Green shoes

Sled dogs in the winter.

An assignment for a winter theme.  There are definitely some changes I want to make (for instance, looking at it just now I see that I have left off the ropes that attach them to the sled...) but I'm pretty happy with where it's heading.  I started out completely differently, trying to draw a realistic dogsled in action.  But then I decided, no, I want to do fun character designs.  So I did.  I like their shapes very much.

A Christmas character

The Salt Fairy, a benevolent winter spirit especially found around schools and churches.

Donato Giancola!

On Wednesday we had a guest speaker in the Illustration department.  Donato Giancola came from New York to talk to us!  He is one of my favorite illustrators!  I've been pretty excited ever since we heard he was coming.  I saw a book of his Lord of the Rings-inspired paintings a few years ago, and pretty quickly became a fan.  He's good.  Really good.  His paintings are beautiful.  He does a lot of book cover work but I believe has also done concept artwork for movies.

And he's so nice!  He gave a presentation to my concept design class (which normally has like six students attend, but the room was crowded with visitors), and he was really cool and chill, and he gave out posters and postcards, and was basically just a neat guy.  He talked about composition and showed some things from his sketchbooks.  He talked about using repeating shapes, and how he takes composition ideas from abstract and modern paintings and uses their ideas about shape and color and balance in his own realistic work.  In college his professors were all modern artists, and he said they weren't really great at painting realistically, but they knew a lot about how to communicate through shape and composition, and that's what he learned.  His compositions are pretty fabulous, and his sense of light and color are amazing.

One of my favorite things was that he showed us some of his not-great work back from when he was just getting started.  It was pretty much wonderful to see that even he created some stuff that was frankly rather bad, but that he has come so far and learned so much from those experiences.  And he's willing to show them to a class full of students to help them learn too.  I think all of us felt like we now had hope!  It was very cool.

Also, after his presentation was done and most people were gone, I was working on homework in the computer lab while he was chatting with the professors and looking at some of our classwork online.  He said "Oh that's cool.  That one with the sunset," and it was mine!  Donato Giancola said my picture was cool!  It's not even half done!  Then he came over to the computer where I was working and gave me some advice.  I was geeking out a little bit.  

It made my day. :)

*This is the concept design piece I was talking about. It could still use some work.

Sunday Doodles #4

This week on Sunday Doodles: quick portraits of the Relief Society presidency.

Happy Halloween :)

Just a sketch.  A little Halloween friendliness.

Leggings weather!

My favorite time of year.

POUCHES.

So for a reason I can't remember right now, last night Luke and I were talking about comic book superheroes from the nineties and we found ourselves looking up the art of Rob Liefeld.  Now, I do love comic books, but in the past I've tended toward fantasy kingdom graphic novels rather than superhero serials, so I don't actually know a ton about them.  So I had no idea about the history of this guy's work or the culture surrounding it.

But what the heck is going on with this picture.

What.

I don't even know.  Apparently this guy is all about drawing huge muscles, and massive guns (maybe they need the muscles to lift their guns?) and putting straps on things, and hanging pouches everywhere.  And not being good at drawing hands.  Or any anatomy.  And hiding the feet.  And I can't even show you any of his women.

    

I don't want to bash the guy too bad.  His pictures are certainly dynamic and dramatic.  But it's actually rather reassuring to think that if a guy like this could make it big in the industry...

Sunday Doodles #3

Today's sketches are for my BFA project (the art equivalent of an undergraduate thesis), which means I was kind of doing schoolwork during church but not really because they're not for a class and they're supposed to be part of my ongoing development as an artist and it's partly for pleasure and it helps me pay attention so there.  I'm doing concept art for So You Want to Be a Wizard by Diane Duane, which is one of my favorite books ever. These first sketches are for the main characters, Nita and Kit, nerds and brand new wizards out to battle the forces of darkness and entropy.

Drawing the undead just in time for Halloween!

Drawing these guys for character design was super fun.  As my husband is discovering, I really really really  love Halloween.  I love fall in general, I love dressing up in costumes, and I love things that are creepy and spooky but not really SCARY.  So drawing a bunch of undead warrior zombies was the perfect project for me.

 They are the Cauldron Born, again from The Book of Three, reanimated soldiers who feel no pain or fear and have no memory of their former lives.

I was actually rather terrified of these guys as a child.

Hexaflexagons!

No Sunday doodles this week (although General Conference was lovely and everyone should watch/listen to it!) but I present an intriguing little invention that kept us entertained for Saturday night and the larger part of Sunday: Hexaflexagons!

They're like the much-awesomer version of elaborately decorated cootie catchers that you made in middle school.  This video is an entertaining introduction and gives you the basics on how to make one.  They are pretty dang cool.  And a single one entertained a backseat full of twenty-somethings for an entire car trip, so there you go.

A Buffet Project

This is the first fully-(almost) finished piece of the semester, and the first in a long time since I was so busy over the summer.  I sketched a ton but never took anything farther than that.  So it was kind of nice to devote a lot of time to just one thing, to leave it and come back to it and really work out a lot of details.

The assignment was based on the description of this competition my professor found, of which the theme is buffet.  (The brief waxes very poetic about "the world is a table" and "a convivial gathering" and "maybe even finding the great love of life."  You can pretty much tell that it was translated from Italian.)

I started thinking about the games my siblings and I used to play in the backyard when we were little, and no matter what it was it usually involved some kind of feast, and therefore we had to gather and prepare food.  We could pretty much turn anything from the outdoors into a banquet.  So that's the idea that I went with.

I sketched up a rough drawing in Photoshop, did a value study over it, and then did more refined linework over that.

I was trying to focus on the contrasts between light and dark and warm and cool colors, so I played with a couple different ideas of warm yellow light against darker cool shadows.

The one I went with in the end was based off the third thumbnail, with a blue-green base, but I put a lot more warmth into it as I went to make it a little more summery and lively.  Overall I think my attention to contrast led to a much more solid piece than I've had in the past.  Having the lights and shadows clearly separated in value as well as color made the whole thing read better and look more lifelike.  And I'm quite pleased with the shades of green I've achieved in the background.

Sunday Doodles #2

This wasn't done during church, but it was on Sunday.  It was my brother's birthday on Monday so I decided to draw him a robot.  I haven't seen him for a year since he's on a church mission in Brazil, but e-mail is a beautiful thing.  

I hope he enjoys it. :)

Hey guess what?

A Bamboo Capture, to be precise.  I was able to afford it because of Amazon and because of a gift card we got for our wedding (Amazon gift card = an excellent wedding present, if you're looking for ideas).  It's the first piece of new hardware that I've gotten basically since I started college four years ago, so I'm kinda stoked.  Mostly because I no longer have to stalk the "open" labs in the basement of the HFAC to get anything done...  Hopefully it will make this crazy semester that much easier.

And the black-and-silver color scheme matches my computer.  I am quite pleased.

An influence map

For my concept design class we had to create an "influence map," a compilation of artists (or musicians or movies or whatever) that have influenced us or have qualities to their work that we want to emulate.  

It was actually lots of fun to make.  "Oh, my homework is to look at cool art online for a few hours and pick out my favorite stuff, how will I manage..."

Silhouettes!

I'm already loving my character design class.  I am pretty sure that this is what I have been looking to do with my life all along, and I only just discovered precisely what it is.  Now I just have to get good enough that people will want to pay me to do it...

We're designing characters from Lloyd Alexander's The Book of Three, which is great because I like those books and because few people have preconceived notions of what the characters look like.  I'm still getting practice at pushing the shapes to the limit, but so far I'm having fun with them.  Doing silhouettes is great because it's only about shape, not value or color or anything else, so you can experiment a lot without having to niggle out all the details.

Sunday Doodles #1

I doodle during church.  I never quite got over my childhood need for coloring books and crayons to keep me sitting still for three hours. Even now it helps to have something to do with my hands while I listen.  And occasionally I manage to produce a good design or two while my mind is only half-focused.

Lately I've been practicing body types for character designs.

Life-Changing Events and a Freaky Fish-Guy

So I got married this summer.  Yep.  It's pretty much awesome.  Also we went to India which was incredible.  This did not leave as much time for drawing as I could have used.  But now classes have started again so things will probably pick up.

I fixed this guy up from a sketch I did some time ago (painting him during my breaks at work, because I still don't own Photoshop. Soon... ).

I have since been told that he looks just like the Zora from Legend of Zelda, but I promise I wasn't thinking of them at all when I drew him.

Now I want to make some amulets...

I did a piece as a final project for a class where the assignment was to create an entry for this illustration contest.  The only requirement for the contest was that the starting point for our work had to be the Amulets and Charms collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.  (And also that it not have human remains in it, skulls and shrunken heads and such.  I hope fowl remains are okay.)

From what I saw (online) they seem to have a lot of neat stuff, particularly things that I would probably never have thought of as amulets what with my largely Western-European-based fantasy cultural knowledge.  Just looking through the intro page was fascinating, as there were short descriptions of amulets and how they were used in their respective cultures.  (I love cultures!  I love reading anthropological books. Sometimes my favorite parts of fantasy books are the establishing descriptions where they give you an overview of the social background of the kingdom or whatever even before the plot gets going.)

I like the idea of found charms, and item like a stone or a shell or an herb that gives off a particular quality.  But as I read more I got really into the idea of physically creating a charm, working material with your own hands to form it and at the same time imbuing it with some kind of power.  I had this image in my head of someone molding metal into certain shapes and at the same time seeing this supernatural energy that is gathered into it and held within the shapes.  (This probably stems from extensive reading of Tamora Pierce books, I will freely admit.)  Then I started wondering what a character would be like who could sculpt with both metal and magic in such a way.  Eventually out of that came this roughened old amulet repairman, not a magician as such, but someone who knows how to work the magic just enough to fix these charms up and get them running again.

I did a pencil drawing on paper, then scanned it into Photoshop and painted it monochromatically.  (Well almost, from dark green to light yellow.)  Afterwards I added color in some places on a multiply layer.  I'd never worked that way before, but it ended up being really good for me, because I could concentrate on form and shading without having to worry about color at all.  It helped me to get a good relationship between lights and darks throughout the piece, as well as to get a more painterly quality even though it was mostly digital.  I think I'm pretty happy with the final result, although I wish you got a better view of the bird skeleton...

Geeking out about Ryan Woodward

So Ryan Woodward is pretty much one of my heroes.  He's a professor in the animation department here at BYU; chances are you've seen his conte animated video Thought of You, done in collaboration with the dance department.  Maybe it even made you cry.  I dunno, just saying, it could happen. But as a fan of both animation and dance, I fell in love with it.  I love the style, I love the music.  For some reason I tend to like sketches and stylized drawings much more than "polished" images, and Ryan's art is some of my favorite.  I think I can safely say that my whole gesture-drawing style changed after seeing his work.
And now there's another neat video for me to geek out over!  Bottom of the Ninth is an animated graphic novel coming out soon for the iPad.  I'm intrigued by the things people come up with when they combine art and new technology.  I think especially with graphic novels people are able to pull of a lot of quirky and creative things, and this is pretty great.  It's so cool to realize that you're seeing a new medium come to life and soon everybody can try to make art this way, and create within this new framework.  So I'm excited by both the style and the idea.

This one time I flew to California

I spent a while today googling illustrators and concept artists that people have told me about lately and adding their blogs to a watchlist.  This is called Putting the Plan Into Action.  The plan is to keep up with art trends and be inspired so that I can one day become a Famous Artist.  I began to realize something that would seem to make complete sense but I had never really noticed it before: I love looking at art.  Particularly really good illustration.  Why haven't I tried this before??

In other news:

Last month I skipped school for a week to go on a field trip with the illustration department to L.A.  It was incredible.  We visited Disney studios and Dreamworks and Sony Animation and a few video game studios, and several artists who do gallery shows and paintings for a living.  We also played frisbee on the beach, in mid-March, with dolphins swimming just offshore and I felt like I was in a heartwarming teen summer film.

I haven't yet organized the roughly two zillion photos I took yet, but here is a selection from my sketchbook:

The main thing that struck me about LA was the excessive variety of palm trees.

One of the artists we visited, Ken Bishop, lived three blocks from the beach.  And he had sweet boots.

Moonrise from the Santa Monica Pier.  Pen and ink doesn't do it justice.

Not from life, but hey.

A Terribly Cynical Start

It's taken me a long time to get into blogs, largely because it seemed to me that most of them were full of vacation photos or boring stories of craft projects people did with their kids.  But, I have heard from every side lately that a blog is a great way for an artist to develop a following and get her name out there, and that is a thing that I would love to do because someday I would like to have jobs that pay me money.  To be honest, that's the only reason I'm trying this out right now, since I've had this page for years and never really posted anything on it.  With that said, I will strive to make this as interesting as possible for everyone, employing all of my natural wit and hopefully impressive illustration skills.

So. Here are some sketches:
I did these a while ago for a short film version of Ender's Game, being produced by a graduating BYU student.  I don't think the project ever got off the ground, since I was only attached to it for a few weeks and then never heard of it again, but working on it was fun and I liked the sketches I did.

It probably says a lot that some of these were drawn on spiral-bound paper during classes.