Illustration Friday: Focused

Schubert was so focused on what he saw he forgot to chew his cud.

I was researching sheep at work on Friday, and I really liked how funny their faces looked, thus I drew a sheep. I guess I'm back in the swing of things with Illustration Friday, because This concept came quickly and I drew it straight onto the bristol board with minimal corrections.

I also found my water pen again, instead of the gigantic chinese watercolor brush, so I'm much happier. I can add little details to my heart's content. I thought about breaking out the colored pencils to refine a few areas, but I was happy that I kept this loose (for me) so I left it alone.

Illustration Friday: Clumsy & Marvin the Marvelous duo

Marvin the Marvelous donned his pointy hat, secured his wand, opened the door, stepped out, fell on his nose.

This Marvin piece seemed perfect for this week's IF topic: Clumsy. For those who don't know, this is a project that I'm working on with my husband. He gives me a sentence each week and I have to illustrate it with my wizardly character, Marvin. I'm planning on doing one a week in between working on my first children's book project.

Marvin's character is a work in progress, and I'm using him to explore getting more movement and expression in my work, as well as more detail. I've always loved those wonderfully complex characters with elaborate outfits and gadgets and stuff everywhere.

I'm not quite sure what's up with the perspective on the background...it's wonky, and it is what happens when I freehand a background in ink after developing the character. I also couldn't decide which angle I wanted to draw Marvin at--the anticipation or the fall--so you get both! His arm also got slightly disjointed when I redrew the image on bristol using my light box. The bristol board is thick enough that with a light box I get a general idea where the line is, but it's not extremely precise. I ended up just redrawing the hands rather than tracing them.

Next time: make the color looser, and ink AFTER color.

Marvin the Marvelous colored

Marvin has been colored!

I may end up tweaking the colors throughout the course of this project...I am still putting a bit too much detail in the work. He's supposed to be colored loosely. I colored this one at the same as the Marvin piece for this week. I need to try my third Marvin piece drawn loosely with the pen instead of tracing it off the sketch.

Meet Marvin

Meet Marvin. He's MARVELOUS!

He's also my new bloggy project! I've been wanting something fun that I could post on my blog that will also teach me to dedicate shorter blocks of time to finished work, ie, work quicker and looser. He is also my work-around so I have stuff to post while working on my children's book. Like Illustration Friday, I have to do one a week, from sketch to quick finished color. Each of his adventures will be based upon a sentence or scenario that my husband comes up with. The above post is NOT this weekend's, it is just getting a feel for the character. We'll see how color pans out, and he may change slightly in appearance as my characterization develops.

I'll be adding color later, but I'm off to bed now since I work tomorrow. more to come.

Illustration Friday: Wilderness

And he looked in horror at the 'wilderness' before him...

I don't know why I had such trouble with the IF topic this week. It's pretty open-ended, providing limitless possibilities. Yet I was. I tried something with some tropical plant fronds, but it felt too much like someone else's work I saw earlier in the day. I guess the problem was that all my thoughts are on my personal project. I still need to remember to draw other things too.

Once I went back to the Re-cycler Squirrel post from 2 weeks ago, I decided to delve more into his story. What made him the way he is? Why does he travel around re-purposing trash? I also really wanted to do a more dynamic pose then 'just standing there', so it started with him perched on the edge of the cliff, then I needed to give him something to be staring at. Obviously, since he's a nekkid squirrel, this is before he acquired all his accoutrement.

Invisible work

I've been working hard on what I hope will be my first children's book. As such, I don't feel it is appropriate to show online until I get this published (hopefully!). Nor will I be mentioning anything about the story. What I do want to talk about is my approach and initial thoughts on the project.

First, this project is new and shiny, thus it is in the 'fun' stage. I have a lot of enthusiasm about the project currently and I hope to maintain a degree of enthusiasm through the end of the project. I think it helps that this project is MY project for the first time, and it is exactly what I want it to be.

The storyline I'm currently working on is one of a few concepts that have always been tagging along in the back of my mind throughout school and the past couple of years. I have sketches spattered throughout many of my sketchbooks that explore ideas and possible directions, some of them more concrete then others. I am happy to say that I feel my drawing skills have improved since those initial sketches because even though I slow down and slack off, I've never stopped.

One of the key approaches I'm taking in this book is to tackle my greatest fears and weakest points in drawing. The images will be full of hands and feet, complex expressions, and--the greatest horror of them all--perspective! I want this project to be a challenge that makes me push my skills as much as I can so I can say that the result of my first book was to make me a better artist. So far I've filled up 6 pages with preliminary concept sketches, and I have multiple folders of image references ready for my use. The more I draw, the more I'm eager to come back the next evening and draw instead of watching tv or reading books. I want to see how my own story unfolds.

There is only one negative to note currently with my project: I've gone to bed with so many ideas in my head that I've lost sleep. I even woke up in the middle of the night the other day and ended up drawing for an hour.

Illustration Friday: Confined

Over the years his expression became confined to one of loathing, disdain, & disgust.

I tried something new with this sketch. After I drew it, I taped a piece of tracing paper over the sketch and inked the tracing paper. I think the results are decent, but I could do better. The heavy outlines are too heavy for the size of the sketch. Some of the more delicate linework from the sketch got obliterated. At first I was laying in the hatching very slowly and that made a heavier line, but once I started working quickly, the hatching looked much nicer. I'm not going to go back now, but I should have hatched more on the left side of the face to push it back more. It competes too much with the nose.

Daily Sketch 2: Flickr Quickdraw

I haven't done any quick sketches in a while, and it shows...the really bad ones are the first couple, but I started to get warmed up and got a bit better. In theory, these are minute long sketches, but I think I spent up to 5 minutes on some of them. I think next time I'm going to try this with my favorite ink pens, which I find I really love using when i'm in life drawing. The permanency of it tends to make me loosen up and surprisingly draw more accurately. Go figure. My favorite of the night is the guy's nose.

All these were pulled from Flickr's interesting photos from the last 7 days :) Some of these photos are absolutely gorgeous.

Links to original photos in no specific order:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mandi615/4243364480/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/41827227@N03/4259448092/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/itzick/4251519364/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joel_r/4241774044/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexissmith/4246149852/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/skr1993/4256605473/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dreamless-qtr/4256064382/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/iamlowercasepeople/4249476612/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/23934051@N02/4243540553/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomitapio/4246542168/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/krakote/4245270108/

Daily Sketch 1: Monkeys

First of all, my IF: Renewal post (previous post) got 12 posts! WOOHOO! that's already 50% more posts then my best IF post last year. I think that's a perfect way to start the year.

Next, posts were nil the past two days because my evenings became filled: saying farewell to a coworker one evening, and taking my visiting aunt and uncle to Griffith Park Observatory.

Today's sketch is monkeys, because i'm trying to fulfill a promise to my co-worker that I'd do drawings for her child's room.

Illustration Friday: Renewal

Re-cycler Squirrel

I had fun with my little squirrel. The thumbnail at the bottom of the page is the initial sketch. There are elements from the initial that I like better, including working in the recycling symbols. If I ever do this as a finished piece, I think i'll try to work it with those arrows as the framing device. Mostly, I love his ears and the bottle cap.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to everyone!

My first post of 2010 is both good and slightly unfortunate. Good because you get a finished artwork post; slightly unfortunate because this is the fleeting turtles illustration that I entered in the SILA Illustration West competition...it didn't get chosen. Oh well...I plan on doing better next year and hopefully enter multiple pieces. I think that will definitely help me increase my chances of getting a piece of work into the competition. I still may enter it into the Communication Arts illustration competition, but i'm not 100% sure i'm going to submit...the deadline is in just a few days.

I feel that I've improved 10-fold over the first SILA submission I entered in a few years back and I'm hopeful that my future entries will show as much or more improvement from the current piece. It probably also didn't help that I was entering into the unpublished category, which is the category with the most entries and the largest range of styles. I can't help thinking that I really need to get some artwork published, even if it is for a small publication.

I got a really awesome gift from one of my friends this year: Do it Later! A 2010 Planner (or Non-Planner) for the Creative Procrastinator. I'm excited to see if I can fill it up or use it to motivate me and keep me going strong with all my plans for the year...including of course keeping everyone entertained by my sketches/doodles/artwork :) It's going to sit right on my desk and glare at me whenever I'm sitting there, asking me why I'm writing on my blog rather than working on art... hmmm... i should go.

Without further ado, the art:

Happy Holly Days!

The old year is ending and this will be the first year I've actually created a holiday-oriented illustration! yay!

This has been a busy year with work as usual but also with all my new classes. In addition to a half year of taekwondo twice a week, I've taken many classes at The Animation Guild:

Traditional Animation Basics 1 & 2

Life drawing (twice)

Animal Drawing at the LA Zoo

Character design

I started the year strong with my sketchbook, and although it dwindled off as the year progressed, I hope to have renewed drive in the coming months. I'm planning on posting daily sketches again as well as working on my first children's book (which won't be posted)

2009 blog recap:

82 posts

115 comments! woohoo!

40 daily sketch posts

16 Illustration Friday posts

Posts with most comments: Illustration Friday Flying and IF Germs at 8 comments each; IF Germs also generated the most visits in 1 day: 54

Goals for 2010 blog:

1. Post at least 116 posts: one for each comment in 2009 plus one (for effort!)

2. Post more than 41 daily sketches

3. Post more than 16 illustration friday posts.

To everyone who has commented this year: YOU ROCK! thank you for all your feedback and I hope to grow my blog more in 2010.

Have a happy holiday season with family and friends!

Comment Moderation

Unfortunately, I've started getting spam posts on my comments, rather than actual comments about how good or bad my work is. To resolve this issue, I've had to restrict who can post comments to my site. Now only people registered with Blogger/OpenID can post, rather than any random visitor. That may result in a reduction of comments on my site, but it is really frustrating to see that you received a comment, and you get excited then you read a random piece of crap that has absolutely nothing to do with your art.

Sorry to those actual posters who want to give feedback or support but don't feel they should have to sign in/register. I wish I could leave it open to all.

Monster sketch

Found this website that records your sketches as you work: Odosketch!



The limited palette makes it all the more fun because it unifies all the various styles of sketches that appear on the website.

Will have to play around with this more when i'm not on my lunch break.

November is project-finishing month

It's been a busy two weeks, particularly Halloween weekend. I flew out to Tampa to participate in my friends' halloween/masquerade/1920's wedding. Complete with a horror movie cake. :) Fun, but incredibly hectic. The two days after I got back, I slept about 11 hours each day.

My goal for November is the completion of projects:

1. Grandfather's Memoirs - editing is coming along. about 2/3 through editing by hand (made good use of my plane flight last weekend), but I still need to enter all those edits into the digital document...and create the family tree/tables...and finalize the cover...

2. Panda animation - from my animation class last semester. I finished the backgrounds I was working on, but I have yet to make the final tweaks to my line art for the panda.

3. Dog spinning rough animation - from my character design class this semester.

4. Tentative project that I shouldn't be working on, but I couldn't help myself...if anything comes of this project, I will post more about it when I am able.

5. Possible logo design...

6. Illustration friday...since I haven't done one in a while.

As you can see, lots on my plate AND we're heading into the busy season at work.

I also want to scan some of my life drawing from the two semesters I took this year. I went through it and deemed less than a fourth of the pencil scrawls as acceptable and recognizable as a human, but it's a start.

Posting might be scant, since the major project this month is not art related in the least. But I'll try my best to start filling up my sketchbook again and posting images.

Plans...

So I'm in between art projects at the moment, but it's going to be a bit before I work on any long-term projects. I still haven't finished my Grandfather's project and I'd really like to get that finished up in time for Christmas. So I will be dedicating most of my limited free time to that for the foreseeable future.

I'll still be working on Illustration Friday drawings in my sketchbook, and hopefully something Wild Things inspired. If you're creating fan music, it's called filk; if you creating fan stories, it's fanfic; so what is fan art? fart? um...no. Whatever it's called, I want to create one to get posted on Terrible Yellow Eyes.

The good news is that I have finished another sketchbook! woohoo! This one took a bit longer then the last, and technically has a few sparse pages that I probably could fill with sketches and ideas. Still, I think I'll retire this one and start fresh this Friday with a new book. I think it will be a standard journal type book, rather than the landscape one this time. I'd like to work with a larger sketchbook, but the 6x9ish size fits so nicely in my purse.

Illustration Friday: Flying

Between reading about Koldo Barroso's flying fish, finally getting to read the first volume of Flight (one of the stories has a flying whale), and having a couple other whale and fish inspirations popping up on my blog reader recently, I've been motivated to draw my own variation. Originally, I wanted to take another stab at Steampunk a la Greg Manchess' rework of the Tor.com logo for steampunk month.

Alas, I got as far as a basic hot-air balloon...then the whale-beta fish appeared (if the fish are flying in air, they need pretty, flowing fins and all) then the koi, the angelfish (sort of) and the salmon (I think). Finally, I knew there had to be tiny people in the hot air balloon to give a sense of scale. And if you were in a hot air balloon looking at giant flying fish creatures, wouldn't you want to reach out and try to touch one?

If I ever do a finished piece of this, I think I need to fix the background color so it is the lightest around the people in the balloon so the eye focuses on them. I may color this one more, but I have a couple projects around the house I need to work on...and some homework to do.

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.