Spider Magazine

Spider, a children’s literary magazine, features four of my latest illustrations this month.  They accompany “Happiness on a Piece of Paper,” Valerie Hunter’s short story about Garrison, a ten-year old boy living in 19^th century rural Pennsylvania.  Garrison loves to draw but worries that his family will insist he stop “fooling around with pen and paper.”  Keeping with the central theme of the story, I wanted to maintain a subtle tension between Garrison and his family.  The illustrations are mixed media: colored pencil, watercolor, and acrylic with some digital touches.  Big thank you to my art director, Suzanne Beck, for the great assignment.  

 

 

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.

Likeness Cover, Final

Hi everyone,
Things have been busy. Over the past couple months I got a job at the Seattle Blick Art Supplies, I am periodically taking online classes through Tutormill, I have set up a page on theispot, and my boyfriend and I got a dog, Jefferson. Unsurprisingly, the blog was pushed to the very bottom of my to do list. I will be posting lots of new art over the next week or two as I catch up.

Now, on to the art.
The reimagined Likeness cover is finished, yay! I completed the final in Photoshop and Painter, protecting the integrity of the drawing while letting me experiment with creating a mood through a limited palette.