SILA 49

Great news; My illustration of Oprah’s influence on Middle Eastern woman has been accepted into the Society of Illustrator’s West annual show. The original is currently hanging at the exhibition at Gallery Nucleus until January 31st.

Back to (online) school

Like many artists beginning their careers, I have taken a part time job. This helps pay the bills and prevents me from losing all ability to relate to the outside world.

Now that I have a part-time job, every moment for art creation become much more precious.

I’ve noticed that my productivity totally goes downhill when I don’t have a deadline. Personal deadlines don’t count for me; my inner disciplinarian voice is the same voice rationalizing why I stayed up reading instead of making art.

To raise productivity and sleep depravation, I am taking classes through Tutormill. Tutormill offers students the chance to take a class with two mentors of the student’s choice. All of these mentors are professional illustrators including Scott Bakal, Nathan Fox, Marcos Chin, Yuko Shimizu, Edel Rodrigez, Tim O’Brien, etc. My first class, The Power of the Idea, focused on improving illustration concepts (definitely one of my weaknesses). Scott and Yuko went above and beyond offering tons of great advice and feedback.

I chose the six-week format; it gives the student one week for thumbnails and an additional week for the final illustration. For the Power of the Idea the student is given a single word to illustrate. Some of them have restrictions of what imagery can appear in the final illustration to really push your creativity.

Assignment 1: Utopia

Assignment 2: Battle

Assignment 3: Peace (no doves, flowers, or hearts)

One of the biggest challenges was time management, hence the digital push but I'm happy with the work. I'd like to add more polish to these, especially the utopia and battle images, but I'm proud of how far I was able to push these.

I'm currently taking a portrait class on Tutormill that will be wrapping up soon so there will be more fun illustrations in the near future.