Overlook

This was a ton of fun! I did a watercolor overlay on top of my digital painting to give it some extra tone and texture. I hope you enjoy.

Hide and Seek

Yeah, another one! This tree was painted in acrylic. Also, it took FOREVER to finish....but here it is!

The Garden

Hello all-

Finished this over the weekend. I used cut paper for the leaves in the foreground; they took foreverrrr and you can hardly tell, but they're there! They looked so cool on my scanner though :3


Anyone wanna join my team for this animation (refer to two posts previous to see what I'm talking about)?

Creature Infestation

This was one of the difficult pictures I've colored...ever. It's still prolly not done.

Sidenote: Okay, so the .jpg compression apprently reduces watercolor texture to formless mush...I apologize for this..

The Garden

Hey all,

Upon seeing the lecture by children's book illustrator, Peter Brown, I became inspired by the visuals that he showed of Sleeping Beauty, and his own book, The Curious Garden, to create my own animation about a girl in a garden with plants that keep a strange, metronome-like rhythm. She is trying to mix them together to create the correct kind of tune, but keeps messing the potion up. In a bout of frustration, she tosses a bunch of plants together that create a cacophony, and evolves this black-scaled, monitor-like creature that destroys her garden and her hard work. Not sure about the ending yet, but I want to make it something surprising or ironic. Here's the first concept illustration for it:

Hope you enjoy! Feedback on the idea (or the drawing) would be much appreciated!!

What's that you got there?

Photoshop + Acrylic

Postpost

Hello! Got some more stuff to show.

First, the second 'portrait' from the same project as the previous post:
This was an organization called Women on Waves. They sail around to different countries and educate women on proper healthcare, and provide them with proper medicine and treatment for themselves. They also provide them with abortion pills to prevent unsafe abortion practices that are commonly utilized illegally.

I drew this today! I almost abandoned my monster story, but this image popped into my head and I just had to draw it:

And I'm almost done coloring this one!


More to come soon!

Gaza

For Illustration for Publications:


Her name is Madeleine Koulab. She is 16 years old and was in school when her dad suddenly got sick with palsy and could no longer fish. She took over his job for the family and although she wants to go to school and college, she must handle her responsibility and do the right thing.

Hope you like it!

Kitty!

I finished this for the Urban Legends show at the Savannah Mall. Hopefully I get in! The legend is that cats sneak into a baby's crib and steals their breath to suffocate them.

Creature Infestation!

Hello all,

For my independent study this quarter, I wanted to a 'children's book' about a girl who discovers a huge group of mythical creatures. I say 'children's' because it's a bit dark; there are a group of children who believe a folklore that if you wear one of the creature's heads, you gain special abilities/immortality, so the children run around trying to hunt these creatures down. Totally not a children's book, but I want it to have the feel of one. I'm not sure how I'm going to execute the story in terms of finishing, but I do know that it is a ton of fun to draw, and I'm going to enjoy at least that much. :D

The creatures are based off the ones I designed for the paper monster project , I enjoyed drawing them so much I wanted to do this story featuring the crazy cast. Here's some concept sketches for you!~

Under Your Skin

Under Your Skin (2010)

Moleskine Dump!

Hello all! Just showing all the sketches from my huge watercolor Moleskine!!



On left: Janelle, Me, Katie, and Felicity. On the right: My characters Nashi, Ringo, Aaron, Fresa, and Prince Rana, the main cast of one of my favorite stories of all time:



Cat slug!

This girl is from the Demon Story as well:

Illustration for Publication

Hahaha I love this class, everytime we have a project, the sketches are always due the same day! Pretty much, how it works, is that a real client comes to us and asks the students to send sketches for a certain project they need (a spot for a magazine, a banner for a website...) and we each send a sketch of our idea and the client picks one of us. When they do, they must take it to final and then will subsequently be published! It's a very competitive class, and it makes it very hard not to go overboard on illustrating. They usually want more simple, straightforward ideas. Here are two of the three sketches I've done for the class so far:

This one is for Main Street Family, a website banner. Please ignore my bad hand-written type.

This one was for a magazine article about 'real' country music.

Maybe I shouldn't post these until I know whether or not I got the project... oh well. I'll take em down if need be.

All things quite wonderful

The Illustration grad students just had a gallery opening yesterday (called the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) and it was just the most fantastic day. The work was beautiful, everyone was there, and I got to meet some very awesome new friends. I was pleased with the way my own piece came out, especially because I used to be terrified of watercolor, and somehow with a little patience I was able to make it bend to my will...

I was partly inspired by the softness of the works of Joy Ang and James Jean. One day I aspire to that kind of greatness. One day...

This isn't the finished version of the piece. I was going to mix it with digital, but thankfully decided against it.

"Under Your Skin" (2010)

Read the image any way you want (I personally read it from top to bottom). Soon I'm going to post the evolution of this piece, it went through so many stages, it's ridiculous. I should do my thesis on process in Illustration and how not to FAIL at it.

Even though this wasn't fail in my book. For which I am glad.

In other news, I got all my sketches back from my Drawing for SEQA class in Spring finally, so those will also be posted very soon once I bring them to the large format scanner! So keep a lookout for those!

Summer Sketching part 3

I just found my huge watercolor moleskine, and while I didn't actually paint anything yet (I know, shame on me) I did sketch some stuff. Here we go!

I was surprised to find this sketch already in here.


It was pretty hard trying not to get caught by these people.



I was listening to the Decemberists, and I really love their storytelling in their music. I fell in love with the song about the Shankill Butchers, and also When the War Came, both off the album 'The Crane Wife'. I may do a piece about the Crane Wife itself, really interesting folk tale. I did a little Mariner's Revenge sketch too, great song by them.


This guy is from an upcoming story about a demon youth who gets trapped on earth due to his older brother (pictured above) stripping him of his ability to travel back and forth between dimensions. I've been trying to figure out a look to him that's almost ethereal. I'm not quite there yet....

That's all for now!!

Summmmmmer sketching part 2

While cleaning my room this morning, I came across my concept book from Concept Design in Sequential Art. The thing is absolutely filled with tons of world, character, and creature sketches, and it's just waay too much to post here. I'm thinking about making a whole separate blog strictly for concept design for my 8 stories that I have swirling around in my head. I think it would be a good place to keep track of everything and get some feedback on my design and development.

Anywho, here's part two of the summer sketch dump:

Summer Sketching

Hello all! One night I went to bed at 11, woke up at 2AM and decided to stay up and draw myself insane until 5:30 AM. Here are some of the results of that night.

My little pear fairy character, Nashi Pear is always tons of fun to draw. A little girl tried to convince me that she needs a nose and didn't like my explanation that I created her without a nose. She tried to ask her mom if fairies have noses (of course she said yes), and then I proceeded to ask her if Patrick (from Spongebob) had a nose. That pretty much ended it there. Yay for winning arguments against five-year-olds!



The two previous sketches are because of Drew Soman and we'll leave it at that.

Jelly Girl

I also forgot to post the completed jelly girl.

Creature Stampede

I just scanned a ton of sketches I've done over the summer, but I'm not gonna overwhelm this post with everything. Instead, I'm posting sketches from Spring quarter, sketches that eventually lead up to this creature. I had a TON of fun with these little monsters and their little personalities, and I realized creature design was something I was all about. I always have been drawing animals and dinosaurs when I was little; I guess it just makes sense.




I'm wondering if I can make something out of this. I might do a little book series of these guys getting stuck with a bunch of children somewhere.