Jessica Deprez Creative Blog

Serenity & Other things

2011-03-06T22:43:00.000-08:00

These last few months have been artistically interesting.
All five artworks were admitted and published in the American River Review 2010. It is exciting, and very humbling at the same time.

I am still involved in a Serenity RPG. It is a lot of fun, though I do miss my original character, Murielle. Kevin did take her, and turn her into an NPC...
Right now, most of us have super powers, and my latest character "Milli", is the doctor. She can heal from a distance and all that jazz.
....
Do you ever wonder how hard it is to really get your own style? I sure do. For years, I watched Japanese Anime, and analyzed video game character concepts. But in the end, I am discovering that my ingrained style is more.. Disney.. and 80s animated cartoons. I grew up in an environment where 80s and 90s cartoons were prevalent. The struggle to make the my artwork look like something Japanese people are raised in, is sort of a lie. I can take that which I have seen, absorb it, and make it into something that I feel is more my style; whatever that might actually be.
Oh well.

What is Art?

2010-07-24T20:11:00.000-07:00

That's a broad question.
According to Dictionary.com, art has 16 different definitions.

I have this book that was printed in the 1900s, with quotes on various subjects by people time has generally forgotten. There are a couple of quotes from this book that get me thinking...

"The object of art is to crystallize emotion into thought, and then fix it in form." - Delsarte

"The ordinary true, or purely real, cannot be the object of the arts.-Illusion on a ground of truth, that is the secret of fine art." - Joubert

"The artist ought never perpetuate a temporary expression...A masterpiece of art has, to the mine, a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant of a crystal." - Emerson

Is there really an answer as to what art is? And, more importantly, how can an artist define something they have done as artistic, when in their nature, it is to not define themselves?
Are any of us artists anymore?

Fan-Art for Hope from Marvel's X-men.
Created entirely in Photoshop, with my Wacom.
Took about 3 1/2~4 hours
Reference image found here

Maybe I can get into the swing of things, once I can define myself as an artist again.

The Vexel art movement does not exist.

2010-04-19T12:49:00.000-07:00

So there is this 'art movemet/style' that people call vexel. If you ask for my opinion, it is a bit of hogwash in the digital media world. It ranks up there with putting DHTML on your web design qualifications.

vexel: a newly created word for an entirely pixel-based form of raster art that imitates the visual appearance of vector graphics technique. (definition courtesy of wikipedia)

The techniques you use, does not explain the art movement or style.

The person that artists can thank, or blame, would be Seth Woolley. You can find his explanation on his blog here.

Vexel is about creating raster images that look like vector.
Vector is a medium within the digital media world.
The digital Media world does not have itself defined as an art movement.
Therefore, vexel can not be an art movement.

PS - Above image's media is digital. The specific medium would be vector.

Totally not a Hiatus

2010-03-07T13:28:00.000-08:00

I am totally not on haitus. I have, as usual, been working on things. Mostly Illustrator cuteness, logos and packaging design for the coming conventions.

But one of my more recent obsessions has been...sadly... Dragon Age: Origins. It is an obsession that can not be thwarted. At first, I just wanted to play the game. Then I found myself wanting to get all of the gamer points. Now. I just want to play through the game to find out the different endings... but always have a girl in order to be with that adorable little guy up there. Alistair.
The bastard prince, turned Grey Warden.

I do not fan girl over many things. But this guy, I have. It is the first guy fan-girl I've ever done. It is so new to me. And it is a bit dirty in that way. *sigh* Oh Alistair.

Anywho. I'll post more stuff later. Just hated leaving this empty. ;3;

SUMMER COME BACK!

2010-01-19T00:45:00.001-08:00

This winter break has been a bit of a productive ordeal. Mostly, it has been a lot of researching on how to make certain charms, get them to look the way I want them too, and practicing in Illustrator some more.
This little guy is from a small series I did of popsicles. I looked up the original flavors for Kool-Aid and based my colors off of that. This one is Lemonade. What I am trying to do here, take popsicles, think of what dreams I would have as a popsicle, and the nightmares...then translate them into mini illustrations Here, the lemonade is radioactive and glowing. XD

Truth be told, theses are vectors made from sketches for clay charms (Lemonade one is a mixture of yellow and glow in the dark clay since it holds a level of transparency). Their original intent was to accommodate packaging. But I am thinking of making stickers out of them as well. Or maybe people will have in their package the charm and a stick of the charm as well. hmmmm.

Finals.. Ugh.

2009-12-15T00:25:00.000-08:00

I am currently experiencing what so many students like to describe as Hell. In other words, it is semester finals.
This little 'gem' is still a bit of a work in progress, but it was part of a series which was submitted for my Intermediate Illustrator class. The objective was to create posters for children that convey fundamental ideals without the use of words; since the concept was that they are going to school, but just learning how to read.

This one is supposed to convey that reading is fun. I could go into the things that aren't working, but for now.. how about we just look at it as a really cute illustration. :3
Everything was done in Illustrator CS3.

There are a couple others in the series...a "wash your hands," and "Sharing is fun" poster. It was a lot of fun, and hopefully I will be able to work more in the program during the break. But for now, I will finish of my Mike's Hard, stare at some partially finished canvases, and figure out what the flip to do from there.

Eye for an Eye

2009-11-09T19:01:00.001-08:00

Beware the eyes, as they watch.
Yeah, so I am sitting in my Illustrator class, a bit more than ancy.

Yeah, that is a bit unsettling, isn't it. It is my attempt at drawing an eye. Well.. The eye I was drawing was Kevin's. He has the interesting eyes, not me.
But all of the primary blues in the iris are way too dark. As you can probably tell, I am trying really, really hard to understand the gradient mesh tool. Since most things on there are done with the mesh tool, or at least a gradient. Oiy vey.

But, yeah. I am looking forward to Christmas, actually. I'll be making christmas card designs and ATTEMPTING to sell them on etsy. I dunno how well they will turn out. But I've got one from last year that uses Bodoni and it is adorable still. :3.

The City Is Eating Me...

2009-11-02T16:56:00.000-08:00

These last couple of weeks has been driving me, admittedly more batty than a bat boy for the New York Yankees. . .
Ok, so I do not really follow baseball, but facebook was littered with status updates about a player not touching home base, but being called 'safe'.
That is how I have been feeling lately. Except, the umpire is not calling safe, he's calling "YOU SUCK." Ok, maybe that is a bit too emo for the situation. More like, "NO ONE ELSE WILL DO STUFF, YOU DO IT." is the better sort of mentality.
Which in turn caused me to break down last weekend (Not halloween weekend, the one before that). It was an overdue mental breakdown. Slept a lot, missed a lot of classes. Missed a midterm while trying to keep me out of the funk that the weekend prior to that had created. Which pole vaulted me right back into the funk, thus rendering the project pointless in the eyes of funk rectifying.
We'll see what I do this semester about all of it.
This little drawing just sort of sums up how I am feeling. Been drawing a lot of incongruous blobs to symbolize people. Perhaps it is because in the end, everyone is the same, we are all blobs, masses of people. Might as well have fun with it.
There I am, melting. "What a world, what a world." Maybe there is a little bit of a fist shake going on in there as well. Who knows. Only the blob does. And it was not that epic of an old B-style horror movie. . . Except for that one time when they showed parts of it on the Muppet Babies. Then it was pretty epic.

A professor by the name of Betty Nelson was diagnosed with cancer earlier in the semester, and a couple weeks ago she had her last day at school before stepping out until the spring. She is currently undergoing chemo and radiation to kill all the cells. So, as an encouraging little doo-dad, another professor asked me to do something all pretty like with type.

Nothing in it really matches up, and it is a little off balance, but that is sort of the idea, you could say. The 'fuck' was done in felt, while the 'cancer' was done with ball-point. You can totally tell when you compare it close to one another. So the boldness of the fuck is far more substantial than the 'cancer'. It makes me laugh, shrug, and then go about my business. The C is really pretty.

Mmmmmmmmeh.

The Importance of Traditional Media

2009-09-23T18:27:00.000-07:00

I am a New Media artist. That would, in essence, describe just about everything I have done from the early days in paint at my elementary art class room, through the angst teen years, to the adulthood, whichhas just as much angst, but now with more sags and less zits.

With that said, there is something really important about taking a digital picture to the 'next level'. More over, to not be afraid to pull it from the digital world and make it something even more powerful than what a singular tool can do.

So I thought that might be nifty to show, since a professor at ARC is teaching a class with this mentality. I feel a bit dorky posting up a school project, but it came out well enough.
So here is an example of what the digital artworks looked like at the end of the computer process:
A decent composition. Three of my friends were awesome enough to pose for me for the series of these. This is Brick. She is powerful to me, and shows that through the initial pose.
All of the gears and such are originally vector graphics I created on my own (There was a tutorial that I grabbed one kind of gear from and then went hog wild. Made about 25 different kinds of gears.) All of the textures are from my own personal stock as well. I feel it is extremely important to use your own stock. It is the very best way to get exactly what you want.

Now, it is a nice image and all, but it looks Photoshopped and in the end, there are hundreds of thousands of people that can this kind of thing. It just takes some decent knowledge of the program.
That is where it comes so important to go back into the traditional world. You can add depth, meaning, concept. While you could do this in Photoshop as well, you have to stop and wonder how strong would the impact be after it has all been printed out?

Here is a picture of the completed pieces - or nearly completed.
From top to bottom, the models are Brittany Baskerville (Type geeks, I know, right!? XD ) , Amanda Johnston and Clair Fischer. Each model was able to bring their own unique energy to the camera. And while I am most certainly no professional photographer, I had a lot of fun pretending I was. And got a lot of amazing photos of all three of them.

The images were transfered onto 8x10 canvases that had already been treated with a paint and had gesso cover on parts of the original canvas and paint. Texture was created by scratching away the transfer itself. Then multiple glazes cover each canvas. The border was hand made and custom fit to each canvas. To which two more glazes were used to incorporate the frame into the rest of the artwork.

I had a story in mind for them. But that is the personal side of me. I hope that you can see these - even tiny ones - and get a sense of relation to them. It is always a bit difficult of course because in the end, this is the internet. The color on your monitor is terrible. We both have eye strain from reading things from failblog, I can has cheezeburger, and being rick rolled all night long.

At least this added a bit of variety to the night. :D

~Jess

You are a pretty little loser

2009-08-03T12:28:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, you just need to take all that negative energy and make something pretty. So I am totally not digging the fact all the letters sort of 'fell', but the L was a lot of fun to work with.

In an effort to try and just do something everyday, I have resorted to taking rude, negative words and playing around with the caps on them. I mean, if someone is going to call you a loser, you might as well see it as a pretty thing.
There was a little fiddling in photoshop, but honestly the texture was primarily the paper that this was drawn on, scanned in and then using the ~~porn~~filter section made a lot of the texture stand out.
Er, there really isn't all that much else to nerd about.

Thinking never works without doing.

2009-07-31T18:36:00.000-07:00

Alright, so I am not much of an artist. Let us just be honest about that. If I were more into what I do, it would probably be some pretty amazing stuff. (ego much?) Truth be told, I do not practice my art.
I sit. And I think about it instead. I think about what could be done, how it could be done. I write notes on what to do and how to do it. Ask myself questions in my writing about support, structure, significance. And then answer myself back on how to solve the problems.
Things are however, rarely executed.

It is among the many giant faults I have. I just think, not do. I have been THINKING about vector illustrations that deal with Grimm Fairytales. After actually reading the Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found there have been a bunch of illustration concepts for the Knight, the white queen, the red queen, the duchess.. so many characters that I never knew existed!
But it has been thoughts. And thumbnails.

Perhaps this is too much of a bitchy, bitch post. But really, the biggest question is: How do you sit down after planning everything and then go "Alright. Time to work on it." What makes you jump away from the planning stages?

In an attempt to figure this out, I went back to something that was for a school project last year. The ARR2009. IMHO, I fucked this magazine up hardcore. I did not care about it enough, was not dedicated to it enough and did not labor over it enough. But somehow through all of this crazy muck there was one thing that came out that I actually worked on and thought "This is a really neat concept."
Perhaps where it should fall under is 'great idea, poorly executed'. But whenever I look at it, it is just one of those things that makes me point at it and go. You know what? I did that shit. And it was fucking' awesome.
Of course in usual Jess fashion, I grabbed copies of all the native files. None of the fonts, and no outlined .pdf's so that I could.. you know. Actually PUT any of it into my portfolio. All I've got is a book. Battered and now slightly ruined by an over ambitious pup attempting to leap through the window to get to the neighborhood cat.

Anywho... the magazine is coming up again. I've enrolled in the class, but really hope someone else will take the helm as art director. I would love to just sit down and work on a purpose to all of these thumbnails. All of these untested designs. See most of them fail, but in a thousand failures, one would think probability would shine on one, right?

Trying to Get Goin'

2009-07-14T20:05:00.000-07:00

So I haven't been drawing too much lately, which is a bad thing. Actually, I've been occupied with table tops and console RPG's. In fact, while I am writing this, my friends and I are doing a Harry Potter Marathon.

So my boyfriend has been doing a Serenity RPG for a couple months now. Right before leaving for AX, we finished the first 'book' of the adventure you could say. My character is a genius mechanic with a flare for explosives. At this point, everyone in the group is considered a Big Damn Hero. My girl here is the daughter of a Parliment Senator who is mysteriously high in the ranking. Murielle here was supposed to be a registered companion, and went through a majority of the training.

Portrait I drew of her from her Companion learning days. Unfortunately, towards the end of her learning, her curiousity in explosives turned deadly. The result was the explosion of an enitre wing of the companion school in Shinon where tea ceremony was taught and held. Murielle immediately fled, changed her name to Esther and had been a rogue mechanic until falling into the ship the Sierra. Her ability to speak to machines had brought on a keen interest to the little Sierra a Draongfly class ship.
Her father was none to pleased of any of this and promptly put a want out for her. Her story ended up playing a large role in the first book, as did the Captain's backstory and one of our fighters, Marcus. The next adventure get to focus on the other peopple in the crew, but 2 years after all of the incidents that brought us together in the first place.
Kevin is seriously the best DM I have ever had in a game.

Back to the arty thing.. It isn't much but the thing I am the most proud of is the textures that are used. They are all from my own original stock. This is something I have been doing my all to make giant and easy to find. Any have some good ideas of what to shoot for more stock textures? I know there are websites out there, but I think it adds a new level of drama when using your own, ya know?

Anime Expo The Returning.

2009-07-05T23:21:00.001-07:00

Oooooooh boy.
So today was the final day at Anime Expo; the anime convention hold every 4th of July weekend in Los Angelos.

It was a fun convention, but very tiring and extremely expensive. I went down with my clay and some buttons. Very little sold in the way of figurines, but people could not get enough of the buttons! Especially the zodiac signs turned into button form.
Part of me still wants to get a larger button maker for those. So it is a 1~2" button.

The apple magnets went really well too. I am so happy that Aja told me about them and how to make them! On top of that, some people paid for them to be sent to them as stickers to boot. :3

And someone, for the first time EVER commissioned me for drawings. It was amazing and so much fun. Here is how one of the two turned out:

They had requested their own lolita dresses be turned into buttons for each of them. Aah.. I love the sweet loli look *^^*

Apples Magnets

2009-06-27T14:18:00.000-07:00

Hello~

Alright, so I am just a few days away from Anime Expo, the largest N.American anime convention. This year, a table has been secured and I have absolutely nothing done for it. D: Well, I do have some things done for it, just not enough. It is never enough.
So in my wiles of making some nifty and somewhat large stickers, here is one of the apple variations.
He is obviously a zombie apple. I just love the eyes and the rotten spots. Included in the apple magnets is an eaten apple, sour apple, red delicious, golden apple, vampire apple and caramel apple. Each magnet will be about 4.5" large.