IF: Germs

I immediately have to apologize to a particular person for this post. You know who you are, and why I'm apologizing. I didn't pick the topic... i am so sorry and will try to post many posts to get this past my homepage. :)

That being said...GERMS!!!



One thing kept popping into my head, over and over as I thought of today's topic: the computer game I played for many hours in college: WORMS! I loved that game, and the crazy landscapes and the worms perched on the smallest little tips of things not blown up (yet) and wouldn't it be cool to have a germ perched on a nose/landscape getting ready to attack with a big weapon?

Um...he's icky, I know. But he's silly, so that works for me. Plus, it really is perfect timing with the start of flu season.

Enjoy my spoof!

Teaser...

I have entered the completed Fleeting Turtles as an unpublished piece into the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles annual competition, Illustration West. It's been about 4 years since I last entered this competition. I didn't get accepted then, so I'm hoping I've improved enough to get accepted this year. I don't know whether or not I should be showing this work before the show, so I'm going to keep the finished piece a surprise until I know the results.

I will give you a teaser:

I had a lot of great feedback from friends and family on final tweaks to make my illustration as refined as possible before entering it into the competition. I thank them all for their great input and suggestions!

Character Design: homework #1

For our first homework assignment, we had to create any type of character that we REALLY wanted to draw based upon someone we know. I chose the most expressive person I know--one of our best friends, Philip. (I apologize to Phil for him unknowingly becoming my reference model and my awkward handling of any drawings resulting from his reference)

Eric wanted me to draw him as a raccoon, because of an inside joke from childhood. I tried multiple times, but couldn't get it to look right. So I turned him into a robot instead :) A gangly one, of course!

There is a character turnaround that goes with the sketchbook pages, but I'm supposed to make the legs longer and still scan it... It's late... I'm tired... Off to bed.

SketchCrawl 24: Grand Central Market

It was a beautiful day for the sketchcrawl this past weekend, and there was a great turnout! Almost double the number of people from last time. I told a bunch of my friends from the animation classes i'm taking and about 5 of them showed up. Grand Central Market was an interesting place I've never been to and there were so many things to look at. I was tempted to draw some of the neon signage (actually draw the shapes of the tubing, not just write out what the signs say) but instead I gravitated towards the GIANT gumball machine.

I drew more people this time, which I'm very proud of. I'm particularly fond of the janitor sketch, although I'm not quite sure what ended up in his left hand. It was supposed to be a lunch tray, but it just didn't work.

After sketching for a number of hours we headed over to the Bradbury building across the street. It had beautiful and incredibly intricate architecture and lots of stairs and ornate railings...and it scared me. I chickened out on the architecture and went back and added color to the sketch of one of the sketchcrawlers instead.

I stayed until about 6, although I was really done drawing around 4. I did do some crazy animal doodles during that time: monkeys, sheep, and then an awkward cow based on the Dana Lyons song "Cows with Guns". Darn you Steve and Lisa for introducing me to that song. I can't stop playing it....

Parade of Cats

I've started the next semester of art classes with my Character Design class on Tuesday. We cut out geometric shapes and put them together any way we wanted to create a cat. Then we had to do more organic thumbnail sketches based on our creation. Here is my slew of cats...and a duck.

I have art and taekwondo classes 4 days a week, so I will most likely be doing bulk postings on the weekends. Don't expect anything until this sunday. I have a concert friday, and Sketchcrawl and the Terrible Yellow Eyes gallery show on saturday. This is a very busy week for me!

Illustration Friday: Strong

It's still a work-in-progress, but i'm really having fun with this piece. My only wish is that I had scanned the pencil drawing first, but that's ok. The face matches the pencil drawing fairly closely, but the pants and the shirt are slightly different...I also didn't spend even a third of the time on those that I did on the face. I also used photo reference to help with the expression! It made things MUCH easier, and once I had the drawing done to my liking, I found I really didn't need to look at the reference again for shading, because I shaded in crucial tones, such as the brow shadow, and the puckers in the bottom lip, chin, and cheeks. I've also been reading Peter de Seve's blog, so I'm being inspired by his work.

I will finish this up later and post an update once it's done. But now, to bed!

Illustration Friday: Impatient

One month later and our house is still not back to normal. I still have no scanner/printer hookup, or webcam to call my niece and nephew. But at least our computers are off the dining room table again.

I finally did an illustration for illustration friday. It's been a while! He was inspired by my drawings of eagles from the zoo. I'm not sure if he's an eagle...he's some wacky sort of bird. I colored him with the replacement colored pencils I bought from the art store, about 7 colors in all. I just had them nearby, saw that they made a nice color palette, and proceeded to sharpen all my brand new pencils. :)

23rd Sketchcrawl: Echo Park

I participated in my first sketchcrawl yesterday! It was a lot of fun, but unfortunately I forgot to bring a camera. There happened to be a festival going on in the park this weekend, so there were MANY things to sketch. I didn't draw as many people as I wanted to, but I'd been itching to practice drawing buildings and urban scenes.

There was a group of street cleaners that I wish I had gotten a picture of to sketch later. They all had identical shirts, but different tools and different body types/postures. They would have been fun to capture in the sketchbook.

Sorry for the bad quality of the images. I don't have a scanner hooked up at the moment due to chaos in our house. I had to photograph them as best as I could with the iphone.

Illustration Friday: Worn

After drawing pandas all (last) week for my Traditional Animation Basics 2 class project, I decided to draw....pandas. This little guy sums up how worn out I am at drawing pandas, but I still think he's cool. I had fun coloring him and then adding all the crazy tiny pandas everywhere. For some reason this is making me want to read Zen Shorts. hmmmm......

What else could go wrong?

On Saturday night, I scanned my illustration friday drawing and saved it to my computer before going out to celebrate my friend's birthday. Got home really late and went straight to bed. Woke up Sunday to a swimming pool in my living room that was rapidly encroaching on our computers. One of the attachments to the bathroom sink had broken and was flooding everything. Yay.

Long painful story short, our house is in disarray and we just now got one computer back up and running. Since it isn't mine, I still can't post my illustration friday picture. Hopefully we'll get mine back up and running before the next IF post is up. Beyond that, we're trying to do our best to get back into routine after being really frustrated and bummed out the past two days.

Illustration Friday: Drifting

I don't know what it is about the Illustration Friday topics that makes me want to do the least obvious thing related to that phrase? I guess my brother-in-law is right. I'm just ornery.

This sketch was a result of a confluence of inspiration (oooo! big words!) First, I spent the last portion of my workday on friday researching urban youth imagery (aka, graffiti) for my current book cover project. The bright colors that street artists use are incredible and inspiring. Second, I was catching up on my illustration blogs and I started reading Irene Gallo's posts about the illustration masters class (which I hope to attend one day). Looking at the assignments offered during that workshop, I was immediately drawin to "steampunk wizard of oz" it sounded like fun. Third, I got slightly confused between what steampunk is, and what my husband likes: cyberpunk. At least I got the goggles in there!

Thus, the urban steamcyberpunk drifters.

Fleeting Turtles: stage 1

I'm working on a finished illustration of the Fleeting turtles post I did for illustration friday back in April. This picture is about 1.5-2 hours into working on it, although I didn't include the final line art in my count. I'll post more pictures as it gets further along, but I don't get to work on this as much as I would like to because of my art classes.

I've gotten a lot looser and bolder in my work since I started working in colored pencil a few years back. For an illustration of topiaries I did a long time ago, I meticulously rendered each tiny leaf ON the trees. I ran out of time and I had to loosely lay in a background, and I remember getting more compliments on my background leaves then any of the meticulously rendered leaves. Go figure.

I'm also using this nifty invention for artists called a grayscale chart! It tells you how dark (or not) your colors are, so you can get the proper values in your work. I've had this chart for years tucked away in a drawer and I came across it again recently. Since I've long had the trouble of working too light, I'm going to try ACTUALLY using this chart for once to give my illustrations more depth and presence. So far, I've only hit a 4 in my tones--10 being white, 1 being black--so I still have further to go to push the darks.

Illustration Friday: Unfold

"Little Joshua got more then he bargained for when his paper airplane began to unfold..."

I haven't posted an Illustration Friday drawing in a while, so it feels good to get back into it.

I'm not quite sure just WHAT little Joshua's airplane turned into...a paper viking robot duck? No matter what, he's kinda cute and silly...pretty much what you'd expect from me. He was fun to draw, and the airplanes were too. Except for the one at top center that didn't work as well as I hoped. I also couldn't even begin to write the technical manual for this origami robot...

Zoo...week 1

I am taking a class on animal drawing at the LA Zoo (through the animation guild) and I had a pretty successful first week. The teacher wanted us to loosen up our work and try drawing without looking at the paper, use continuous linework, or draw with our off hand.

My most successful drawings of the day were partially blind...i'd occasionally look down to see if I was more-or-less on track. what I liked about them was the fact that I got in so much more detail then when I tried to use the construction approach to building the animals (think boxes and spheres to create the volume).

I also used my brush-pen a bit and enjoyed working with that too.

My husband is awesome!

Yay! He got my site running again. Huzzah for the husband!

Technical Difficulties

Most likely, you won't be reading this until after the problem has been solved. There have been technical difficulties on my end...namely, my website is down. It is down for the very silly reason that the domain name registry was not renewed on time. Oops. We are working on solving the problem and hopefully we'll be up and running within a day or so.

Regardless, it sucks. (especially since I haven't posted anything since May 17th!)

Dragon Blossom

This is my newest piece, Dragon Blossoms, created for our very very good friends Jenny and Philip and their son Gavin. I've been promising them a piece of art for years now, and I finally made good on my promise. We gave it to them today, and they loved it and I got an "ooohh" and a giggle from 2-year-old Gavin. Obviously, it was a hit all around!

The blue pattern/color on her kimono matches a plate I got for them years ago, and this piece is a nod to my first oil painting of a little girl in a kimono holding a giant umbrella while tea rains down and turns into flowers. Philip always liked that piece and wanted it or something similar. I tried a couple of different compositions, but wasn't happy with any of them, and once I drew this little girl, I knew I had the perfect drawing for them.

If only it had a ladybug or frog....well, Jenny, maybe next time!

Illustration Friday: Contagious

Achoo!

I couldn't pass up using this piece I did last year as this weeks Illustration Friday. It gave me a very good reason to finally get it scanned and in my digital gallery.

I'm very happy with the irradiated tones of greens and yellows in the piece. I had a lot of fun working on this one. This was the result of a month+ of a continuous cold. I used my artwork to vent my frustrations, and I think it turned out rather well.

This is NOT the promised piece that I mentioned in a previous post, just a great reason to post more of my finished artwork.

Still to come...

I posted some of my zoo sketches, but then I felt that the image sizes were too big, so I took them down and will repost tomorrow at a better size. I might also just pull out my favorite drawings from the bunch since there are about 10 pages of sketches, 5-6 animals per page.

Monkeys and Giraffes...oh my!

I've been killing three birds with one stone with these animal drawings: 1. practice drawing animals, 2. create some fun (and simple) animals for my friend's daughter's room, 3. do some character studies for my Traditional Animation Basics 2 class. In the TAB2 class, we're going to be using the 12 weeks to create a 30-second animated PSA! How cool is that?

Since I never animated before the TAB1 class, I'm kind of nervous, but I'm going to jump right in and give it a go. If nothing else, I feel that I'm really good at brainstorming, researching and coming up with ideas/unique perspectives.

All the realistic-looking sketches are from photos off the internet, but the cartoon-y ones are my original creations. Besides for the 3 crazy giraffes, my favorite one is the mom and baby giraffe. Incredible original photo here. I may have played up the size of the baby's ears a bit much, but they make him just too cute!