It was on day three, hiking out into the mountainous scrublands and already sweaty from exertion, when he felt it: a rumbling.
Then he saw it: plumes of white clouds, billowing from the horizon off in the distance– no, not clouds… smoke, he realized, watching as a trail rapidly ascended.
Then he heard it: a deep roar, loud and imminent as the rocket screamed through the atmosphere.
Hello, and welcome to Industrious Illustrating! This is a new weekly column updating on Fridays which will show process pictures, sketches, and sometimes finished works that show what goes into making character designs, illustrations, and the like.
This week we will look at two different pieces I created based on photographs I took on a 2019 summer trip to England.
Last night, I digitally painted this piece of two girls hanging out in an alcove on the University of Cambridge campus. I directly painted over my photograph for the background, but I took liberties in the exact details and drew two figures who weren’t present in the original picture. I had to construct the lighting and proportions on the two characters based on my own understanding of how lighting and scale would work in that environment.
I traditionally painted this piece with watercolors and alcohol-based markers in the fall of 2020 based on a photograph I took at the Bridge of Sighs in Oxford. I had to eyeball all the proportions and perspective and then draw the environment by hand, albeit while referencing a photograph. In retrospect, I think some of the details and perspective look a little off. But that was the best I could do at the time without the ability to directly paint over the original photograph.
For both paintings, I had to rely on my own understanding of lighting and perspective to construct the scene. The original photographs were also unquestionably my work. Since I wanted to depict real places in the United Kingdom, I couldn’t just rely on my own imagination to recreate existing scenery, and it wasn’t practical for me to return to the UK in person every time I wanted to paint a real-life scene. So my best option was to use photographs as a tool for inspiring interesting illustrations.
Digital art programs make image adjustments such as brightness, contrast, and saturation much easier, and they also have the blessing known as the undo function (ctrl-z). They also have the ability to directly integrate photographs into paintings for textures and references, which professional concept artists and illustrators often use so that they can finish detailed paintings on a timely basis for their clients. Using these tools isn’t cheating, as no amount of fancy tools can compensate for a lack of artistic skill. Rather, digital art programs enable artists to speed up their workflow and create finished works faster for both professional and hobbyist purposes.
I’m still proud of both pieces, and I think they both have their own merits. But this comparison should hopefully show that while digital art programs didn’t teach me the fundamentals or my current skills, they do help smooth out the process as a tool akin to a paintbrush or a pen.
The wreckage lies in a barren desert, adrift in the sands of a dead sea. The hard-packed dirt was once an oasis for fishermen– now it is home to a titanic skeleton and its refugees.
NOTICE ACCESS BY UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED NOTICE > NEW SESSION INITIATED > ENTER HOST NAME: > ████████████ >... > SUBMIT PRIVATE KEY FOR AUTHENTICATION: > █████████████████████████████████████████████████ > AUTHENTICATING WITH PRIVATE KEY... > ... > ... > LOGIN AUTHORIZED > WELCOME USER 1Œ‰)*òˆæ›ÄéRøß4¯–î· > OPENING FILE 19890607_POLYGON_S3_IMG004 > ... > ...
Item No. 012
The exterior of Station “B” illuminated by a billowing cloud of smoke and fire following the criticality incident at Reactor █ at ██████ on ███████, ████████, 19██. Initial report of ██████ casualties increased to ████████ after the total structural collapse of Station “B” and subsequent triggering of ████████████████ at ████████.
Addendum 001-1
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Hey all, here’s to acknowledging the start of a new semester. Personally, it’s been a bit hectic for me; I’ve been facing questions on what I want to do with my life and which classes I should choose or swap. But I still love what I do here. I still love working on my story.
This is my uniform design process for the antagonists of my story. They come from a guild of mercenaries from a different world based on Norse myths and they want to cause trouble for the protagonists. I wanted this futuristic viking sort of look to them. The uniforms took inspiration from the KNY uniforms in that I wanted to make them simple yet customizable.
Happy Saturday!
We are rapidly approaching the end of the semester which means I only have a couple of posts left. This week I’m posting a day late because my organization, MUSIC Matters, held our biggest event of the year. If you attended SpringFest day festival or the night concert featuring Hippo Campus – I just want to say thank you. We all appreciate it so much and hope that you enjoyed it.
Moving on, this week we are talking about Mentality Magazine! I had the opportunity to speak to Liz Hoornstra, the current editor-in-chief of the publication. She explained that the magazine aims to do two main things: 1. Create a sense of community for its members and 2. Destigmatize mental health through writing. As someone who has been focusing on taking control of my mental health for the past year, I was really excited to learn more about how the magazine has done this and how others can support their mission!
Mentality Magazine typically publishes digital issues, with a printed copy done once a semester. This semester marks an exciting milestone for the organization: 10 printed publications (and 5 years of being an org on campus!). Some of the topics they’ve been focusing on most recently deals with the impact that the pandemic and racial injustice towards the BIPOC and AAPI communities have had on peoples’ mental health. This follows in their larger commitment to diversifying the magazine’s staff and writing focuses, including highlighting marginalized voices in mental health discussions. I was excited to hear that they’re taking on these topics so directly, as they have affected us all in different ways over the past year and are, in many ways, directly tied to some of the most widespread mental struggles on campus.
Mentality Magazine has also recently partnered with steps wellness, “the mental wellness platform for college students”. The platform helps connect students to licensed therapists, provides safe, private spaces for them to have therapy sessions in person or through video call, and allows them to share and read about their peers’ experiences with mental health. This is something that I found incredibly important. Especially in college living situations with many roommates and with most therapy sessions being virtual right now, it can be hard to find a space where you can talk about your struggles without worrying if others will overhear or barge in. This partnership shows that Mentality Magazine is really committed to helping students at every level of their mental wellness journey.
Liz also explained to me that COVID has sparked some important conversations regarding mental health equity and accessibility, things that people were sometimes skittish to talk about before.
“We welcome any and all members to Mentality, but we also are very open that mental health is not a topic that you can be apolitical about and we have to recognize that, holding a space in the mental health community here at Michigan means that there are certain times when we cannot stay silent. I hope that going forward, that is something that we are prioritizing.”
If you’re interested in getting involved in Mentality Magazine, you are welcome to join at any point! They look for writers all through the year, so you don’t have to join at the beginning of the year or semester. You can visit mentalitymagazine.org and fill out the contact form and a member of their exec team will get back to you about the next steps. If you don’t have enough time to be a writer, or that’s not your personal skill set, you can still do other things to help support the magazine and its important mission on campus! Reading and sharing articles is so important – de-stigmatization can’t happen without conversation.
That’s all from me this week! Thank you so much for reading and I will be back next week with my last post of the semester featuring a capella group 58 Greene!
Stay safe & stay well,
Lucy
