dresses which are not dresses + website

I forgot to mention this before, but I finally have a place you can find me in the internets with a name which is very easy to remember!  

It's brigetteb.com!

That's where my tumblr-based portfolio lives.  If you have a tumblr you can follow me and tumbl away! It feels very official and neat.  The only bummer is that you still have to remember to spell my name right (no D, two E's, two T's, yes I know it's a funny spelling, but I didn't choose it).

And here are some discarded ideas from a thing I'm working on, er, trying to be working on.  

I'm not going to explain too much because there isn't much to say.

Here's a birdcage dress lady!  Her hat is also a birdcage.  

I imagine that the weather girl is prone to mood swings.  

Pomegranates.

Yes I know they're very silly.  

puss in boots

I remembered that the Puss in Boots book I worked on last summer is out now, so I can show you some pages!

Some projects you look back on fondly, and others not so much.  This is a not-so-much for me.  The deadlines were super tight and crazy, and my collaborators were, ahem, difficult.  Luckily for me, the feeling of being sleepless, exhausted, and SUPER stressed is a familiar one!  At CalArts I went through it once a year, getting my student films done.  We call it crunch time.  It's always totally worth it, but it sucks like crazy when you're in the midst of it.  

All that white space is where the text is.  I did have fun with the style and compositions as much as I could!  Some of my favorite children's books have really excellent use of white space, so I tried it out for myself.  

Oh my gosh you guys, I argued to much for the left hand side of this spread!  It's not good to get super married to your ideas, but I loved how that page looked in the sketch and it's still probably my favorite of the whole book.  On the right you have Humpty Dumpty having a spazz attack.  

Here's a weird thing: I have no idea what happens in this movie.  As a the illustrator, they don't tell you the story as it plays out in the film, you just have to glean what you can from the text and the reference images.  I guess this happens, at some point, for some reason!

I also exercised the use of unnatural and eccentric color!  huzzah

All in all I managed how to have fun with it, and I like how it turned out.  The book is on Amazon, where you will notice that the cover is a screencap from the movie.  I don't know why they do that (they did it with all the books for this film), when the insides of the book look nothing like it.  What I say to that is: whateverrrrr!  

Also, I found the following amusing:

I was surprised at the 'cats' part!  cats?  I didn't realize that was a "thing" of mine.  

Don't act like you don't google yourself, too. 

puss in boots

Hello out there in blogger-land!  In a nutshell: I've been working a lot, and not blogging very much, and having adventures, and taking pictures, and making plans, and writing 100 e-mails, and maybe spreading myself a little too thin.  But what can you do?  Sometimes life is like a roller coaster, and you just gotta hang on!

I wanted to update with SOMETHING, for heaven's sake, since it's been a whole month already.  But I have very little lying around that I can show to you all, because so much of it has to stay secret for what feels like forever.  What I found when I rummaged through my files was this sample piece I did for a Puss in Boots book.  I ended up getting the gig, and spent aaaaaaalll of last month crunching like crazy to get it done just barely by the deadline.

It will be out in October.  So you can sink your eyes into it then!

In other news:  Guess who is teaching a class at CalArts this coming school year?  

More on that later!  Time for this moi to catch some snoozes.  

bring your record player

Another painting for the Norman Rockwell show in July!  It is the horizontal sister to the other painting of teenagers.  I took these pictures really quickly and sloppily immediately after I finished it, and then I packed it up and sent it on its way.  

This is my favorite part.  

A portable record player is a good thing to have.  I've got one.  It's not pink though, unfortunately.  

A big gross mess!  I used that brown paper (actually cut up Trader Joe's bags) to wrap up the two paintings.  Recycle and stuff!

I kind of went with a different process for this painting than I did for the other.  I didn't really make an initial sketch, instead I did some little studies and then drew the sketch directly onto the primed board.  Then I scanned it (in pieces...I hate doing that) and did a digital color key.  I always like the way the sloppy color pass looks better than the finished painting.  It has more something.  I'm not sure what.  

I'm not quite as pleased with this one as I was with the other one, but c'est la vie.  I was also in a tremendous hurry to get this one done, and I'm sure that had something to do with it.  Working under pressure is tricky.  Sometimes it forces you to be more awesome in a smaller amount of time, and at the end you are so happy and you feel like you WON!  But other times you can't escape that gross feeling that you really just don't have enough time and what you're trying to do isn't going to happen, and you go into lazy auto-pilot mode.  

In any case, it's time for me to drink an iced coffee, so til next time!

this painting has no name

The finished painting!  I realized as I was writing this post that I haven't yet named it.  I've been trying to stay looser in my paintings, and let go of that holding-your-breath-trying-to-make-it-just-so feeling.  It's bunches more fun if you are not freaked out every time you pick your brush up.

Sorry about the quality of these images.  I don't have a real camera (these are iphone pics) and the painting is too big for my scanner.  Yes I know I could scan it in pieces and all that jazz, but who has time for that?! (I do not...as I type this I ought to be working on something else, but I get excited when I finish something!)

I know you guys like seeing the painting surrounded by the chaos of my table top...

That thing in the upper left corner is my color work book.  I had to paint what felt like a billion swatches of different color combinations, plus shades and tints for each combo, for a painting class I took at city college.  The class itself was pretty useless, but I've kept and used that color work book ever since.  It's a super helpful thing to have, if you  have the patience to make one.  

flapper paper doll for the goods

I made this flapper paper doll for McSweeney's The Goods

That means it will be in the two papers that carry The Goods: The San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. If you wanna get this cool stuff in your own local paper, then you should call em up and tell em so!! Otherwise how will they know? Also, The Goods could use your support.

Paper dolls!!

kim and jim

So, I was invited to be in this show. I watched this movie and did a bunch of sketches, and then decided that I'd feature the 'villain' of the story in my piece instead of the hero, because while Edward gets a lot of love, poor, beefy, angry Jim (Anthony Michael Hall) gets nothing.

Also, I thought it'd be fun to document my painting process. Why not? I'm not sure that you'll be able to glean any "secrets" or "techniques" or any of that stuff from these pictures, but at the very least they're interesting to look at!


I started off with a little doodle of what I wanted the painting to look like! This sketch is really only like 1 1/2" tall. It doesn't need to be much bigger than that to get its point across. You can pretty much tell what's goin on, compositionally.

I scanned it, brought it in to old photoshop, and did some color stuff! I did a bunch of different color ideas but this one (which was pretty close to what I'd imagined) was the best.

I got this big piece of very cheap board from an art store and cut it down to the size I wanted. I didn't gesso the board, I just gave it a coat of really ugly bright magenta paint. I don't have a good reason for choosing that color. I just had a really big bottle of pink paint that I wanted to use up. Anyway, once I had a layer of paint down the next few coats of paint had something to grab onto, so that's what that's all about. Please note: my paints are mostly of the cheap-o variety.

I took a big turquoise colored pencil and sketched in my dinosaur bush, Jim and Kim. For some reason I suddenly felt that I should switch Kim with Jim so they're different than they were in my first sketch. I don't know why! It just seemed right! Also I started to lay in some paint, mostly just for texture and rough shapes. It looks awful at this point, doesn't it??

Nooooow it starts looking a little more like something, although not much more...

It's slowly coming together, but only sort of. Usually somewhere in the middle of working on a picture you have a moment where you think "This is awful. This isn't going to work. What was I thinking? What IS THIS??" I was having that thought about here. If you recognize that feeling, you know it eventually goes away if you keep working...

I don't have a hierarchy of what I work on first or last or whatever. It's usually more like, "What do I feel like painting now??" I felt like getting Winona resolved. Winona Ryder is hard to catch a likeness of. She's pretty and all, but she kinda doesn't have any really defining features. Anthony was pretty easy. I just had to make him look angry and red.

Finally past that "this is garbage" feeling! It's starting to look like a painting!

OH! THAT'S what it's supposed to look like! The piece is BIG (for me at least!) and won't fit on my tiny scanner, so you will have to be content with these grainy iphone pictures of the finished product. I like how it came out.

It was missing something, so I added leaves and branches to the ground around the dino-topiary. It gives you the feeling that Edward was just there, even though he's not in the picture at all.

Grrrr!!

BIG news!

Okay, first I'll give you the small stuff and then we can work our way up to the big one. Here's a drawing I did for some freelance recently to accompany the nooz:



NEWS!

-I received a shining endorsement on the Publishers Weekly blog! Thank you, Alison!

-The paintings from my last post are for SALE on the Bear and Bird Gallery site! Buy 'em up, make my day!

-LOTS of the paintings (and some prints) from my previous show are up at Una Mae's, a really cute boutique in my neighborhood. Support a local institution and a local artista, and go peruse their stylish duds and take home a painting.

-I'm going to be at Unique L.A. this weekend! Come by and visit! Me and my tiny pink X-mas tree will be happy to see you. I've got paper dolls to peddle!

-And finally: I'm going to be both writing and illustrating two books for Chronicle. They are awesome folks. I can't give any details yet, but I'm super excited. For anyone who ever doubted that their biggest craziest wildest dream could come true, let me tell you: if you keep hammering away at it, someday it WILL. And on that day your heart will explode into stardust and sprinkle itself all over the universe, covering all those who know you in a glittering blanket of AWESOME. No seriously, that's how it works.

SO, I've been busy, to say the least. Hope all you's Thanksgivingses were grand!

the book!

It's right HERE on Amazon! I illustrated this book last spring for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, which is coming out pretty soon...

I thought I'd just share some pages, since it's been released into the world already. These don't have any text (although you can obviously spot where the text belongs), and also the book doesn't exactly look like this, since it's a fancy 3-D book that comes with fancy little 3-D glasses. The effect is actually pretty neat.



Drawing food is a tedious affair. It really forces you respect the little glinty grease bits on a pizza or the texture of scooped ice cream when you are required to duplicate it...



These aren't all the pages, they're just the best ones (as far as I'm concerned).



I watched "The Lady Vanishes" while doing this page. Now when I look at it I think about terribly upright English people on trains.



Yay! I bought a copy at Borders and it was right next to my buddy Christian's book on the rack. Small world!