hand-sewn sketchbook

i made my first hand-made sketchbook by binding rives BFK drawing paper and sewing the cover from patterned cotton fabric and off-white muslin for the inside lining.

in japan, it is common to hand-sew neat covers for bunkobon, or small paperback books, which is a good idea because sometimes, beautiful books have the misfortune of being published with hideous covers. i have a few examples on my shelf which deserve better dust jackets. it is also a good way to hide embarrassing reading material.

happy holidays!

the last romanovs

magic

i shot, processed, and printed them on friday. they are all a little funny, underexposed, but i think it's charming. wabi-sabi; i am embracing imperfection. the very fact that they exist and that i made them is a little miracle.

minicards, too

and the half-size cards with my blog address came in the post today! i love them, too.

business cards!

the business cards i ordered from moo arrived in the mail yesterday, and i love love them. they came in time for the market! the cards are printed on 100 % recycled paper and come in a precious little box.

art market 2009

today was the first day of mica's 3rd annual art market! i have prints and gift tags for sale, and i already sold about five items this morning. anything that doesn't sell - plus new prints - will be for sale in my etsy shop. the market will be going on through saturday, december 12th, 10 am - 6 pm. it takes up three floors of the brown center this year, and every department is represented.

alice in wonderland, 2.0

alice got a slight makeover tonight. i am going to be making prints of this one, as well.

it's good to be home

i am in ohio for the weekend, marveling at the perfect combination of very cold air and very bright sun.

first batch of prints

in preparation for MICA's annual art market, i have finally started making prints of my illustrations, on high quality, white enhanced matte paper. prints will shortly be available in my etsy shop (coming soon)!

embroidery experiment

this is what i did today. i liked working on it, so i might incorporate embroidery into my thesis to give it a more special quality.

doll

i am slowly expanding my horizons, starting with embroidery and attempting to hand-sew this doll, which i designed last year. i have off-white muslin for the body and cotton fabric remnants for simple clothes. if the experiment is a success, hello corduroy and tweed!

this bird had flown

i have just discovered that there is going to be a film adaptation of haruki murakami's "norwegian wood," my favorite book in the universe, starring ken'ichi matsuyama and rinko kikuchi (from "babel"). i am reading it for the third time right now, and it feels like crawling under the coziest down blanket on a starry winter night.

daily sketchbook, nine

daily sketchbook, eight

i just checked out two books from the school library that i am very excited about: "wabi-sabi for artists, designers, poets & philosophers" by leonard koren and "six names of beauty" by crispin sartwell.

previously unseen prague sketchbook pages

above are some pages from my prague sketchbook that i have not shared yet. i remembered them while re-scanning the other ones today. they are all from my last days in the czech republic, which i spent reflecting on my life in the previous five months and slowly preparing to look forward.

positively kafkaesque

before leaving prague, one of the last things i did was visit the franz kafka museum. photography is not allowed in the museum but i just had to sneak one in, of a small drawing that kafka did of himself sitting at his desk. i did something so similar in my sketchbook last year!

daily sketchbook, seven

i have recently become fascinated with people photographed by the sartorialist and of course, the best way for me to fully process the images is to draw them.

contemporary japanese fashion

yesterday b. and i went to washington and finally paid a visit to the textile museum, which is hidden away in neat and quiet embassy row. the current exhibition, "contemporary japanese fashion," features three designers: yohji yamamoto, issey miyake (top), and my favorite of the three, rei kawakubo of comme des garçons (bottom). her work is extra bizarre and some of it is quite unflattering to the body, but her explanation - "what is beautiful doesn't have to be pretty"- really resonated with me.

daily sketchbook, six

artist's bio

here is the brief bio for my hypothetical website. i wanted to write it in third person at first, but when i did it sounded very stupid.

i hatched in saint petersburg, russia and migrated to the great lakes eight years later. in 2010, i graduated from the maryland institute college of art with a BFA in illustration.

sometimes i get overwhelmed by the amount of beautiful things in the world. a few of my favorites are world exploration, dashing historical men, good grammar, fancy urns, books, elephants, persian portraiture, folklore, japanese things, limericks, elaborate textiles, napoleon bonaparte, silent cinema, russian ballet, and mysterious circumstances.

daily sketchbook, five

the daily sketchbook hasn't been very daily lately, but i'm trying to stay on top of it!

my new love

vera kholodnaya, russian silent film star, 1893-1919.

nepalese manuscript cover

our latest assignment for the class "arts of asia," is to go the walters art museum and find an asian object that has some religious association, and then write an essay about it and submit a little sketch. i chose a beautiful 11th century wooden manuscript cover from nepal. above is my drawing. "the four outer figures on each side are kings of the primary and intermediate directions of the compass." in the middle is the linga, or "sign" of shiva. to its left are vishnu and his consort lakshmi, and to the right, brahma and saraswati.

sometimes, it's ok

i gave up. i dropped the basic photography class. i don't like to give up and so i was not giving myself permission to leave it because i told myself to hold on, it will get better. but everything that could go wrong keeps going wrong every single time. i fixed problems, and immediately new ones came up. when i noticed that i barely sleep, frequently walk around stressed and misty-eyed, convinced that the gods of photography are telling me "go away, stick to what you know," and most importantly that my thesis - which should be the center of my universe right now - is being neglected, i decided to put my foot down. i still have access to the photography department's equipment for the rest of the semester and will take and develop photographs that are funny and imperfect - just the way i like them - on my own time.

11 second exposure, 2.5 filter

it took me all class period and many, many test strips, but here it is: my first baby. happy october!

photography blues

i seem to have forgotten my praguey idea about magic and the everyday world. all i do these days is weep over destroyed film and complain about the "unfriendly looks" i get from people in the photo lab to anyone who will listen. that spells bumbag and i don't like it. once i accept the fact that i am a bit slow, i can calm down and take things at my own pace, even if it means many trials and many errors and falling behind everyone else. i will get through this thing, and i will like it too!

espresso cups

i found them at an antique store in hampden. i don't even drink coffee!

il treno

i went to SPX (small press expo) this weekend, and while very few items agreed with my taste, i did find this gem - "il treno" ("the train") by hong kong illustrator chihoi in collaboration with taiwanese poet hung hung. this edition of the book is in italian, but there is an endearingly bad english translation at the bottom of each page.

about the color yellow

i found the mums at waverly farmers market this morning. the weather was lovely as i carried home a giant orb of yellow.

young playwrights festival poster sketch

this is my sketch for centerstage's "young playwrights festival" poster. it's accordion lady! except this time, she has a typewriter. i feel like drawing her again and again. maybe she can be my mascot.

daily sketchbook, four

branching out

i am taking a basic photography class this semester. above is the first ever length of film shot and developed by me. i was so happy it turned out. i was on the verge of tears last week because i didn't know what i was doing. now at least i know it can be done, with special attention and care. tonight we are printing! hopefully soon we will see the first photograph in the world printed by me.

daily sketchbook, three

afternoon on a hill 2.0

a new and improved version.

daily sketchbook, two

daily sketchbook

last month, i decided to keep a daily sketchbook. there are two reasons for this. one, i need to be disciplined and i want to cultivate a constant love for drawing within myself (it works; i look forward to it everyday) and two, every day i have some theme that is on my mind. i think about a place, or a person, or a work of art. i want to record it though drawing it and writing about it while it is fresh on my mind. i will post the two-pages spreads here from time to time:

my weekly thesis meeting group (and BFFs) decided that the sketchbook should be presented as a part of my thesis, and i agree.

senior thesis

i have formulated and presented my proposal, and am not ready to begin working on it. my class requires that i create a separate blog to document the progress of my work, and so i give you, yet another blog: bryksenthesis. i will post all of my completed work on this main blog anyway, so you won't miss any illustrations. what bryksenthesis will have that this one doesn't is perhaps more sketches, references, and interesting sources or inspiration. and photos of my new senior illustration studio, the acquiring of which i have anticipated all summer.

eureka! (senior thesis)

i was desperately waiting for an idea to arrive the way it usually does - in a sudden flash of lightning - and of course, it did. i looked around my room, and the answer became so very obvious: my edward gorey covers, books, herbariums, postcards, letters, little special objects, sketchbooks filled with drawings of things i saw and things i dream of one day seeing, lists that i make, photographs, notebooks filled with favorite quotes and passages from books; these are things i surround myself with, because i am a born collector. i build my world around me with people, memories, ideas, and objects that make me happy. everything i own has meaning. i even wake up with a new "theme" that i think about every day, that i record with writing and drawing in a my new sketchbook that i started one month ago.

so that is what my senior thesis will be: a collection. each week, i will focus on a place that captures my imagination, either a place i have recently been to, a place i dream of seeing, or a place that i visited a long time ago that still haunts my memories. i will compose a collection for each - drawings of urban or natural landscapes, patterns, something from tradition, anecdotes, portraits, whatever. and since it will be so free of predetermined structure, it will not become tedious. i think this might work!

one man's trash...

a couple of blocks behind my house is a place called "the book thing," a nonprofit organization with a mission to give unwanted books a new home. people donate their unwanted books all week, and on saturdays and sundays, the general public is invited to browse the selection and encouraged to take home as many books as they like, for free. i go there every weekend and find all kinds of treasures: handsome old volumes of classic novels, old issues of "national geographic," children's books, history books, geography books with beautiful photographs...

my most prized collection from the book thing consists of the nine paperbacks pictured above. in the 1950s, edward gorey designed covers for doubleday anchor books. his name isn't even credited in some of them. i skim the paperback shelves every week for the familiar illustration style and hand-drawn type on the spine, and when i find one, it's a holiday. last week i acquired "tristan and iseult" and "greek tragedy," (the latter looking so hastily done that i assumed i was mistaken and put the book back, until i saw the cover on somebody's blog. i sprinted back and snatched the book, and sure enough, there is a little "EG" in the corner of the illustration). these covers are very rare. really, the things people give away!

library of congress

yesterday i took my monthly day trip to washington, d.c. the thought of the day was, "how is it that i have never been to the library of congress?" so i went into the jefferson building, and was completely dumbfounded by the incredible and overwhelming beauty of it. established in 1800, the library of congress is the largest library in the world, containing over 118 million items, which take up more than 500 miles of shelving. the only question is, where are the 118 million items?

i had a dream of settling down in a big armchair, surrounded by the greatest selection of books i have ever seen, but instead had a very eerie experience, running between the jefferson, adams, and madison buildings, and not seeing a single book. the madison building was especially kafkaesque: endless white, sterile hallways filled with numbered doors, like a hospital. a security guard told me that a reader's card will get me into the reading rooms, but i decided to do some research at home and figure out how this bizarre system works, so that next time i can approach this monster of a library with confidence. those books are in there somewhere!

mission for next month: get a reader's card and gain access to the lavish reading room of the thomas jefferson building. also draw the patterns on the mosaic floor.

prague sketchbook: four

prague sketchbook: saint petersburg

from russia, with love.

stay tuned

i haven't fallen asleep; i am in the middle of a 5-piece series for last semester's fashion illustration class, and starting a new sketchbook. i also still don't have a clear idea of what i will do for senior thesis, and michael kimmelman's portraits, our assigned summer reading, is not exactly helping me see the light. meanwhile, there still are more pages to share from my prague sketchbook!

prague sketchbook: germany

prague sketchbook, three

review of contemporary fiction: georges perec issue

that portrait of georges perec i drew over a year ago turned out to be quite useful. the people at dalkey archive press liked the original and so i made this new and improved one for their "georges perec issue" of "the review of contemporary fiction." how exciting; i have never been on the cover of anything before!

back in baltimore

hello again, friends. i am back from ohio (by the way, the cleveland museum of art is practically unrecognizable now; i can't wait until they finish it!), and preparing for the start of my senior year at MICA. i have yet to think of a theme for my thesis project (what will interest me for an entire year?), but i know that spending the last half year in the czech republic gave me a great deal of things to think about. one of the most important things i learned is to appreciate and take advantage of my surroundings every day. no, baltimore is not quite prague, but that doesn't mean that it deserves to be treated with any less wonder and fascination. i am lucky to live practically next door to the baltimore museum of art and only a short train ride away from washington, d.c. i vow to take advantage of as much as i can, while i can!

prague sketchbook, two

view from my window

i am back in the USA, and i just returned from camping and canoeing on the allegheny river in pennsylvania. i am working on gradually posting all of my sketchbook pages from prague, and some other cities that i visited during the last five months.