Students from the Graphic Arts Association will be selling their work at Anime STL this weekend. The students have spent the past year working under the guidance of Neko Pilarcik-Tellez to produce original T-Shirts, Prints, Buttons, Stickers, and Video Game Controller skins. Anime STL is the region’s largest anime convention, drawing over 5000 attendees. Their Artists’ Alley is a juried space and the students beat out some stiff competition to be accepted in. Neko and her students will be there all weekend, so if you happen to be there, stop by and say hi.

The Graphic Arts Association, Fine Art Club, and Photography Club partnered up for a whirlwind tour of Kansas City last Friday. 26 students boarded the bus at 5:30 in the morning to spend the day visiting art museums, galleries, and film / animation studios.
 
In the morning, the students toured the campus of the Kansas City Art Institute and visited the Kemper Art Museum and the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum. Many of my animation students were excited to see the animation and illustration spaces at KCAI. Julia Welles was kind enough to lead our tour group and spend time answering the many questions of my two students who will be transferring to KCAI in the fall.

That afternoon the groups split up to explore downtown Kansas City. Michael Quintero and Christine Giancola took students to the Crossroads Arts District to visit art galleries and photograph the city. Neko Pilarcik-Tellez arranged tours of two animation studios: Wide Awake Films and Intake Studio. At the studios, students got a behind-the-scenes look at how animation is produced for big-name clients like the National Geographic Channel and AMC Theaters. It was a fun day, packed with new experiences for all.

HEC-TV's Scope did a very nice piece on the gallery exhibition. Big thanks to Paul Langdon for producing the piece and Alexis Nugent for setting it up!

I've been helping our Gallery Director, Deb Jenkins, with promoting our latest gallery exhibition: Black Girl Culture by Scheherazade Tillet.  I worked with our new Marketing and Communications person, Alexis Nugent, to get the word out and secure some media coverage for the event. Also made flyers, of course.

Scheherazade was kind enough to fly directly in from L.A. and spend two days with our students doing workshops. The first one was "Art and Social Change" which involved a really interesting presentation by Scheherazade followed by the students collaborating on the creation of art focused on social change. The second was a portraiture workshop in Erica Popp and Giada's class. The events culminated with the gallery reception and artist talk Thursday night.

A very cool event! The exhibition will continue through April 7th so if you're in St. Louis it's definitely worth checking out!

Black Girl Culture Art Exhibit
Feb. 27 – April 7
Contemporary Gallery (IR-111)

About the Exhibit:
Black Girl Culture is a pioneering photographic exhibition that gives black teens a safe place to tell their stories. The exhibition is the brainchild of photographer and youth organizer Scheherazade Tillet, who founded a nonprofit that uses art to inspire young women and protect girls from violence in her Chicago community.

Article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-photography-helps-black-girls-define-their-culture-on-their-own-terms_us_570ff602e4b0018f9cb971cb

I did a little volunteer work for WCA St. Louis recently. This is a half sheet flyer and a couple quarter sheet postcards I made to help promote their upcoming events.

My students always inspire me!  This is the show card I made to advertise this year's Animation Showcase at STLCC - Florissant Valley.  I wanted to give a nod to my students' soon-to-be-published graphic novel, "Galactic Axolotls", and my Animation Tech. 2D class's very ambitious stop-motion project, "My Past".

I took one of the main characters from "Galactic Axolotls" (character designed by Megan O'Loughlin) and rendered him in the style of "My Past" (Animated by Ca'jion Starr, Tommy Benoist, and Karolyn Zheng).  This is the end result.  It was really fun incorporating their very different styles and ideas into an illustration.

The website is now live at DrawingFergusonTogether.org! Originally the committee wasn’t planning on having a website and instead just using EventBrite and Facebook for information. I felt pretty strongly that spreading the info across multiple places wasn’t a good idea; we needed a central location for everything related to the event.

Knowing I would encounter resistance because “websites are expensive and hard to build” (they’re actually not) I decided to just mock one up and present it to the committee. Better to ask for forgiveness than permission, right? My plan worked and now we have a website.

I'm still waiting on some info from the committee before I can fully populate it (final event schedule, etc.) but it's pretty much there. If you wanna check it out go to: DrawingFergusonTogether.org and if you happen to live in the St. Louis area you may wanna consider attending, should be a really interesting and fun event!

Final designs for the logo and flyer.

I've been asked to design a logo for the art event Drawing FergUSon Together: A Vision of Peace. These are some of my initial ideas. To find out more about the event check them out on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1581674195431973/