Is it spring yet?

Much to my dismay after last week's post about the 70 degree weather, New York has revisited winter again for this week. It's very confusing. I sat in on my teacher Ronnie's location drawing class today and got to draw in Union Square for a couple hours. I decided to make one drawing to show the bleak depressing winter....and one to show the hopeful (and hopefully soon-to-come) spring! Hopefully you can tell which is which...

Sunny Day in Washington Square

Last Friday, we had a wonderful, 70 degree day. I was on Spring Break, so I took the day to go drawing in Washington Square Park. I wanted to just play around and try to draw the park in as many ways as I could while still enjoying the sunshine and fresh air!

The magnolia buds have already started blooming on my street corner, so I'm hoping we can all begin to emerge from our caves and go outside again soon.

Breathing

These are a few drawings, thumbnails, and storyboards for an animation I'm working on that focuses on using your energy as a way to change the world around you.

Stay tuned for the full animation!

Disney Trip #3!

Last week I got back from another class in Disneyworld, and it was wonderful as always! It was great to get into the mode of studying and playing around again. Speaking of playing around, here is a drawing from the nighttime light parade at the Magic Kingdom, full of psychedelic retro-wackiness!

I Return! (With some animation!)

Wow, it has been such a long time since I last posted. I've been working on an animation for my last year at Parsons, so I've been busy with that for most of this semester. Here's a few drawings and collages from that, as well as a trailer for the final animation (Coming Spring 2011!)

"Clouds" Teaser Trailer from Evan Turk on Vimeo.

Here are a couple shots of the set-up for presenting my thesis to the judges (taken by my fellow classmate, Deniz!):

(me, looking a little delirious)

And some of the storyboard collages and drawings:

Paris: Monmartre

Now that school's started again, I can start reliving my summer! Still working backwards...the last day of my trip to Paris, was the neighborhood of Monmartre.

Monmartre feels like a storybook version of Paris, with old cobblestone streets intersecting at impossible angles, wacky characters, and soaring views of the entire city. And stairs. Lots and lots of hills and stairs.

The center of Monmartre is the beautiful Sacre Coeur basilica. It's a very unusual cathedral, that looks almost Middle Eastern, with tall domed towers and the pure white stone. It always looks to me like it's been plucked out of the desert and put onto a Parisian hillside.

Back behind the cathedral is a beautiful (although closed) vineyard. I did my best to fumble through the placard with information about it, but then I overheard people talking about how the wine is awful, because of the lack of sunlight, but sells for a very high price because they donate the proceeds to charity.

My last stop in Monmartre was to the artist square, where dozens of artists and patrons cram into a small square to paint, sell, and buy art. It's great to see all of the artists out there working in such a picturesque place. It makes you feel like you're sitting in the residual energy of Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, and all the other artists who worked there, trying to soak up anything they left behind.

Colorado!

Hello! It's been a long time since I've posted here, since I've been out of town for the past month. I took a wonderful reportage class in Paris for 10 days, and then I went home to Colorado for a week. I'll start with Colorado since Paris will take longer. What a great month it's been! Colorado was so fantastic for a break. My boyfriend Chris and I went back to visit my family and take a little break from city life. The thing we could not get over was how INCREDIBLE everything smells in Colorado! There are flowers, trees, thunderstorms, rain, and just clean pure air. I can't believe I barely noticed how great it smells when I lived there.

Anyway, moving along, Chris and I went downtown into Denver one day and happened upon the Denver Botanic Gardens. They were having a show of Henry Moore's sculpture throughout the gardens, which was beautiful. Just drawing the flowers after having seen the sculptures made the gardens, shapes, and colors feel completely different.

The gardens cleared out once it got cloudy, and looked like rain, but we stuck around and stayed outside in the cool, fresh air. Rain doesn't seem so threatening in Colorado, because it just feels, smells and sounds wonderful.

Towards the end of the trip, we headed up into Rocky Mountain National Park to hike. Another thing I couldn't get over were the clouds! There is SO much sky in Colorado, and the clouds stretch around in a 360 degree panoramic wherever you are. The only time you can't see clouds in every direction is when you're up in the mountains surrounded by jagged cliffs and pine trees (don't even get me started on how good it smells up in the mountains...it's like what Pine-Sol wishes it could be...).

We ended up going on a 7 mile hike that looped around various lakes, through the forest.

Every once in a while, through the tangled pine trees, we could see through to beautiful soaring peaks and turquoise lakes.

Near the end of the trail, we came to the roaring Alberta Falls.

Finally we made it down to the base and began to drive home. The rains had finally come, after booming all day long, and we had given up on seeing any big wildlife for the rest of the day. But wait! Over in a marshy valley was a surprisingly orange animal wading through the grass. We all hopped out of the car and I ran down into the grass to get a closer look. A single, beautiful female elk was grazing near the side of a creek. It's always amazing to see such exotic animals, like something you'd see in Africa, grazing in a field only a couple hours from downtown Denver.

It was a wonderful, peaceful, and relaxing trip, and I can't wait to get back to clear the city air out of my lungs again.