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.

View of the Studio!

I've been self employed for almost a month now. Things are going well but I've been feeling like a slacker since I haven't finished as much art as I thought but my studio is set up and I have two major pieces in the works -- more to come on those soon.

Here's the studio . . . ta da!


It's a wonderful space, I'm surrounded by books, one of my many obsessions, and get plenty of northern light.

Also, I've completed a small media study based on a photo of my friends Cat and Sarah. My main goal for this piece was to incorporate more on the original line work in the finished piece. I'm happy with some aspects of the experiment but want to continue playing around with the possibilities. We'll see what happens.

Medium Exercises

Hi everyone, Here's a quick look at some quick medium studies I've been doing. One of the major suggestions I received while in New York was to figure out a way to incorporate my sketchbook style with my final illustrations, so this is one of my first steps toward that. I'm trying to do at least one portrait a weekend, preferable in different mediums.
I'm really enjoying the return to working in watercolor, I haven't really created a major watercolor piece since high school. It's nice change from oils and I'm having fun playing with different papers and how they effect the paint.
More to come soon, I have an illustration project in the works so keep you eyes out for some thumbnails and value studies.