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!!

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!

Sidewalk Arts!!

Hoo boy,

If today was a turkey, it would be stuffed with all manner of excitement and the most delicious foods one would ever imagine. I got to beat out another girl in a serious match of rock-paper-scissors to spend the whole day with Ed Murrieta, senior creative director of Cartoon Network!!! It was fantastic. He's so fun and down-to-earth, and an all-around nice guy. I also got to meet his wonderful family as well (his grandson is the cutest thing ever). We walked around for judging of the works of Sidewalk Arts, many beautiful entries there, and it looked like so much fun. I'm definitely taking part in it next year if the opportunity doesn't arise for me to volunteer with another awesome guest judge (or maybe it'll be Ed again!). He told me to go with the fun people anyway, mayhaps I'll do just that.

Ooh, I also got him to draw in my sketchbook, but I should prolly make sure he's okay with me posting it before I do....I'll just upload a low-res scan of it for now.

I also drew a bit in my brand-new sketchbook yesterday.

And this painting is one in progress that I should be working on now, and that I'll be working on probably all the rest of this weekend.


Ciao!!

Illustrator's talk

So, I just came back from the panel discussion with illustrators Christoph Niemann, Yuko Shimizu , Anita Kunz, and Chris Sickels, and it was AWESOME!! Ughh their work is so amazing, and it makes me feel discouraged and encouraged all at one time. They all made it clear that their ideas aren't immediately awesome and don't come out of thin air, but still...the ideas that do occur are just so amazing and so clever...Christoph Niemann is insane. All of them are incredibly inspirational and tonight made me remember why exactly I'm paying so much money to attend this school: I get to have these fantastic experiences. Well you know...and the education and all.

I got Christoph and Yuko's autograph!

I also did a bunch of sketches during the talk as well...because no illustrator can come to SCAD and talk without risk of being (badly) portrayed in some unknown sketchbook:
It was really interesting to see what their hands were doing (my favorite is Niemann in the middle):


Playing around with a more whimsical style-

And whimsy in a different sense-


...Today was a good day.