São Tomé - redrawn fashion illustration!

Ha hah! I got it done! Check it out. Woot.

Now two travel books to go....Go!

São Tomé watercolor

Good morning!

I'm working on a new piece for the final watercolor as we speak.
I completed a fashion illustration while I stayed in São Tomé,
but being inspired so much by my fine artist friends there, my work became more realistic.
That doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing, but I am now going to only exhibit that piece for the Summer Study Abroad show,
re-do another painting and show the new one for my Summer Thesis show.

Here's what I did in São Tomé:

Marlin, or the swordfish, will come up often during this travel. In Portuguese they're called "peixe andala" (fish marlin) and they're SUPER delicious!

I wanted to redraw this same image and just stylize it a bit more for the fashion illustration, but I ended being inspired by the pose, but changing the girl entirely. Check out what I have so far:

Excuse the documentation quality: scanning for me is such a hassle because it's smaller than my works and it tends to saturate my pieces more. At some point I'm going on campus to re-scan all my final work for my website.
Anyhow, in the re-do I made the her hold a bucket of fabrics. The background will be the river scene with other women washing their clothes. I'm not sure how well you can see in this image, but there's a little boy holding her hand and also a toy car made of plastic bottle in his other hand.

Critiques are always welcome. :)

Next blogpost I'll show you my travel book. At some point I have to show you the box I carved too! About 2 and a half weeks stay in São Tomé, some of us worked with the professional word-carvers and either commissioned them, or learned to hand carve wood with them. I'm very proud of the box. The top is a mancala board (or "jogo de arrur" in Portuguese. I'm probably butchering the spelling. If anyone knows it, please correct me) and the bottom has a little drawer to put the playing pieces in, in my case, sea-shells I collected on the island.

São Tomé

São Tomé and Principé are small tropical islands on the coast of West Africa.
This summer I had the opportunity to visit there for a month and it was incredible!
I loved everything about the place and the experiences I had there.
I'll post some pictures for you to see:

The red Skittles looking things are seeds from this tree. They're so bright and beautiful, I brought some back with me. They're used as beads to make necklaces, but I'm not sure what else they're used for. The shells belong to this snail and are discarded after you eat them. Yup, I had escargot. Mmmm! These shells are much smaller than the ones I saw on my dinner table.

A lot of the houses in the smaller towns were built above ground to avoid mice and bugs. Aren't they beautiful? And the windows and doorways were usually covered with brightly patterned fabrics.

Yes, the more rich and upper-middle class had washing machines, but we visited all over the island and saw people washing at the lakes, rivers, and estuaries too. I'd say this was much cooler and awesome-looking. Look at the fabrics they have!

Art Market!

Last year I sold 2 different screen prints:

"Under the Sea"

and

"Into the Woods"

These are both on white background, but I sold larger prints with tan colored paper, which were beautiful!
I still have more to sell if you're interested.

my goodness...i had a blog?

great start. really.
i totally forgot i had a blog.

so, until i forget again, let me post up more work

these are more of my illustrations for the children's book :)

why does it keep one changing it sideways?!

That's upsetting. So I think I won't put up more until I get this figured out.

So my teacher suggested I change my title for the story.

title I got now: "On the Way to School"

Yeah... the whole story has nothing to do with going to school because the boy practically is stuck at school and uses imagination to figure out why his mother is late.

Can anyone help me figure this out?

Let me post up few more and I'm going to bounce. Ciao

I forgot to mention: Merry Christmas and Merry Belated Christmas.

I'm currently in New Jersey right now with my roommate and friend, Laura. She's a lovely girl. If you see her around, tell her I said hi. We're on our way to go watch a movie!!! Hurrah

When I come back, I'll tell you more about New Jersey on my other blog... where I should be talking about my life.

obviously i'm new to this

i suppose i can delete the other post
and retype it again with new images
but it's kinda funny so i'm going to keep it there

so again
my art works...

the blue one is in watercolor and the cicada is in gouache. they're both from last year so give me a break.