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!~

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.

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.

Oops

...I haven't updated for a while. Shame on me! Well because of my lack of updating I have a great wealth of art done over the past 3 weeks, so it's a fun time for everyone.

On an awesome note, I had an interview with the amazingly talented and famous illustrator Jon Foster!! Go check out his amazing work! It was an honor and a privilege to be able to speak with such an insightful and down-to-earth person, and he gave a lot of useful advice about entering the field of illustration and make sure doing what you love is truly what you love to do. I would post it, but I don't know if I am allowed to.

In other news, here are like the half-million (yeah right) projects I finished over these weeks:

1. The In Character Magazine cover

This didn't turn out as well as could be with all the hype that was attached to it. My professor seemed to like it a lot, which is good, but as with everything, I could have done better. Playing with the colors was fun. It was better as a stand-alone without the text added, but you know:

And also, the spot illos:


2. Backlit Watercolor


This one should have turned out so much better than it did. That is all.

3. Gouache Secrets

We had to illustrate either secrets or Noah's Ark in gouache, and of course me being me, I choose the secrets. Here's the comp:





And the final:

I liked this one much better than the watercolor, but I still got the same kinds of marks on it as with the previous, and no one said anything about it, like at all, during critique, which was really frustrating because I would, you know, like to improve. I was happy I was able to use the color yellow in a much more desirable way than I imagine the color yellow would be used by me. It was a lot of fun to paint, especially the fabric!

4. Character Design for Sequential Art

This was enjoyable, that is all. She is a female inventor in the Victorian Era, who works as a seamstress by day and sneaks off to try to uphold her father's legacy by inventing things people couldn't even imagine back in those times. She has to fight hard to hide this from her mother and successfully create something without blowing it up (which explains her partial bustle). She sewed those pants herself.



I'll upload the rest when I get to a massive scanner!

Faillustration

Yeah, so my attempts at being clever are laughable at best (and not in the way I would like them to be). In Illustration Markets, we have to do an Editorial Illo for In Character magazine, and of course, I pick the generosity issue, who's cover I cannot top:

It's unfairly perfect. Like, that's EXACTLY what generosity is! What am I supposed to come up with now? So here's my fail cover (partially scanned because I don't have a large format scanner and I'm too lazy to piece together a mere comp/sketch):

I was kinda feeling okay about it.....

Okay so I thought it was a good cover that got to the point, but my senses are obviously skewed when I saw that my professor really wasn't feeling it, and I understood why: It just gives too much information. It's not at all clever (much like me), and so I need to figure out another angle. He did like the hands though, he wants me to keep them.

This one, however, he loved and wants me to keep.

It's about tithing (giving 10 percent of your income to the church) . There was a passage that regarded it as a spiritual investment that ensured money, health, or well-being.

I need to figure out how to illustrate generosity.

Cocoa START!!

Hello, just feeling around the fresh new blog space, so I feel I should start by posting some new artwork and sketches! The old, finished stuff is still on my
Deviantart, so feel free to check it out!

These are some sketches for Illustration Techniques II (backlighting done in watercolor assignment) that I was working on:

Hilariously enough, I just did a watercolor in Techniques I that had backlighting:

These are for the previous assignment, it had to be a song lyric Illustration (I chose Monster by Meg & Dia because I just wanted to draw a monster):

The finished scratchboard piece: