Author: Robin

I'm Robin (he/they), a third year enrolled as a User Experience Design student. I'm especially interested in eventually professionally creating artwork for entertainment such as animated films, books, and video games. I want to share my artwork with a wider audience using this blog, and I also want to open up a conversation about what goes into making illustrations and artwork both on the creative and business sides..

Industrious Illustrating #26 – Character Concept Sketching

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While I’ve been trying to get back into a regular artistic workflow by working on more sprites and illustrations for “Flamechaser”, I also feel like I could benefit from exploring new ideas more. Because of that, I found some time this week to sketch out a character design for an original character I’m going to call Rashida Kuromiya. She’s a cybernetically enhanced freedom fighter who dons a helmet shaped like a canine’s head in battle.

While I haven’t gotten around to fleshing out a full backstory for Rashida, I enjoyed drawing her and I want to draw her more in the future. Eventually I want to implement her into a story idea I’m working on called “Blade of Seafoam” that follows an amnesiac super-soldier who’s traveling across a post-apocalyptic archipelago to find clues about his past. I’m not sure yet whether I want to make this idea into a comic or a visual novel, so I may have to adjust the character designs based on whether I’m drawing them just a few times to make sprites and illustrations, or a hundred times for each panel they appear in. I’m working on character turn-arounds for Blade of Seafoam for my ARTDES 220 iterative projects, so I’m looking forward to being able to share them with everyone once I’m done with them.

In other news, I recently sent applications to several conventions happening this year hoping that I’ll be able to get into at least one or two Artist Alleys. I really enjoyed my experiences at Con Ja Nai, Anime Park, and Youmacon, and I’m hoping to make more good memories and sales at future conventions!

Industrious Illustrating #25 – A Year of Progress

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This month I’ve been working a lot on “Flamechaser” behind the scenes as the team develops the 0.6 demo build that we hope to post on Itch (https://jarojakd.itch.io/flamechaser) early this year. It’s been nearly a year since I joined the team, and as a result of foraying into game art and mecha design for the project, I’ve developed a lot of new techniques and built upon old ones.

I drew the new illustration of the Penguin and the Phoenix Heart clashing in hand-to-hand combat this year on the 11th, while I drew the old illustration of the 3rd of February last year. When I put these two images side by side, I’m pretty satisfied with how much progress I’ve made over the past year! I’m motivated to keep working on my art to see what new heights I can reach artistically in the future.

If you’re an artist, I encourage you to try redrawing an old piece of art that’s a year old or older and compare them side by side to see all the places where you’ve improved and where you can still continue to improve. I promise it’s a good exercise and also motivational!

Industrious Illustrating #24 – A New Year

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Happy 2023, and welcome back to another semester of Industrious Illustrating! While I’ve been busy with a lot of things these past few weeks that hit me one after the other, I did at least find the time to cobble together a 2022 art summary showing off some of my favorite works from last year by month. In 2023 I’m hoping to further strengthen and diversify my illustrative skills, while also putting more work into projects such as “Flamechaser” and tabling at more conventions.

In terms of what I’ve been drawing lately, I’ve been trying to get back into the flow of freely sketching, as I haven’t been working in my sketchbook as much as I used to. Here’s a few sketches I made recently from life and from photographs I took in Portugal:

See all of you again next week, hopefully when I have more to show for artistic output!

Industrious Illustrating #23 – Finished Book

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For those following along with Industrious Illustrating, posts 19 and 20 were about my process of creating a childrens’ book for ARTDES 270. Well, now I have a finished product for my efforts! I cut out several 3.5″ x 3.5″ chipboard squares, printed and cut out 7″ x 3.5″ spreads of my illustrations, and pasted it all together using rubber cement. The end result looks like this:

While I’m still not super into making physical objects such as paper cuttings or sculptures, I still enjoyed getting to see my efforts come together into a tangible object. I’d say that it’s one of the pleasures inherent to being creative and making artwork. I’ll definitely look forward to working in various ways in the future to explore and realize all kinds of different artistic visions I may nurture!

Industrious Illustrating #22 – Model Kits

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Hello again! I ended up taking last week off because of final projects and exams, so to compensate I’m making more posts than usual this week.

Recently I started building a plastic model of the F-15E Strike Eagle mech from the visual novel “Muv Luv Alternative”. Because the model’s joints are articulated and its overall design is blocky and mostly angular, it’ll be a good default pose reference for figuring out how a mech’s body and limbs would look in three-dimensional perspective while also making changes in my mind’s eye to better fit whichever mech I’m actually drawing. While I didn’t think of myself as a very hands-on or crafty person before, I’m actually really enjoying cutting and filing down plastic pieces to assemble into a working model. I plan on purchasing more model kits in the future for either reference material or simple enjoyment.

Here’s what I have done so far:

While I am a little disappointed that I haven’t had much time to make new artwork over the past two months, I also increasingly feel like it’s important to feed one’s artistic psyche by enjoying life’s many offerings and gradually processing them into memories, feelings, and knowledge that can inform one’s creative output. I hope that my non-art posts demonstrate that I’m not a machine creating fully formed artwork on a dime — I’m always gathering new information and reference material that may one day show up in my artwork.

I’ll be spending most of winter break traveling abroad, so I’ll bring back a lot of reference photographs that I’ll use as inspiration for future artwork. I hope everyone has a relaxing and fun winter break!

Industrious Illustrating #21 – Two-Tailed

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Hello again, and welcome back! When I was abroad vacationing in Spain and Portugal over Thanksgiving break, I saw a lot of interesting art and architecture, but one particular image I saw depicted on tiles particularly stood out to me (warning for some partial nudity): 

After seeing the twin-tailed mermaid, I immediately had the idea of making a drawing where her tails more closely resemble legs. This is what came out of it:

I’m swamped with final projects and assignments at the moment, so I didn’t have the time to push this further than a black-and-white sketch, but I hope to develop this piece and this concept further in the future to make something interesting out of it. Good luck with the last few weeks of this semester, everyone, and see you again next week!