Dancer

Playing around with shapes and rhythm!

Wash it away

This is for Neil Gaiman's contest, A Calendar of Tales. This challenge was for November, the prompt was "What would you burn in November", and someone answered "My medical records, if only it would all go away." The ensuing story inspired me to create this, like washing it all away by fire. I hope you like it; it's my first 'real' illustration (meaning, not fanart and not for profit) in nearly two years. How time flies...

DevilPaus!

This kid and his story have been stuck in my head for about a week now, so I had to paint him. He was inspired by a combination of owls, butterflies, the tooth fairy, and Clopin from the Hunchback. The latter two, not directly, but it was in my head somewhere. I haven't painted like this for quite a while, and it was a ton of fun to get back into it. More to come! 

Power of the Pen

It's amazing how much less work I've been producing since getting a job a year ago. It's quite sad actually. But I don't think I always give myself enough credit. I've always gauged my successes in art by how many completely finished, colored illustrations I have. But I still have been drawing quite a lot. I've inked a bunch of things, and I never posted them because I never seem to see the value in them. I found some inked illustrations today and realized that I need to give them more attention.

Sketching and inking has always been my favorite part of the art process for me. That, and seeing a finished, colored illustration. But for some reason, I can never seem to get colors right. There have been very few illustrations where I've been truly happy with the end result. I think it's simply because I love doing lineart so much, that once a piece has been colored, it takes the attention away from the part I have the most enjoyment in. I need to find a balance between line and color, or even better: a marriage between the two.

This is a struggle that I have been facing for years. Any advice anyone wants to give me would be extremely helpful.

But for now, have some inked drawings I found laying around in my Bristol pad!

Ursula, one that I abandoned coloring on

 Snow, from Norovirus

The inks of Midna, from one of my previous posts!

These are all huge, so if anyone wants to take a crack at coloring the lineart, feel free to use it as a test (not as actual profitable work, of course! Don't make money off me plz) Show me the result, maybe it will help me, who knows!?

Link was the hardest one to do so far *o*

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!

Hell Week

My goodness, was this week stressful. But productive! Huge image dump right here...it's what I was working on this week. I would scan my SEQA stuff, but I already handed in half my sketchbook.

I changed my idea like I always do for my backlit watercolor assignment. Here's the old idea:

And the new one!!


This panel for Drawing for SEQA took forever and there's still a crapload of things wrong with it, but I worked really hard on it so I still want to share.
I'm just not cut out for comic books; it's a really good thing I didn't switch my major!

This little enjoyable piece will be for my roomate's birthday when I'm finished with it. It's also used on my business card.

And a bunch of sketches from my old Travelouge in Fall quarter:

Hehehe, the strap finished her knee shape. I found that funny.
I like drawing monsters...way too much for my own good...

This post is dedicated to Chris Gash, btw.

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.

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: