A Tribute from Mollie Bozarth (Class of 2010)

Reposted with permission from the blog of Mollie Bozarth (Class of 2010).

Two years ago I had the opportunity to travel to California for the first time with a group from my master’s program.  I spent a week in San Francisco, walking over the city hills, wandering down by the Bay and Wharf, soaking in so many sights, sounds, cultures.  Our master’s homework was to create an illustration based off of our trip.  So, I sifted back through my favorite impressions of the week, and three things stood out:  pigeons, the Powell St. cable car, and a group of street dancers we’d seen one day.  This illustration was a fun challenge in pulling together 5 or 6 photos from the trip and making them feel like one cohesive scene.  I cut and pasted all of my images together in Photoshop, printing out the composition to use as my final reference.  It was a big step in the right direction of where I wanted to take my watercolor paintings (as opposed to the more stiff and over-worked look of my previous illustrations).

I have since graduated from that program with an MFA in Illustration.  However, some of my friends currently in the program will be headed to San Fran in a few days for the same trip I took two years ago.  So, this blog post is a tribute to them.  I hope they’ll enjoy the city as much as I did!