Kelly Newcomer Design Portfolio 2015.

I am currently looking for design or social media work, especially small jobs. Preferably for social justice groups.
Contact me for pdf of design samples (low-res version below)
Some of my layouts are online: https://www.scribd.com/PowderhornArtFair and https://wedgenewsmpls.wordpress.com/

Mark Dayton and the Office of Technology for Peace

On September 22, 2005, Minnesota Senator, Mark Dayton, introduced legislation to establish a Department of Peace and Nonviolence that included the establishment of an Office of Technology for Peace. Here is the link to that legislation https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/109/s1756/text

I made a comic about it back in October 2005, but now I am finally getting around to posting more info about this legislation. How cool for Mr. Dayton, to be able to write a bill with such a visionary message -- that's the kind of stuff I'd want to try for if I was a United States Senator.  (Vote for Newcomer!)

John Lennon and Yoko Ono liked to talk about the war machine, and the necessity of a peace machine. So, this is part of what needs to happen (in every nation) to help bring about peace. 

Basically, this legislation was not adopted. But let's hope for a similar bill to be ratified sometime soon.

 

107.

Office of Technology for Peace

(a)

In general

There shall be in the Department an Office of Technology for Peace, the head of which shall be the Assistant Secretary of Technology for Peace. The Assistant Secretary of Technology for Peace shall carry out those functions in the Department affecting the awareness, study, and impact of developing new technologies on the creation and maintenance of domestic and international peace.

(b)

Grants

The Assistant Secretary of Technology for Peace shall provide grants for the research and development of technologies in transportation, communications, and energy that—

(1)

are nonviolent in their application; and

(2)

encourage the conservation and sustainability of natural resources in order to prevent future conflicts regarding scarce resources.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/109/s1756/text

Kelly goes to Arts Funding Panel

Notes - I am a note-taking-machine! (image of my notebook from my etsy site)

On Jan. 13, 2015, I went to a free arts funding panel offered by Springboard for the Arts and Hennepin County Libraries. I ended up with a couple new goals about art grants.

Goals: 

1. Approach WARM Women's Art Registry of Minnesota http://www.thewarm.org/mentor-program/mentor-intensive/ and maybe do their mentor program, or at least write the funding for the mentor program into one of my grant applications. (yikes: Looks like it costs $90 per month) But WARM members have other get togethers and hopefully they can help me as a mom who put her art career on hold for the kids and  special needs issues of kid - who is ready finally to refocus on art-making but I still have to juggle  other caregiving responsibilities. 
I became a WARM member for $55 for one year - which will get me into their other programs (not the Mentor one though)

2. I used to have a goal of applying for ONE art grant per year. Maybe two. (MN State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant and McKnight Fellowship). Now I am more in mind to apply for three - and go for something like a travel/study grant or a grant for a project with a community-emphasis - there might be something I'm already involved in (like those conversations I've been having with Tammy Ortegon about balancing caregiving & art-making - that could possibly turn into a project with a community connection for which we could get a grant to help realize it).

The presenters were:

Delta Giordano, she is an artist with a theater background and she works for the Knight Foundation which has an innovative new program called the Knight Arts Challenge. http://www.knightarts.org/knight-arts-challenge/stpaul

Cynthia Gehrig, President of the Jerome Foundation http://www.jeromefdn.org which gives fellowships to emerging artists, and also sponsors a travel/study grant, and also sponsors residencies for artists at Northern Clay Center, Highpoint Center for Printmaking, New York Mills, and Textile Center
Shannon Forney from http://www.mrac.org/ MRAC - she's also a performer, a clown, and part-owner of a coffee shop where they have the Smallest Museum http://www.vita.mn/crawl/277644751.html?page=all
Noah Keesecker Moderated - Program director of artistic development at Springboard http://springboardforthearts.org - he's also a composer.  

How to enter for painting giveaway: (GIVEAWAY OVER - join my mailing list to be alerted if I do another giveaway)

To enter for the giveaway of this painting, just visit
http://etsymn.blogspot.com/2013/08/handmademn-kelly-newcomer-drawings.html
and follow the instructions and then every comment is an entry.

You can make comments up through the end of the day on 8/24, then the winner will be chosen by random.org and this contest is organized by HandmadeMN, an etsy team that I'm part of.

 

Peace Machine With Broccoli, Watercolor and Ink, 2012, 9x12 in.

Upcoming HandmadeMN Giveaway

Kelly Newcomer original art Giveaway starts 8/11 and ends 8/24.
Check back on 8/11 for HandmadeMN link.

HandmadeMN is the etsy team I'm on. They provide opportunities for artists and crafters on etsy to meet in person in the Twin Cities and sell at art/craft fairs like the Uptown VFW fair I did last October...

Illustrations and Logos

Kelly Newcomer is an illustrator and artist specializing in character design. Portfolio of recent commercial illustrations below

Recent illustrations and logos portfolio, updated with animations added 1/15/2013:

 Click on image of desert sky to see it animate on my website:

Above: Just finished the Lynda.com online tutorial for "Create an Animated Star Field" (link to lynda.com tutorial) with Edge Animate with Chris Converse using javascript and jquery to randomly animate the stars.  (Layout and photos provided by Lynda.com tutorial.) 

 

static gif of ad in final state

Powderhorn Art Fair Banner ad 160x600 with frog hopping and button slight animation on over, with clickthrough to art fair site (Ad for 2012 Powderhorn Art Fair featuring frog artwork by Marina Lee) Click image to see flash animation hosted on kellynewcomer.com (blogger won't embed flash for some reason)

http://kellynewcomer.com/flash/PowdArtFair160x600v2.swf 

static gif of wedgie on bike animation final state

Above: Wedge on a bike for our neighborhood newspaper "The Wedge" Click image to see flash animation hosted on kellynewcomer.com (blogger won't embed flash for some reason) http://www.kellynewcomer.com/flash/wedgie%20flash%20600x800.swf

First Universalist Small Groups Logo which I animated as an exercise to learn Flash. Click image to see flash animation hosted on kellynewcomer.com (blogger won't embed flash for some reason) http://www.kellynewcomer.com/flash/Small%20Groups%20Logo%20v1.swf






Above: Peace Machine character from a personal comic series

Above: Yellow Kite Realty designed for Minneapolis businessman Al Olme who came up with the ideas as a rough sketch and just had me create everything in illustrator.

Above: Illustration for CLIPit Cover-Siemens CLC-604. Licensed by Designafairs GmbH, Munich, Germany   Above: Cover Illustration, The Portland Mercury, Portland, OR, Volume 3, #45   CD Illustration and Design, Extra Credit, Salt Lady Records   Illustration for article about a mom whose little boy is playing hockey. Rake Magazine, 2005

 

Above: Illustration for National Lawyer's Guild annual program 2009 created with oil pastel and watercolor transparent layers

Above: Final illustration for National Lawyer's Guild annual program 2009 final

Above: Illustration for National Lawyer's Guild annual program 2010 (this group LOVES raised fists) I love working for lefty groups.

 Above: The Wedge  newspaper illustration for Earth Day article

 

Above: Illustration for 7 foot Outdoor Museum Banners, Roswell Museum and Art Center/City of Roswell

Unity Leadership Programs Logo


 

  Above: Illustration for  Utne Reader, magazine article about radio frequency identification chips

 Above: camera guy logo for Minneapolis photographer, Jeff Newcomer. He chose the guy with glasses, but he doesn't wear glasses, so I took them off.

Above: University of Oregon Bookstore children's section bookmark and also these images were installed as a mural in the kid's reading area.

 Above: Powderhorn Art Fair Program, bicycling art fair artist

 

Above: Proposals for CARAG neighborhood signage

Above: Logo, Association of Universalist Women

SooVAC Pop Up Shop goods

The Soo Visual Arts Center (SooVAC) has opened a boutique for the holiday shopping season. It's at 35th and Nicollet near Pat's Tap (skeeball), Honeycomb Salon and B-Squad Vintage. The new Butter Bakery is one block south. Lots of parking on the street nearby. Nicollet is opened and the construction is over.

3506 Nicollet Avenue, 55408, through Monday December 24, Thursday-Friday from 4-8pm, and Saturday-Sunday from 11-3pm. SooVAC MEMBERS receive 10%!

I just dropped off cards, magnets, pin-back buttons, small sculpture and eight-inch plates with friendly technology themes. A lot of these items have been or still are on my etsy site.

Peace Machine Dream Card

Rocket Santa card

Banner for my booth

I've got a bunch of Rives Johannot (really thick paper with a toothy unsized feel) paper lying around and I used Sumi ink to draw the robots. I based the robots on some magnets I can see from the dining room table. I made some splatters to add a little life to the banner. This banner is 30 inches x 40 inches.

I LOVE Sumi ink.

HandmadeMN Fall Market 10/27/12 10 am - 5pm, 2916 Lyndale, Minneapolis

Handmade ceramic magnets about one to two inches wide on average.

Getting ready for my first art/craft fair. I am planning my table display, making a banner, deciding what to bring. Gotta fire up the printer and create some more art prints. Now where did I put those peace machine pinback buttons...

HandmadeMN Market Artists

HandmadeMN Fall Market
Shop Local. Buy Handmade.
October 27, 10 am - 5 pm
Ballentine VFW @ 2916 Lyndale Ave S, Minneapolis, MN

Come join 45+ local artists and crafters offering handmade jewelry, knitted goods, clothing, baby items, toys, purses, stationery, wallets, and more!

Parking: The VFW has a free lot in back, lots of street parking, and there are convenient garages on Aldrich Ave.

HandmadeMN an etsy team

I love being able to sell my prints and things on etsy... One of the things that's nice about etsy is the way we group up into teams that share information and help each other out. So, I'm in an etsy team called HandmadeMN and they are having a big craft fair, Saturday May 5, in uptown at the VFW. I will go check it out and shop, but I'm not exhibiting in this one. I recommend it to all and buy some

Show Details:

WHAT: HandmadeMN Spring Market

WHEN: May 5, 2012   10am-5pm

COST: Free and Open to the Public

WHERE: James Ballentine VFW, 2916 Lyndale Avenue S, Minneapolis, MN 55408.

          parking lot located at rear entrance to VFW, on Aldrich Avenue.

WEBSITE: http://handmademn.com

SHOP LOCAL.  BUY HANDMADE.

May 5, 2012

HandmadeMN Spring Market

Featuring Distinctive Made-in-Minnesota Items By Local Etsy Artists

Shoppers continue to seek out distinctive handmade merchandise for themselves, family members and friends.   HandmadeMN, a collective of Minnesotan artists, is excited to bring their handmade merchandise to the local market once again on May 5 where shoppers can buy handmade merchandise from over 45 juried artisans.  HandmadeMN artisans also sell their products on Etsy.com, the world’s largest online marketplace of handmade merchandise.  

There will be two floors of locally-made items including jewelry, paper goods, toys, clothing, photography, home décor, soaps, artwork, accessories, and more.

Over 350 Minnesota entrepreneurs are members of the Etsy collective called HandmadeMN, which is hosting its Spring Market at the Uptown VFW in Minneapolis on May 5.

The first 25 attendees will receive gift bags with handmade items from HandmadeMN members; in addition, a drawing will be held for two handmade gift baskets valued at over $150 each.

Happy landscape

Jazz picnic.
Jamie took me to see The Bad Plus, a jazz trio, two nights ago. Great show.
I feel like drawing musicians and people in canoes, cats flying, and spirited mountains.

The mini vans of the future will just run on photon energy, emitting rainbows.

Roswell Mini Van Robot Family

Dark Journey (robot minivan)

It would be fun to design solar powered free flying space-mini-vans for the futuristic families of tomorrow. The painting with the turquoise sky is "Roswell Mini Van Robot Family." The other one is more nighttime, and the van has a kind of faux wood paneling... it's called "Dark Journey." Both are 2011 watercolors and 11 inches high x 14 inches wide. Just listed them on etsy http://kellynewcomer.etsy.com


I would like a smooth-riding mini van with that button that opens the doors for you, but I don't want to cause more and more environmental destruction.

The mini vans of the future will just run on photon energy, emitting rainbows.

Anyway, I'll be happy driving the old Hyundai Elantra for a while longer.

Earth-Like Planet show at Irvine Fine Arts Center

Intro to Watercolor - Week 2

(I taught this intro to watercolor class twice through Minneapolis Community Education at Lake Harriet school on Vincent Ave. But I never finished making blog posts about all our activities... So there's just the first two weeks here on my blog)

This week: Hue/Color Mixing - Texture - Masks/Frisket - Matisse Cut outs forms - Birch Trees

Tonight the first thing we did was we masked off an area with liquid mask/frisket in the shape of a Matisse cut out sea plant. Before dipping our brush in the frisket we rubbed the bristles with a little dab of liquid soap. We also dabbed on frisket with the end of the brush to make dots. (Then we let the liquid mask dry for about ten minutes while we started the next project – color mixing). After the liquid mask was dry, we painted a wash over it, (we added texture to that wash with Qtips - to remove a bit of paint, and toothpicks, to create a scratch like grass or just abstract texture). We let the watercolor wash completely dry, then we peeled the mask away with a ball of squished up masking tape (or a rubber cement pickup eraser) to reveal the white of the paper.

Then we did some color mixing to get comfortable with the idea of "hue" (Hue is pure color from the tube) and color temperature. For example we made orange with lemon yellow and cadmium red, then we made orange with lemon yellow and alizarin crimson - and so on, making colors with our suggested paints. For color temperature, we can say that lemon yellow is cooler than cadmium yellow. We actually made a grid on our paper, wrote the name of the color combination at the top, then made a mixture of that color. We worked on dry paper. See below for a list of the color combinations we used. We also discussed how "sap green" may be phthalo green yellow-shade... This is a great exercise you can start to see how to make purple, how to make a rich black. How cool yellow and warm yellow change your mixtures/ how cool tones can muddy warm tones. Cadmium yellow (warm yellow) mixed with Ultramarine blue (cool blue) make an earthy/muddy green.

Colors we mixed:

Make a grid on paper and in each square, mix these colors. Write the color combination at the top.

Lemon Yellow + Cadmium Red

Lem Ylw + Alizarin Crimson

Cadmium Ylw + Cadmium Red

Cad Ylw + Cad Red

Lem Ylw + Ultramarine Blue

Cad Ylw + U Blue

Lem Ylw + Phthalocyanine Green

Cad Ylw + Phthalo Green

Phthalo Green + Ultramarine Blue

Ultramarine Blue + Cad Red

U. Blue + Aliz Crimson

Dynamic Duo Neutral:

U Blue + Burnt Sienna

More Interesting Black:

Aliz Crimson + Phthalo Green

There was some discussion about watercolor in Western art history, feminism, the more "elevated" role of oil painting, frescoes, and tempera. Watercolor was a popular pursuit for educated American and European ladies with the advent of cake watercolors sets in the mid-1800s. Watercolor was a way for "serious" oil painters to make quick studies and sketches, prior to working on more expensive canvas support. Winslow Homer embraced watercolor, made some nice big "serious" ones, and with his being already famous for his innovative work as an illustrator for Harper's Weekly and he had exhibited some oils in Paris, so he asked an unusually high amount $100 for his early watercolors, (according to my research at the National Museum of Art website) and that was a lot of money in the late 1800s. He was using his name recognition to brand or market his watercolors as high art. Today, watercolors can be considered very important artworks and are seen in contemporary museum settings.

We next used masking tape to make birch trees in snow. Keeping the birch trees masked off, we applied a sky wash with texture for the background (using sponge and paper towel to lift off some of the sky wash) right over the tape. We left the bottom third of our work white for the snow.

We removed the tape and used the interesting neutral: ultramarine blue and burnt sienna to make the warm grey for the dark parts of the bark. We got the tree area wet, made the sides of the tree dark, and kept the middle light. We saw how to use a plastic credit card to scrape the dark paint into the tree, getting texture. We blotted color off with paper towel to lighten the center of the tree. We did a warm yellow/grey wash -kind of stripe - over the tree at the end. We discussed using a thin brush (round #2, or even a rigger which has longer bristles) and quick flicking motions to get the dark branches and twigs, holding the brush lightly at the end to get more flicking action.

Below are a couple images (screen shots) of the birch tree painting idea, and a nice use of masking fluid to show highlights on a boat and water.

Next week, we'll be learning more about paper and sizing, thoroughly immersing and wetting a sheet and taping it down on our boards for wet into wet painting... And also we will do some practice with painterly brush strokes. We'll be in the art room on the first floor next week.

Intro to Watercolor - Week 1

I started teaching Intro to Watercolor at Lake Harriet Community Education, 4912 Vincent Avenue South. Here are my notes and some images I wanted to share with the class from week 1.

--

To review, tonight we talked about value. The lightness or darkness of a color. We made four squares on our paper and practiced flat wash, gradient wash, dry brush, and wet into wet. We made five squares further down on that piece of paper and made the first one pure hue then each next square gradually lighter in value. We did this by dipping our brush into paint for the first square, then once into water for next square, dip it twice for 3^rd square, dip it three times… and so on, each square lighter in value due to less of the original pigment remaining on the brush.

Then we did a painting based on Georgia O'Keefe's abstract sunset using wet into wet for the bottom third - and two colors in the rainbow arc of the sunset. We planned our copy of her painting to leave some white paper. Leaving white of the paper is a very important watercolor technique.

Okeefe image here: http://cache.boston.com/resize/bonzai-fba/Globe_Photo/2009/07/09/1247187476_3472/539w.jpg

We also talked about making a grid of your colors and seeing how they look as gradient washes. For each color from your set of tubes or pans, make a square on a grid on paper to refer to in your studio.

Here is that list of materials...

Materials

Pencil

Kneaded eraser

Masking tape

2 wide mouth water containers (12 oz or so)

Large board for mounting wet paper 16x20 inches

Masking tape

Watercolor paper 140# Strathmore cold press 11x14 (or Arches, Lana Aquarelle, or Fabriano Artistico)

Watercolor brushes #8 round, #2 round, 1 inch flat

White plastic palette with lid

Tube watercolors (Winsor Newton, M. Graham & Co., Utrecht)

Permanent Alizarine Crimson

Cadmium Red or Scarlet Lake or Napthol Red

Ultramarine Blue (or French Ultramarine Blue)

Thalo Green or Winsor Green

Lemon Yellow or Hansa Yellow

Cadmium Yellow Medium

Burnt Sienna

Burnt Umber

why tweet

Connecting With Twitter
Visual artist Krystyna81's story of success as a result of her presence on Twitter. Read Kristina's story and her tips on using this cool (and quick) networking tool on the Etsy Blog. http://www.etsy.com/storque/how-to/etsy-success-connecting-with-twitter-7322/

I'm making this blog entry so I'll remember it, myself! It's her story of how one of her twitter followers got her a contract to do a book cover for an Italian book of poetry.

Garden helper robot

Kelly Newcomer, originally uploaded by collegeofvisualarts.

Illo Minn Munny Auction
Thursday, February 18


Twenty-eight illustrated one of a kind Munny dolls
will be sold in a silent auction during this Thursday's
Illo Minn opening reception. Doors open at 6:00
p.m. and the bidding closes at 7:30 p.m. Auction
proceeds benefit the CVA Scholarship Fund.

Illo Minn: Volume Two is a biennial exhibition. The
2010 exhibition features the work of commercially
active Minnesota illustrators. Each illustrator will
exhibit a printed illustration with original artwork in
addition to their Munny doll.

View Munny Image Gallery on Fickr

01 KN watercolor set up

01 KN watercolor set up, originally uploaded by kellynewcomer.

My dining room table and a 20 minute art making event. I can bring this palette plus a paper towel and water and pretty much paint anywhere. In fact, this is my modus operandi now that I'm a mom. I haven't used acrylics or oils for years. I love watercolor! -- You can also see the mug I ordered from an uploaded file to costco.com photo services.