Illustration Friday: Round

I’ve super busy with school and being a single mom this semester, so I’m glad the semester is wrapping up. Today I finished all the necessary Photoshop tweaks on my final project for Cartooning and Comic Book Art, which is a three page comic about a wizard and a fairy. I think the last panel of the middle page suits the Illustration Friday topic well.

Conjuring Cupcakes at a Campsite

I’ll upload the rest of the comic as I have time.

Illustration Friday: Silent

This is a digital painting I recently created from a photograph my husband took of our three year old daughter. I loved the quality of light in the original picture and its stillness and quiet, which I tried to recreate in my digital image. Digital “painting” was a new experience for me and I’ve come away from it both frustrated by its limitations and astounded by all its possibilities; as someone who has drawn all her life and painted for a few years, too, it was especially strange to be unable to feel the canvas, paint, or brushes and to be unable to mix colors in the same intuitive, hands-on way I do with paint, color pencil, and even ink. That being said, it was also a challenge and I intend to try my hand at it again, especially since there’s so much art being created digitally these days.

Illustration Friday: Scary

A badly stitched-together scan of my scary self-portrait from last semester. I need to eventually get a better image of this! It won Best in Show in Delgado Community College’s Visual Communications show and first place in the category of Illustration. It was a fun, although time consuming, project.

Rawr!

Bam-sha-Bam!

Being a quasi-single parent has proven difficult when paired with a full class load, so updating my blog has been pretty far from my thoughts!

I need to scan in some of the fun projects I’ve been doing in my Cartooning and Comic Book Art class, which is taught at Delgado Community College by Tedd Walley, but for now I’ll just post my most recent homework assignment, which is still a work in progress.

The idea was to take the text that was provided and then simply create our own speech bubbles and special effects to create the proper mood. I worked in Adobe Illustrator.

On the second page we were instructed to create some emotions and sound effects, as well; I still have a few more left to create. For the thought bubble I initially thought I could just draw it with the pen tool, and I’m sure some people can do that with no problem, but creating a lot of ellipses of varying sizes and then merging them worked for me. The last problem was to recreate a title we were provided or to create one of our own; I chose to create my own title, but I still want to tweak it a bit and give it a bit more visual impact.

Strawberry Fields

This is my current project for Computer Graphics I. It’s just an introductory project to teach us how to properly make selections, then edit them. It’s been an entertaining project and, if nothing else, I am no longer baffled by the pen tool! I could have created a greater sense of depth by adding more thyme and strawberries in the background and adding more atmosphere, but I was getting a bit tired of all that duplicating and transforming; but if we’re still working on this come Monday I’ll push the sense of distance a little more.

Illustration Friday: Midsummer Night

I was at my mom’s house right around Midsummer to pick figs and while looking through some drawers for shot glasses (totally unrelated to the figs), I came across several drawings I did in high school in the summer of 1999.

I was experimenting with frisket film and spray paint back then and this was way before I knew about the effect of acid on paper, because I actually colored in the black tube with a Sharpie. I like to think that my fascination with light and color has evolved since then, too.

Spectrum

Sometimes it’s hard to look back at old pieces like this, but I’m glad to have some of my old work back after losing the entire body of work I’d created up to that point in the flooding associated with Hurricane Katrina, back in August 2005; although I didn’t realize it at the time, losing my work and all of my art supplies was quite traumatic for me.

It’s nice to have some sense of personal history.

Busy Bee

I’ve been so busy lately that I’ve barely had time to think about Illustration Friday, let alone draw anything for it! I’ve been painting a lot for school, especially in watercolor, which has been fun. I get really excited about color and love to experiment with different combinations of various hues; I’ll have to post some photos of my recent paintings after my final portfolio review this Tuesday.

Part of the reason I’ve been so busy is that I agreed to take on an additional project for Delgado’s literary magazine, Images. I’m working on a pair of 8.5 x 11″ watercolor illustrations for another student’s short story, “Island Girl.” I did some half-size roughs last weekend, but didn’t have the time to begin working on the full size illustrations until tonight. Now that I’ve got the pencil layout down for each illo, I just have to paint them; that’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow morning before class, thanks to one of Panda’s benevolent babysitters, who agreed to watch her for a few extra hours in the morning– not at all an insignificant contribution!

The two half-size roughs for “Island Girl” appear below. I’m looking forward to further developing my concepts in watercolor.