Tag: watercolor

Industrious Illustrating #60 – Botanical Gardens 3

Robin Leave a comment

Hello, and welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! This week I’m going back to talking about my classwork for “Making Science Visible”. We recently finished our botanical illustration project where we each illustrated a plant at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens to be later compiled into a map for visitors to identify plants of interest in each biome with. Our first set of drawings are now printed out and on display at the MBG in the hallway leading up to the entrance of the indoor gardens! I personally did my painting first on paper with watercolors and inks and then digitally retouched the painting, but some of my classmates did their drawings entirely traditionally or entirely digitally. I’d definitely recommend taking a look in the near future to see how we all approached the subject matter!

My work is currently hanging in the hallway at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens alongside the work of my classmates!

Something else I did this week was stop by the UMich Natural History Museum to take reference pictures of their microscopes. Our next class project will be creating and redoing various illustrations for the Natural History Museum’s educational materials, and I volunteered to make illustrations for a revamped tutorial for using the microscope. While I was there, I also asked some of the student volunteers about the microscope’s specs and learned that the base model is a National 215 Microscope. I’m glad that I took time out of my day to gather reference materials in-person, and I’m sure that this will be a unique and challenging illustration project.

That’s all for this week! Next week I’ll be in Seattle to vend at Sakuracon, so I’ll probably be making my weekly arts ink blog post the week after. I just finished finalizing my last merch order last night for the con, so I definitely feel like taking a break from drawing for at least a couple of days (I have 2 orders of keychains and 1 order of prints on the way). To that end, I plan to spend more time with my friends and watch a movie or two this weekend. I hope every one of you guys will also have a restful weekend!

Industrious Illustrating #58 – Botanical Gardens 2 Electric Boogaloo

Robin Leave a comment

Hello and welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! This week I actually have some watercolor and ink sketches I made at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens for the aforementioned map project. I picked the Meyer Lemon plant from the Mediterranean/temperate biome because of its fragrant flowers and fruit providing interesting subjects to paint. It’s been a long time since I last used watercolors, but getting to work with them again reminded me of why I love them so much — there’s just something so charming and beautiful about the layered translucent shades and letting them settle into their own texture on the page.

One of these days I want to do watercolor painting more again — maybe with mechs, since I’ve only really drawn mechs digitally — and at that point I think I’ll have to buy another watercolor paint palette because my current one is at least six to eight years old now and shows every bit of its age! Anyway, I hope everyone will get to enjoy spring break next week and maybe even rekindle their love for an art medium they haven’t touched in ages!

Industrious Illustrating #19 – Material Explorations

Robin Leave a comment

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!

Industrious Illustrating #12: A New Semester

Robin Leave a comment

A new season means a new semester, and a new semester means a new Industrious Illustrating banner! It’s been a while since I last posted to this blog, and I hope that the summer was a restful or productive time for all of you, whichever one was your goal. While I have some exciting new projects I want to share with you guys over the next few weeks, I want to focus first on a brief recap of a few pieces I made over the summer.

For most of the summer, I was spending time living with my parents in Hong Kong. We lived pretty close to the beach, so sometimes I’d go down to the beach and look for interesting-looking animals in the sand and rocks. Attached are a few watercolor and ink sketches I made of a Fiddler crab, as well as some clams, sea urchins, and sea snails I found when the tide was low.

Aside from sketching the wildlife, I also made more refined illustrations based off of the scenery and sights I saw in Hong Kong, albeit with a few changes for artistic effect. For example, one of the new pieces on my year 2 banner features a tiger girl dressed in summery clothing while leaning over the railing of a staircase next to overgrown terraces. This is actually based off of a real staircase near my summer home that led down to some tropical fruit trees and a tiny beach (though it wasn’t the one I frequented).

               

If you look at the other side of the new banner, one of the pieces I added features a girl floating in a brightly lit vestibule as if she’s in a spaceship. This is actually inspired by the Moncler clothing store display in Hong Kong’s International Commerce Center, which always caught my eye when I was walking from the Kowloon MTR stop through the ELEMENTS shopping mall and the ICC lobby. I made a few tweaks to the lighting to make it look more dramatic, but otherwise I kept it close to the reference in an attempt to capture what I liked about the design.

For a side by side comparison:

       

Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten around to making more studies of the sights I saw in Hong Kong, or even more pieces inspired by what I saw in Hong Kong, but I’ll be sure to work on some and post them when I have time!

What did you guys do over the summer? I would love to hear about it in the comments.

Art Biz with Liz: Watercolor Cacti

Elizabeth S Leave a comment

Earlier this semester, I learned about a watercolor workshop for students through Passport to the Arts. By using Passport to the Arts, I registered with Flipside Art Studio for a Zoom class and picked up a free art kit. I recently added my own flair to the painting by using black Sharpie to outline my cacti and provide detailing. While my watercolor painting turned out differently than the instructor’s version, I was relatively happy with how it turned out and wanted to share it with you!

 

Creating this painting was one of my first times working with watercolors since I was a child, and it was interesting to play around with them. At times, I accidentally painted blotches on the page or had the paint bleed in a way I didn’t intend it to, as it’s easy for watercolor paint to bleed if wet paint gets too close to another color. I worried about it ruining the painting, but “mistakes” such as these turned into opportunities to play around with new shapes and create interesting visual effects, like gradients.

On one last unrelated note, I hope this Thanksgiving break proves to be a restful and rejuvenating time. It might be a great opportunity to take a break from schoolwork and do that art project you’ve been dying to do (like watercolor painting!). Whether you stay in place or share the table with family, my whimsical watercolors and I are wishing you a safe and happy holiday.