pretty replaceable with the people that I know at school.  Sometimes I feel that no matter how close I am towards someone, there is not much too memorable or important about me.  I'm the person who invites people to things, but I rarely get the favor returned.  If there is a memory that involves me with someone else, possibly that song that I played in my car when I would cart people around in the summertime, it becomes someone else's fond memory with another person.  I guess the only thing I can do is be there.  I can pick people up from the airport, give people rides, talk to them, go with them to coffee shops, show them things that make me think of them and tell them how nice their artwork is.  In truth I am fairly replaceable.  And after college I feel like I won't be very missed at all.  
But that's fine.   

I still have my own memories, and I feel like that I am with people in the present and make them feel happy, instilling these memories in their heads, whether or not I am included in them, that's all I want.  People being happy and safe and secure.  There's nothing bad about that.  

I often think about what would happen if I died.  It's a common thought.  What would people say about me when I'm gone.  Who would remember me.  Who would go through my room.  Who would get my stuff.  

I have a dream very often.  And it always takes place in my parents' old house, in this tiny little bathroom on the main level where my brother's room was.  It was a clean, narrow room with blue tile.  And the sun would always shine into it, illuminating the blueness and carrying rays of white through out.   There was a bathtub, a sink and a toilet. Nothing too special.  But about 7 out of 10 dreams that I have involve this room.  I really don't know why.

Oh what I would give to buy that house back and restore it back to the way it was.  

Either way, I can shack up in my quiet little studio for now and daydream of pretty, happy things and drawing and write.

Well, it's late.  Although I don't have artwork, here is a massive string of thoughts for you all.  

love

your every replaceable,
Mary

Well

What do you think?

I JUST finished it, and it's about the top things that made us happy in 2010.

I have a whole other illustration to do as well, since the art directors didn't come to look at sketches,
so to be safe, I'm doing two. 

Hopefully it's done. I really like it

Love,

Mary

I am seriously getting so excited to finish up school, it's not even funny.  ;)

In other news, the MCAD ART SALE IS THIS WEEKEND!  Friday evening it's $35 to get in and on Saturday it's free!
COME SUPPORT YOUR LOVELY LOCAL ARTISTS LIKE ME!

I'd really appreciate it, as will everyone else at MCAD.  

That's all for now, time to get back to my tons and tons of homework for this week.

Love

Mary

Illustration for the Utne Reader

The most depressing article ever.  We're not allowed to talk about it because it has yet to be published.

It's 14"x14", technical pen, acrylic ink and a little marker.

Don't steal

Enjoy!

Mary

Deep Sea Fishing.

Technical Pen, acrylic ink and marker.  

Also, The MCAD art sale is coming up on November 20th!  Support local artists and designers like me!

Please don't steal.  I really appreciate it.

Mary