Undergrad Exhibition + Other Fun!

First order of business (which I will probably repeat again somewhere else like Facebook or via a bullhorn on a busy Chicago intersection): if you are in the Chicago area, why not take a trip downtown to my BFA show? The SAIC Fall Undergraduate Exhibition runs from October 30th to November 20th, from 11am to 6pm Tuesday through Saturday at the Sullivan Galleries right in the heart of the Chicago loop. Like you've probably read in these past blog entries, I'm showing three of my digital prints. They're so super awesome. You should go see them in person!

Second order of business... things I have been doing other than the BFA stuff! Here are some simple animation backgrounds that may or may not be complete due to me being fickle and wondering whether or not I should add some more details.

Painting "Did"

I'm putting the final touches on my last piece for my BFA entitled "Did". It's a sort of artistic representation of (or, uh, just an attempt to represent) dissociative identity disorder and, at the same time, represent multiple identities that everyone accumulates for their every day lives. All of the mask pieces touch this subject in some way or another, and this one just happens to show another danger to not being true to oneself: being bombarded with so many personalities and false representational images that one can't keep track of.

I really love this one, though. I really do. I don't like working large... I really like keeping my drawings very tiny and detailed. When I work big I feel like I loose the ability to make everything tight and crisp and perfect and sometimes end up losing track of the big picture because I'm always catering to the tiny little details in sections. With something like this (this picture is around 11x14, I believe...) I can focus on the whole thing but still be able to work on it in sections and make something that I feel a lot closer to. And... oh, man, I love the texture. It just makes the mood of the picture, it really does.

Printin' Tests!

Today I went to check out how my print will look once it's completely printed. The test strip colors seem okay, and since I chose to have the print made on canvas the actual print-out of it feels so much more organic than it would if I had opted to use satin or just plain old matte paper.

So far so good! I'm really excited. I can't wait to get the completed project.

Skeletal Fun!

Finally I figured out a color scheme that I like for this project I'm working on. It's kind of Toulouse-Lautrec/art nouveau inspired in a way, as you can kind of see in the following two pictures.

Voila! Another piece of it for you to see! I've got to soften out the graphics a little bit... just looking at this my skeledude obviously needs more shading but I'm not digging the brightness of his bones against the crimson background. This will be eventually changed.

Espresso! My only friend (other than art)!

So it's that time of the year again where I get reacquainted with my good buddy, Caffeine. Oh, the joy of knowing that fifteen or twenty shots of espresso are surging through my veins and making my heart pained and unhealthy while keeping me bouncy and productive! It's times like these that I love being a student. Oh yes. Yes indeed. Man, it's hard to type while I'm so jittery lik ethisoaicjoasidjoisjdflakcj

I've been up and about working on a really super big project for the end of the month. It's going to be so super great. It's a continuation of my mask projects but this time it's a LOT bigger. So far for the mask portraits I've been keeping my size limitation to around 10X14 at the most. This time it's around 24X36. And I'm working digital. The file size is HUGE and my laptop is lagging and crying and screaming at me to stop abusing it's technological limitations, but it's working out so far. Below is a sliver of the whole piece which is probably going to drastically change color-wise in the next 24 hours.

Well, it's back to espresso and jittery painting for me now, kids! Excelsior! And anon!

Forrest Lives! (Also, old storyboards!)

Sorry, folks, my lack of posts has been from a lack of a workable camera to document my work (plus I've been frantically trying to put together stuff for my BFA show), but I figure I should at least put something up in my spare time. If you haven't seen them (i.e., if you aren't subscribed to my Vimeo or friends with me on Facebook) I've been doing tests for my puppet animation class with my totally awesome puppet Forrest. This one is the most recent so far:

[Stop Motion Animation]-[04] from Maz Zolp on Vimeo.

If you want to see the rest, just click here or click the link to the right on the blog.

Also, I thought these would be interesting to post. I took animation history one semester and we had to reboard a scene from What's Opera, Doc?. I found these hidden underneath the billions upon billions of doodles and school papers and thought that they were pretty neat. Knowing what I know now about storyboarding I would have done these a WHOLE lot differently, but I have to tell you... as much as I dislike Chuck Jones, you gotta give the man total props for laying out his shorts. You can see that there's good stuff going on here.