Laundry Day!

Last week's post for the Wheelhouse continues Adventures in Amanda-land: dressing like a radioactive crayon box can make one quite conspicuous at a Manhattan laundromat. My neighborhood is stuffed with business people who dress pretty somberly, so my rainbow-fest of a wardrobe really does happily stick out sometimes. Or, as my friend Juliet quipped, "NYC is full of colorful people in black clothing. And then there's Amanda..."
:)

Ding Dong...

Last Friday's illustration for the Wheelhouse was the second installment of my current series, Adventures in Amanda-Land. No thank you, Sad Times, I do not want to hang out today.

Summer Storm

Last week's piece for the Wheelhouse Review begins a new series—Adventures in Amanda-land! This one is about how much I love summer storms in the city; I found it in my head whilst strolling home in a torrential downpour back in July.

Hey Sara, Wanna Split a Cookie?

An afternoon in a West Village cafe with a cookie, coffee, and Sara is an excellent afternoon indeed.

I have decided that I really like portraits. Or bubble-people portraits, anyhow. I like thinking about how excellent the other person in the picture is, and drawing about their awesomness makes the picture-making process feel worthwhile and the picture feel valuable. This one is of my college friend Sara and is from an afternoon we spent wandering around downtown when she last visited me in the city. After a long walk, we happened by chance upon this cafe that had both amazing coffee AND amazing cookies {a very rare find}, and the seats in the sunny window made for a very pleasant place to hang and chat.

Love

Weekend Wanderings in Washington DC!

My friend Juliet is living on Capitol Hill right now, and I got to venture down to see her this weekend. We had many excellent adventures, the first of which was a nighttime walk around the hill.

Juliet's neighborhood = extremely adorable. 

 The capitol hill used book store is a gloriously claustrophobic & wonderfully disheveled maze of nooks and crannies stuffed to the ceiling with classics and contemporaries:

 complete with commentary, in case you are wanting some opinions, spoilers, or amusement.

 Everything we tasted or bought from eastern market was super yummy. The corn lady gave us a very helpful lesson in selecting the best corn for our cookout.

We got to the Library of Congress just in time to be sheltered from a tornado meandering through. Perhaps not the safest place to avoid a tornado, but browsing Thomas Jefferson's personal library is a pretty nice way to ride out a storm. :)

I very much enjoy the creepily lit station architecture in D.C.'s metro.

 Juliet's neighbors

 Lincoln Memorial at night: BEST. THING. EVER.

I am in love with the Gettysburg address. I am also in love with this engraving of it.

My camera failed massively here, but I had to include this anyhow because the Washington Monument at night, as seen from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, is super, super magical. None of the magic showed in the photo though, so you will just have to go and check it out yourself. 

Looking out the window into the enclosed courtyard at the National Portrait Gallery

Awesome skylight at the National Portrait Gallery

Group Portrait

This was a fun little piece commissioned by the Wheelhouse Review; the request was a group portrait of the contributers that could be used as the cover image for the blog's Facebook fan page. The goal of the blog is to be a forum for each writer/artist to do what they do best {aka be in their wheelhouse}, so the work featured shares a space, but not necessarily a theme or voice. I thought a good way to weave that concept into the portrait form was to have us all rocking out together at the helm of our own unique little boats. {Also, water is a very fun thing to draw.}
You can see the full-size version in action here: https://www.facebook.com/wheelhouserev

Soup Dumplings are not Huggable

...but I love them anyway. :)

Self-control

Today's post over at the Wheelhouse. Poor little cupcake.

Hey Caitlin, could you pass the remote?

An ode to many nights of bunk-bed bedtime tv-time with my college roommate. This drawing posed a new challenge for me; I'm not used to depicting scenes that I've actually lived in. I can see it in my mind exactly as it was, the problem is that "as it was" was not very compositionally/tonally lovely. So the puzzle here was to figure out how to keep the colors and layout true enough to reality that it felt to me like an accurate rendition, but leave enough wiggle room so as not to create a super ugly picture. I erred more on the reality side than perhaps was good for the standalone artistic integrity of the final product, but I am pretty happy with how much it does look like how things actually were.

Toaster Ghost!

This one requires a bit of set up—

This week everyone over at the Wheelhouse teamed up to do a week long multi-part fictional mystery series. Juliet kicked things off with her side of the story on how the office toaster mysteriously caught fire, and then every day a different writer took a stab at unraveling the mystery from their point of view. When Friday rolled around, I wrapped things up with a cartoon:

The Heat is Off

Wrapping up work on finals for a book proposal. Above is a full spread for the busting-out-of-the-desert scene {two pages}, and below are the individual pages so you can see 'em a little bigger:

Guest appearance of an old friend

I had a monster like this when I was a kid; I created + commissioned him to eat my nightmares. {He was well fed.} Someday I am going to make a book about him. But while he waits, he has graciously agreed to lend his likeness for the latest in my poster series for the Wheelhouse. :)

Miscellaneous Adventuretimes!

W 46 st = haunted by bagel ghosts. RIP, H&H bagels. :( 

on the pier @ Hudson River Park 

 What a lovely night for a concert next to an aircraft carrier.

 There's a spaceship in my backyard now. Got to watch the installation of the Enterprise from my office window, and went to inspect the delivery when I got home—it  still had the packing materials on. :)

 Lovely late afternoon light in a little park down in Alphabet city

 Clearly the best art installation NYC has ever seen. POLKA DOTTED WONDERLAND: swoon. 

 Waiting for the fireworks to start on the fourth of July

Pretty rubble on E 23 st

 Type love @ the Highline

 Oh little water tower, you are so cute.

It is not often Seymour gets the right light to escape being a vague black blob in photos.

Faithfulness

Darn it.

Another one in the theme of innovation labs—this little scientist's latest sinister experiment clearly went very, very wrong.

Preparing for Takeoff

The prompt for this week's assignment was innovation within large corporations. As this is a theme that also daily asserts itself in my professional life {as someone tasked with being creative in a giant corporation}, I've had lots of opportunity to ponder what circumstances make for the ideal innovation lab. I've explored this here with kids, the segment of our population most frequently in the ideal place to create.
In this instance, these guys needed a rainy day—a large stretch of unstructured time in an uninteresting place with a few excited friends, a few supplies, and a self-directed project they've got real ownership of. As the sun breaks out of the clouds, they've now got something else they'll also need; a chance to get outside and see if that work can really fly.

Kindness & Goodness

Pieces 4 & 5 for my bi-weekly series over at The Wheelhouse were interesting to tackle, as kindness and goodness are often used interchangeably in casual language. 

This is, for the sake of my sanity, a large simplification, but I decided to distinguish them here by treating kindness as a particular instance of action {have my mittens, cold-handed friend}, and goodness as having a supply for a number of those actions {it's snowing right into my snow cone machine on this hot summer evening, how convenient}. 

Hey, that's me in there!

Much excitement in Amanda-land this week: I just got my shiny new copy of Denise Bosler's magic-filled "Mastering Type." I'm super honored {and a little baffled} that a few of my pieces and an interview with me are included in this textbook of type-wizardry. It's a really thorough, well done, + gorgeous textbook {published by HOW books} chock full of crazy good work—I'm super pleased to add it to my little library. Studying design, or looking to brush up on your typography skillz? You should totally go get it. :D

"There's something special about him," she thought.

Broccoli and Ruby had so much fun that summer afternoon that they just couldn't be separated at sundown. They celebrated their new BFF status by taking merrily to the evening skies on the amusement park ferris wheel.

Clearly we were meant to be.

Our assignment this time around was to do some sort of promotional work or PSA-ish piece related to health. I went the "Hey kids, veggies are your friends" route because I have been itching to draw broccoli and here realized that I had a character in my repertoire that he would hit it off with instantly. Indeed, they had so much fun together that I turned this into a two piece series—stay tuned for more of their day of summertime goodtimes! :D