A Day In Our Lives #23

Hey guys,

This week I am posting a sketch I did when I took my friend to go try out Digipaint club here on campus. They have weekly meetings and normally do cute fun things that use digital painting. The week that we attended, the club hosted a workshop on how to draw birds, as well as how to create your own creatures. It was a fun experience but due to my extremely busy school schedule, I will not be able to attend weekly.

 

I decided to draw cows, which are one of my favorite animals. I think they are so cute! I am also generally better at drawing women in my cartoon style, which made drawing human-cows even easier. I picked some cute light blue and pink colors just to get them to stand out a bit. If I had more time I could have accessorized them a little more. Hope that you like it!

See you next week,

Marissa 

 

Mixed on Campus #3 – Alanna Grace-Marie

Name: Alanna Grace-Marie
Mix: Black, biracial (German & Nigerian)
Major & Year: Sociology – Afro-American Studies; Junior Transfer Student

I am a visual sociologist and multimedia artist. I use my art to tell my unique story as well as share Black history and culture to uplift my community with positive representation. My business instagram is @equitable.arts

Q: How has being mixed affected your campus experience?

A: Being a Black presenting biracial woman at a predominantly white institution, representation is hard to find. So I create my own! And I collaborate with others who have intersectional identities to share their stories too.

Q: What do you wish more people knew about the mixed experience?

A: The mixed experience is unique for every individual and it can be complicated in unique ways too! This isn’t always a negative experience, we can use our unique perspectives to brighten this world. So please, refrain from placing us in stereotypical boxes.

+1: I will write an autobiography one day soon to show the world how being both Black and biracial has informed me and shaped my experiences in this world. I was raised to act a certain way and certainly, society put more pressure on me to conform. But now, I reject this! I am all of my ethnicities and identities, uniquely me! No need to pick a side.

+2: Blair Imani is an educational inspiration of mine. She also rejects stereotypes of her identities and lives an authentic life to uplift all marginalized individuals.

A Day In Our Lives #22

Hey guys,

This week I wanted to talk a bit about my process and how I create a lot of my more complex digital drawings. I originally studied Illustration at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. During my time there, I spent a lot of time learning anatomy and perspective. In the illustration program, almost all of my work had to be on paper, they teach traditional art for the most part in that department.

With this, I usually start out my drawings on paper, and then take a photo of them. I then upload the image to procreate on my Ipad, where I color in the image. Sometimes I will include line work, but I really just love using value in my digital artwork. I like to think of it more as a digital painting than anything. It is a lot easier to digitally paint in the colors in my opinion. Then I am able to get exactly the right tones that I want, and if I mess up there is always the undo button.

I know this isn’t a good tutorial on digital drawing, but it is just my different way of going about most of my more complex artwork.

See you next week!

Marissa

Mixed on Campus #2 – Indira Sankaran

Name: Indira Sankaran
Mix: Indian, White-American
Major & Year: PitE and EEB; Junior

Q: How has being mixed affected your campus experience?

A: It has definitely been an experience! I have always had difficulty understanding where I fit into society and coming into a new environment, without any strong cultural foundation, is hard. Especially with so many ethnic and cultural organizations, I always have a difficult time joining them because I did not have a similar upbringing or experience from others. However, being a junior and meeting so many new people from many backgrounds, I have cultivated a community where I feel safe to express myself.

Q: What do you wish more people knew about the mixed experience?

A: That my mixed experience is soo different from others who identify as mixed or multiracial. We should not be defined into a category and everyone expresses or represents in so many different ways!!

Q: What is your proudest moment?

A: My proudest moment was recently when I realized that my school or academic success doesn’t define me or my future.

Q: What are you most anxious about right now?

A: Presently I’m nervous about internships! But overall, I’m anxious about leaving college and my safe community in a year.

Q: What kind of person do you aspire to be?

A: That is a hard question but i aspire to be a kind and grounding person. I want to be the person that is independent and kind to herself and others 😌

Q: Who is the most influential person in your life?

A: Would it be narcissistic to say myself haha. I’m proud of myself and how much i have grown these past two years! I aspire myself to work on myself and I think that is the most influential thing a person can do.

Industrious Illustrating #33 – Character Turnarounds

Apologies for the lack of a post last week. I’ll make an extra post to make up for the gap.

Recently I realized that I’m lacking character design work, specifically turnarounds, in my portfolio. As a result, I decided to make more detailed character sheets for my cast of original characters for my cyberpunk/post-apocalyptic story idea “Blade of Seafoam”. If I were to one day make “Blade of Seafoam” into a video game or a comic where I have other artists assisting me (e.g. 3D modelers or character artists on a video game, art assistants on a comic) I would need to have these design sheets to pass along to other artists as a reference for how they should depict the characters. Even if I don’t end up doing anything substantial with the “Blade of Seafoam” story concept, I can still use these in my portfolio to apply for character design jobs with larger companies.

What I want to do next is work on turnarounds/orthographic (internal/detail) views of the mechs in Blade of Seafoam to better establish the world that these characters live in as well as demonstrate my ability to draw mechs when applying to video game art jobs. Stay tuned to see those!

Also, if anyone is interested in seeing me in real life, I’ll be selling my art in the Artist Alley at Con Ja Nai at the MLB on April 8th, and I hope to table at more conventions pending results! (I’m still waiting on artist alley application results from Anime Central and Dokidokon in particular).

A Day In Our Lives #21

Hey guys,
This week I am posting some of my character sketches/studies. I really enjoy creating characters. One of my favorite things to draw is human anatomy. I really love boosting the color in people’s undertones in order to create my painting/coloring style. For lighter skin tones I start with a base of sage green, for darker skin tones I use an undertone of red or blue. I also created a new header image for this series. I feel like this frame from one of my comics fits the vibe better here. I like creating a variety of characters in order to push myself to stay away from “same face” syndrome, which is a really hard thing to overcome if you have a distinct art style. This just means that because of your style, you sort of accidentally draw the same face over and over.

See you guys next week!