Sketchbook

Another from my big sketchbook. Just quick drawings of my sister, young and present. I'm actually not sure if the child face is hers or if it's mine, being twins it's hard to tell our baby pictures apart sometimes...

Sketchbook

Random page from my larger sketchbook. Cus everyone loves tigers, right? Right?

Trying to get more practice with drawing animals, but especially noticing just how their bodies move and look when they're still, laying down, etc. Tigers are very long in the torso, and heavily built up front and in back, with very long tails to help with balance(Often the tail is the same length as their whole body!)

Character Sheet - Sita and Fin

From another assignment in my digital illustration, we had to design and create a character, and then put them onto a sheet. So, welcome to Sita and her canid, Fin. A Gypsy/Romani from Romania, she's gone through lots of changes from the start(The ink drawing on the far left is the very first sketch, and the far right is the more final one.)

She and Fin are both going through more changes as I draw them more and figure out the backstory for them. New costumes, possibly new name to go with her nationality, Fin will be changing species, etc. The rest of her development is purely for my own enjoyment. Gypsy characters always appeal to me, from the movement, the jewelry, costumes, everything about them.

Spot Illustrations/Icons - Avians

For an assignment in my digital class earlier this semester, we had to learn the uses of Adobe Illustrator and create three icons, of a similar subject and that related to each other. Surprise! Birds.

From left to right, there's an Eastern Rosella, a Scarlet Macaw, and the right is a Rainbow Lorikeet.

Book Cover - Biting the Sun

A book cover assignment in my digital class, I chose the book "Biting the Sun" by Tanith Lee(Written in '76-77, I highly recommend it!) It's a book about a futuristic utopia where pleasure, joy, physical and drug related ecstasies and thinking no complicated in depth thought it the expected behavior. Everything is provided for by authoritative robot personel. One person though, unnamed throughout the book, becomes disenchanted with this. She starts looking for more of a meaning to life, some purpose to make herself feel worth living, and by this she stands out and is eventually exiled.

I've read it so many times, and it is so unique and wonderful and different that I will read it many more.

This is actually the second go in terms of the cover. Below was the first one, with some of the base colors, before I decided to re-do it:

The proportions were off, angle was awkward, lots of things were just not right about it. The remake isn't perfect either, but I like it a little bit more at least.

Speed Painting

More quick painting studies in photoshop, again jacked from Google images so I take no claim on the original photos :)

Speed Painting

I wanted to paint something super fast in photoshop, so I yoinked a photo off of google for a quick painting. Maybe 30min for the whole thing? It's a start, at least.

"Birds of a Feather" - Sketches

Here is some of the process work for the "Birds of a Feather" series. It went through a number of changes throughout the months I worked on it, as you can see from the process for the "Firebird," the first one I did.

 

The idea from the start was to portray the folk lore creature, say the Inuit raven, interacting in some way with a figure dressed in the outfits of the folklore's culture. So with the initial firebird sketches, I also researched a little bit of the Slavic/Russian traditional dress. There were additional creatures I had originally planned on putting into the series, like the Inuit Raven and the Native American Thunder Bird. My concepts at that point didn't get positive feedback from the Antwerp teachers, so I changed my approach to be more of a book/encyclopedia sort of feel, as if they'd be pages from a dictionary on mythical creatures.

My ideas changed again when the teachers still weren't really feeling the encyclopedia concept, so I tried for a more storybook feel to it. Still wasn't really met with agreement. 

From there I came to my more final idea, straight black and white pieces in pen and ink washes(These still didn't meet with approval from the instructors, but I forged on anyways as the deadline was coming closer now). I still tried to stick to the "Fact or Fiction" theme by having certain words that were also personality traits written in on the pieces, as if they were almost a new sort of tarot card.

 I wound up taking the words out from the final results, but it was interesting to read and reread the folk stories and decide what lesson or knowledge there was to be learned from it.

"Birds of a Feather"

This isn't entirely new, but it is from the past year. All together there are seven pieces, and I designed and put them together for a project during my semester abroad in Antwerp, Belgium. The main idea of the project was to go with the theme "Fact or Fiction," and we basically had free reign from there.

The idea behind this is to go with my fascination with folk lore and myths. Within all those old stories and tales, there's always some sort of lesson to take away, or a trait that identifies with them. Quetzalcoatl, the Mesoamerican deity of the arts, among other things, represents a persons' creativity. The siren is the allure of women, the faery is a child's innocence and belief. Originally, each piece had the word it represented written along one of the upper corners, but it didn't work aesthetically, so I removed them.

It was fun doing the research into the myths, and finding new ways to portray the figures. Lots of initial sketching and drawing came first, just looking up the animals they were based on first. Gotta say, there are some pretty attractive photos of peacocks all over google :)


All together, each piece took roughly between five to seven hours or so, and they're all done in pen and ink washes.