Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Illustrator of the Week: Jill Barklem

This week we look at mice...those cute, adorable balls of fluff with the big ol' ears and the looong whiskers. Ms. Barklem's world of Brambly Hedge is great! It is full of factual information about the land and environment she grew up with. And the mice are such characters! Her work is very reminicent of the Beatrix Potter illustrations, which I grew up loving. Best of all, the characters are NOT "perfectly drawn" a habit that I need to grow out of and just let the pencil flow, because they will never be perfectly drawn. The little wobbles and quirks make the illustrations that much more interesting. Characters like these are one of my goals for what i'm trying to achieve with the insect illustrations. (Also, characters like Laurel's black and white illustrations, which I spent all Monday drooling over!)

on a different note...time for laundry...sigh

Angry Moon



I don't know why he's angry, and there has never been a more cheerful looking angry face. it was fun to paint, and I enjoyed adding texture to the moon himself. I was very pleased with how the face came out. he looks petulant. and we mustn't forget the shooting star!

For whom the school bell tolls

Back to school for me, and I couldn't be happier. I have discovered that I like interaction and feedback from other students. I definitely need to start holding illustration parties or something at my house to get that interaction when I am out of school once and for all (if that will ever happen...)

The job continues very well, and we are starting phase two...color studies! look at all the pretty colors! I shall post my digital illustration of a moon I sketched out last semester and have been itching to paint for a while. I need to learn to get this type of color and form in my traditional paintings. maybe just do lots of mini-illustrations where I paint loosely...not loosely as in abstracted shapes, but in not trying to achieve perfection....who knows, I might achieve perfection better that way.

Projects for the semester: of course, the workbook, my paid job. Then the illustrations for a friend's story...it has bug in it: fun bugs, and i've had an idea for drawing bugs for a while (I even have some really old sketches I might revisit sometime. and then there's my holiday/birthday poem that I want to illustrate. I was going to do the bug illustration in class and the holiday illustration during my apprenticeship, but I was thinking about it, and I wanted to work on pen and ink in class, which I really want to do for my holiday poem, and I'll use the more colorful acrylic paints for the bug illustration. oh, and onion boy. musn't forget him!

very busy this semester!