Tag: industrious illustrating

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!

Industrious Illustrating #20 – Childrens’ Book

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I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! This week I’m continuing off of last week’s post by showing what the end result of my sketching and exploration process for this ARTDES 270 childrens’ book project looks like. I edited together 3.5″ x 3.5″ square illustrations and added text digitally to create a cover and four spreads.

If you saw last week’s post about the material explorations I did ahead of making the finished illustrations, you might recognize that I took cues from the thicker paints (gouache and digital) I experimented with to try using saturated application of watercolor in a similar way. I ended up pretty satisfied with the results, so I’m glad I took the time to play around with other mediums first.

 

 

The end result will become a physical board book made out of chipboard, but I haven’t made the prototype yet because I’ve been too busy with schoolwork and holiday break travel to assemble it. I may post the finished physical book in another column if anyone is interested in seeing it, however.

Once I return from my trip abroad, I’ll do my best to find some time to make sketches of what I saw and integrate them into future illustrative projects!

Industrious Illustrating #19 – Material Explorations

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Welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! This week I’m returning to discussing schoolwork and the creative process, as I’ve done for previous Industrious Illustrating columns.

For ARTDES 270: Visualizing and Depicting, we’ve been working on an assignment to create a short childrens’ board book about a letter of the alphabet. I ended up writing a book about mythological animals whose names start with the letter K. I made character designs and sketches in a mixture of watercolor and ink.

Before I made the final illustrations, I explored a few different approaches and mediums to figure out which one I liked best.

I tried gouache and colored pencil,

ink and collage, and digital painting.

In the end, I still ended up returning to using watercolors for the book project, but I now had a better idea of what I wanted to do with the character designs, compositions, and techniques in my final illustrations.

Next Friday I will post the finished layouts of my childrens’ book to compare between the conceptual process and the result. I hope everyone has a great and restful Thanksgiving break with the friends or family of their choice!