02Mar / 2014

Body vs. Clothes

Both of the original photos for these women had them in dark, drab colors, and I started thinking about the things we can change about ourselves, and the things we can’t. You can change your clothes and hair, but you can’t really change much about your skin, and it’s certainly a process if you want to change your aura.

For this girl, I decided to change all her clothes to be bright and colorful, but her skin I wanted to be duller and more pensive – filled with small sepia type like someone who is totally in her own head. I also used the stripes for her hair because even though I wanted it to be colorful, I still wanted it to be limp and stringy.

Also can I just say that I made 4 pairs of shoes for this girl before I found ones I liked? High maintenance and indecisive, just like I created her to be, haha. Also, if anyone knows of shoes like the bee ones in real life, please let me know!!

For this girl, I decided to keep the dark clothes, contrasted with her light hair and skin. But I felt a sense of calm and peace that I wanted to capture with her skin, and I also think it captures the tattoos. This is definitely more of a literal translation than I generally go for, but I kind of like it.

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20Oct / 2013

My First Commission

My best friend and I were having a Hanukkah party at my apartment in Portland. But if you know anything about Portland, you know that there aren’t many Jews. In fact, if we just invited our friends, there would be one and a half Jews coming aside from ourselves. So we told our friends that they couldn’t come unless they brought a Jew with them. This ended up being amazing, and hysterical – I wish I could have been there to witness people asking their token Jewish coworker or friendly acquaintance from their volunteer job if they wanted to come to this party. But it was a great turnout, and super fun.

As it would happen, one Jewish friend-of-a-friend who came to the party saw the Brooklyn Girls haphazardly taped to my wall and started asking me about them, and ultimately asked to buy two of the girls from my wall and to commission a 3^rd that would become a birthday present for her boyfriend (hence why those pictured are colored copies). This was pretty exciting!!

Turns out her boyfriend didn’t like them – I think he felt uncomfortable because of how provocative they were. I’m not entirely sure what ended up happening with them, but it was cool for me!

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06Oct / 2013

Brooklyn Girls

I’ve always been into making collages with magazines, and then at some point started getting into scrapbooking paper. This was back when I was living in Portland. One of my roommates at the time worked at a bookstore, and when they had calendars that didn’t sell, they would rip off the cover to send back to the publisher, and then they could do what they wanted with the rest of the calendar. One of these that made its way back to our house was the Brooklyn Girls calendar, where queer girls from Brooklyn dressed up as pinups from the different decades. We didn’t love the way they looked as such (no offense) but another roommate suggested I remake the girls with scrapbooking paper, and thus my art form was born!