#GingerAbroad
Since being out of school, I've had more spare time than I know what to do with. When I'm not coaching softball or begging professors to be references for job applications, I've been teaching myself how to use Adobe Illustrator. Still new to the process and in possession of over 600 pages of information on using the program, I made this character design. It is rough, but not a bad start! As making female "superhero style" characters has been my favorite thing to draw for years, I made more concept characters. The left is what I imagine (in my wildest/impractical dreams) I would want to look like as a superhero. The right is inspired by the Norse Valkyrie from mythology.
I'm still learning the basics of Illustrator (woohoo, only about 500 pages to go!), but check out my Instagram for future images. Comment on this post if you want to see something specific!
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I assist coaching a girls fastpitch softball team in Yakima this summer. We went to Surrey, BC, Canada to test our skills against the Canadian competition this week. I don't have pictures of that (because I was too busy coaching, of course!) but the International tournament was going on at the same time! 31 countries from 6 continents were represented.
![]() While they were all completing against each other, there was a strong sense of community within the teams and fans. The Ugandan National Team was playing with only 9 gloves for the whole team, 3 bats and all the girls wore old sneakers. An unknown fan brought brand new shoes for the entire team and fit them all from the back of his car. It is people like this that make me feel better about the world.
It's hard to accept the weird, and in this case "the weird" means graduating from Gonzaga University! I did that, and got the two majors (biology and art) to prove it! I never really learned the name of the guy next to me... I think it was Aaron... or Eric? I should have asked during the three hour ceremony. whoops Of course there was plenty of time before they let us into the arena for the ceremony for selfies with friends... the one on the left was right after someone said "now you have to be adults" And like any good art student, I decorated my cap! Dedicated to Spike, the golden bulldog that stands guard outside of the basketball stadium! There will be people I miss, but I'm excited to see where I wind up next! (sorry for the cliche ending)
The perks of being a biology student at GU is that we have access to some of the most amazing opportunities in the world (seriously)! For example, I spent eight hours at the Clarkia, Idaho fossil site. The site is considered one of the richest fossil beds in the world and most of the fossils contain organisms that went extinct 20 MILLION YEARS AGO! I know that I only found leaves but still, these are amazingly well preserved!
Four years of living in the studio has led to this moment: the Senior Art Exhibition! Myself and five other extremely talented students have been slaving away to make ourselves look professional enough in the art world. Did we do it? In past years, students have fought to the death to have their piece be front in center at the Jundt Art Museum. This group was too nice to each other so I came up with the idea that we would present the aprons that we worked in all year. Mine is the top left. It might be less colorful but it fits my personality :) I also got to design the poster for the show. Thank you YouTube for the how-to guides on Photoshop and InDesign these past four years. It didn't click that I was finished preparing for the show until my work was hung in the gallery and lit. Thank you to everyone that came to the opening reception! It was one of the greatest experiences of my undergraduate career!
I had the honor of going to SGCI, the printmaking conference with my professor, Mary Farell and two amazing classmates, Becca and Shannon. While it might not have been the most helpful "demonstration" for my style of printmaking, the steam rolling printing was by far the most entertaining! Underneath that monster of a machine is a sheet of plywood, a slab of foam, an inked up sheet of metal cut into a fun design, and finally the paper at which they are printing on! Even though we went to about a dozen galleries, I might have taken more pictures of the ridiculously amazing food in Portland, Oregon! The meal with the egg on top was this mixture of fried potatoes, burnt cheese, onions and peppers topped with an over-fried egg. I have to say that I ate the entire thing and could have eaten a bucket (the technical term, I'm sure) more!
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In other wordsI've moved to Beijing, China where I'm teaching art! Archives
March 2020
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