COMMISSION WORK DONE!! :D

It is officially done, and sent off to its happy new owner! I adjusted the brightness just a tad, and its final size will fit a standard 11x14 frame...

I will post a photo of it hanging, framed, when that happens! Can't wait to see what it looks like, and I'm so happy to have been able to do this project. It makes me feel a little more confident in my work's appeal!

More Commission Progress!! :) (DONE?)

So I've added the background now, and the coloring is pretty final! The background is a mix of my own watercolor textures and some photos of the teacup ride that's altered in Photoshop...

Looks like the JPEG is still a little too bright, though. Their shoulders and the background got a little blown-out. I will have to re-look at that and maybe adjust Levels... ;)

Commission In Progress!! (For A Friend)

I have been doing some work on a commission for a friend at grad school, and here is the progress! She gave me a photo of her and her boyfriend on the teacups at Disney, and I am creating a mixed media illustration for their new place/ her boyfriend's birthday. The story behind the photo reference is that they closed on their new place while waiting in line for the ride! So cute.

So far I have completed a graphite drawing of their portraits, and I have colorized it and painted into it a bit. It is very light color with some of the pencil strokes still showing, and I like that look. I think it suits Disney and my experimentation with style. I'm considering a few options for the background... I will either do a photo collage of her own snapshots from Disney, or I will substitute some Disney textures (from her photos still) for their clothing (see the red areas in the sketches). I'm also playing with blocking out the clothes with white, because it really makes their happy faces stand out.

Still a lot of work to do, but it's coming along!!

(Always In Progress) Artist Statement

As a budding children's book illustrator, I figured I should start tailoring my illustrator's artist statement a little bit more to my specific goals... Before it more or less referred my illustration goals in general: advertising, book, or editorial...:

We are so often negatively influenced by manipulative media.

Consumer culture inundates us with visual and verbal subconscious messages,

and an overwhelming amount of them are harmful, demeaning, unnerving, and flat out wrong.

My personal brand of visual communication can innovate media’s molding of society.

As an illustrator, I have the power to improve the quality of published and projected images.

Through my work, I want to revolutionize the way we, as human beings, currently see the world and ourselves.

My dream is to be a children’s book illustrator.

Through children’s books, my work will influence the young generations’ lessons and fantasies. The ways in which I have understood my world will feed others’ perspectives, and then be passed down through families in book form.

My visual messages and narratives will form and mold young minds, positively impacting society.

I strive for my work to express my vision. I am not merely drawing or painting; instead, I am exercising powerful visual language. In addition, integrity is forever present in my vision and what I illustrate. My life goal is to be an honest illustrator, ever conscious of and judicious with my work’s psychological effects on viewers.

I have the power to manipulate people, but I choose to use this power to educate and to tell truths.

Lion

I felt like drawing something from a photo reference.
Sadly, it has been awhile since I've done something like this. Haven't had the time!

I was drawing while watching Beauty and The Beast (I confess!); I think my subconscious wanted me to pick a movie with a lion-like beast in it. (And I don't own the Lion King.)

Speaking of Disney, I'm feeling like the mane became subtly influenced by Disney Princesses' hair texture... especially near the bottom of the drawing.

(Graphite on bristol board)

Tiny Tully: Secret Place Book

This project was a "secret place book." The way this book works, as you can see, is that it can be viewed as individual pages, or it can be opened up into a stand-up shape. This shape works really well as a room, box, cage, window, etc...

I used colored pencils, ink, pastel, paper collage (with painted paper I made), card paper, and illustration board.

Overall, I really liked this project. It was really neat to think 2-D with a 3-D aspect: kind of like a beginner's pop-up book!

 

 

Lie Like A Child

 We all feel displaced or disconnected once in awhile. Suddenly the way we saw something in our lives changes dramatically.

This comic-strip type of project was about a time in which I felt this way; it is a very personal project, but it deals with how I found out about a close family member's Diabetes. Suddenly, this person was no longer "immortal" as she had been in my child's mind. However, I was also hit the with realization that I could be an important source of support for her.

(I should note that I see this experience overall as a revelation, and not as a traumatic event. At the time it certainly felt chaotic and scary, but reflection has made its educational value concrete in my mind. Now, it is just a dynamic, personal story I have been able to illustrate like this.)

I know some of the details may be tricky to see, but I hope you can click and zoom, and get the information you need to understand the story!

30 Days Of...

This was a project called "30 Days Of..." I chose emotion, and sketched how I was feeling (with marker or watercolor) on a roughly 1" x 10" strip of paper every day for 30 days. I also wrote the date and a little blurb of info about my activities and the weather that day. (I noted, by the end of the project, that my mood is definitely heavily influenced by the weather, and whether or not I had homework to do that day!)

It was not only an exercise in habit, repetition, and series-making, but certainly also a lesson about abbreviation, in my case. I limited myself greatly on the amount of space I was allowed to use each day, and I tried to keep my drawings abstract (or maybe that was just the easiest way for me to "draw emotions"). It is also really neat to see how color, variation, pattern, shape, and line all played into how I chose to communicate each emotion/ each day.

In the end, I displayed them together by attaching them all to a piece of string. I really liked the way it looked like a mobile, and so the top picture shows it hung up.

Overall, I enjoyed doing this each day. It was a nice mini challenge to keep myself on track for a whole month, and now I want to try it again. However, I think I may use a different subject... Something external for a change, for sure.

Welcome!

Hello everyone! This blog will be primarily a place for me to submit current work I'm doing in my grad degree, as well as any other personal work I'm fiddling with. Basically, for now, this is the stuff that doesn't make it to my (more professional) online portfolio, or to my Lesley University key assignment portfolio.

Hope you enjoy what you see! Please leave comments if you'd like. :)