Happy Holidays and crazy dreams

Hey everybody! I'm still a little bit busy right now, but I thought I'd share my semi-Christmas themed picture I finished the other day.


Yeah... This is the product of the insane dreams I had during finals this pass semester and boy, were they a dozy! I started getting into the habit of writting them down to remember them.

"I was going out Christmas shopping with my mom, which is a normal, but we were shopping at a Bradlees, which has been closed for years… I haven’t been in one since I was like, ten. Then Mr. Spock pops out of nowhere and starts helping me Christmas shop… For some reason after that, I’m in a shopping cart with my hands up in the air shouting, “Whee!” Spock is pushing me around in the cart and he has the same perpetual :| expression on his face while he’s doing it. I lol’d. We went all around Bradlees, and then into the mall area, through the halls, up and down the escalators, (I don’t know how we managed that…). I have no idea where my mom wondered off to… Then we ended up on the moon, but it wasn’t the regular moon, it was that “moon city” moon from episode 22 of Excel Saga, minus the Puuchus.



We walked around for a bit… then I woke up."
-

My dreams became more surprisingly detail oriented as the week went on. They go from me wanting waffles and my laptop, to me and my animation classmates clashing with the cast of Glee. I wish I kidding.

I hope I get a chance to draw them all. :)

MassART T-shirt contest designs!

This is for MassART Animation's annual T-shirt contest. This is completely hand drawn with pencil and ink. I made three entries.



I actually won last year which was great. However, I still feel like I have no chance of winning regardless, because within minutes they had all ready picked a favorite and seemingly ignored everyone else's :(

Oh well, at at least I won once.

Color 3 Ways Project

I usually don't clean my sketches this much, but I was bored while I was waiting for a student-teacher conferrence and had nothing else better to do.

Tigger & Salem :)


I was thinking about making this into a personal project called: "Color 3 Ways Project" which as it sounds, is me coloring a sketch in three different ways. I'll post them up when I do some more.

I'm doing something, I promise...

Agrh... I've been so distracted by final year of school and other crappyness, that I've neglecting my blog... more than usual :(

I put this together really quick... I've been doing some color collaborations lately. Nothing big, but I thought I'd share.


Line work by Bryan Lee O'Malley. Colored in Photoshop CS3.



Line work by Brittany Inglese. Colored in Photoshop CS3.



Line work by Brittany Inglese. Colored in Photoshop CS3.

I realized I really like coloring line work other than just my own. It's fun! Send me a suggestion for some stuff to color if you'd like :)

This is a copyright page!

Without the copyright... ^^;



It's mostly blank for the reason that if Artist In Wonderland were to be published, this is where all of the copyright would go.

"Artist In Wonderland" title page

From the comic I made during my Narrative Illustration class. I'm coloring it now. Drawn with pencil, colored in Photoshop :)

"Artist In Wonderland" centers on an art college student who has a drab outlook on life until one day she is thrown into the world of chaotic world of Wonderland.

Influence Map

Yeah, hi. Long time no post, I know. Hopefully, I'll get to post more interesting stuff before school starts up again. In the meantime, I thought I'd share my "Influence Map" A map of old and new influences. A meme started on deviantART.

Working on Stuffz...

Here are the stuffz...



Wow, this summer is going by so fast! Bummer... :(

Artist In Wonderland Preview: Progress Page 10

Oh my gosh! I can't believe I'm updating this thing within a month! :O

Go me!! :D

Anyway, I thought I'd share the process work for one of my upcoming comics I'm doing this summer, "Artist In Wonderland". The comic was created for my Narrative Illustration class.



The story is about me as I journey from the real world to Wonderland on a really bad day. The story features me and my friends Amanda Myers, Erika "Rew" Hapke, and Andrew Clapper.


Here's the process work of page 10


First, I drew a crappy little thumbnail drawing of the page. It's about 2 and a half inches in size.



Next, is the bigger thumbnail drawing that maps out the final page. This is about 4 x 5.5 inches in size.



After that, is a clean sketch of the final comic page. The page was drawn at 12 x 16 inches in size.
NOTE: Since this comic was intended to be sketchy (by both my teacher and myself), there is no need to ink the sketch. It can be colored right after this step.



After I scan the picture on to the computer, it's time for coloring! My favorite! I start off with only flat colors.



Then, I add the shadowing. Three layers of shadows were used for this page.



Finally, the highlights. I LOVE shininess!

And there you go! <3


So...What do you think? :D

Holy Updating, Batman! Also, a Giant Purple Crab fell to Earth!

Oh man... I have been so bad with updating this thing. I'm sorry, I've just been so busy as of late... ^^;

I've been completely done with classes for the summer for a little under a month, and let me tell you something: I am so relieved! Degree Project (DP) was NO joke... I barely finished it! And while not totally satisfied with it, I have to at least pat myself on the back for completing something so crazy and difficult. I had to drop one of my critical studies classes just to focus more on DP and I still didn't have enough time! I'll post the mostly finalized version of my Degree Project movie here soon, but I wanted to update the DP blog with all the extra progress work first ^^;

My Animation Portfolio class was really great! I was really stressed at times because I was worried about finding time to work on DP, but it was so awesome getting our professional stuff done. I'll show you all the business cards, dvds, and dvd covers, I did in another post soon! Also, I really need to thank my teacher for being so understanding about my situations with DP throughout the semester. You rock Steve! :D

Narrative Illustration, the class I busted my butt to get into, did not, unfortunately, live up to my expectations, mainly because of the professor who taught the class. Their bad attitude, short-temper, tactlessness, and unwillingness to take responsibly for things, made for a difficult working environment and made me all too glad that I was part of the Animation Department.

Unpleasantness aside, I did learn a lot of great things about narrative illustration. One of our assignments for the class was to make a children's story book with some very odd constraints.

The teacher gave me and each of my classmates a small plastic toy sea creature or insect. We then had to create a short story that started and ended in 8 pages or panels featuring the creature we were given. Also, the story had start with the line, "One Fine Day, a giant _______ fell to earth."

Since I got a purple crab, guess what mine was about... That's right! A DOG! :D


Anyway, I wanted to make the style cute and fun, for a children's book, but also simple to draw as possible. This was because I would have to complete multiple other assignments for this class during this assignment, and I had to worry about work from other classes... Like DP.



I first started the assignment by sketching the whole story on (crappy) normal paper. It didn't need to be perfect, but it had to be clean enough that others could understand it and that I would be able to change it if needed.



Next, linework. I wanted a very clean, but simplistic line, so I decided to do the linework in Flash.

I couldn't figure out at first how I wanted to color it, but I did want to experiment. Finally, I came up with the idea to try a technique I learned from my super awesome teacher from last semester, John Roman.



The technique involved painting with watercolor on watercolor paper or bristol board, then scanning the paper into Photoshop and applying the watercolor to the figure, background, etc.



It didn't make much since, as they only ended up taking the two sheet paper copy version, but my teacher strongly suggested I bind my book together, for the reason that it was meant to be viewed as a storybook. My teacher lightly mocked my lack of book binding skills, and though annoying, it was true. But hey, I did the best I could.



So here's it is the finished product in "comic form", the way I handed it to my teacher.

And before you say it, yes, I know it's missing the word "do ", but I'm not going back through several Photoshop documents just to change it. I'm lazy, I admit it :P

This was a cool assignment and I was very happy with the results. I'm not interested in writing children's books, however I think I would definitely consider illustrating one.

Anyway, thanks for reading! Hopefully I'll have more work up sooner than later... >.>

My Demo Reel! :D

More to come soon! :D

Children's Book Illustration revamp

It's been a while... Crap. >.<

I have been dying to update this thing for a while now but between the stress of my Degree Project and me having to Full Restore my computer twice within a six month period, it has been nearly impossible to do so...

Anyway, since I have a lot to post, I'm going to put my certain art pieces in there own seperate post :D

First, I'm currently taking Narrative Illustration, which I was dying to get into. Admittedly, it is a little frustrating dealing with my teacher, as she can be rather confusing to understand and quick to become agitated at times, but for the most part I am enjoying taking the class.

This is for my first assignment for the class, which was to was revamp a 60's children book we received at random.



All of my other classmates were super happy with their choices, but I got the lamest one though... "How we celebrate Spring holidays" So I did the best thing I could think of, which was redrawing the pictures."

This was the first time I used a Stabilo marker pen to ink my work. Secretly, I always wanted to have a gray inking pen to help make my marker drawings more painterly, but I didn't even know the existed until recently! :D

I think my teacher was a little disappointed in my book, as I don't think she thought I pushed enough to better the story. I just couldn't get my mind to wrap around of how to "better" the book, as the text was seemingly fine and to the point as it was... The pictures however, were rather dull, so that's what I decided to change. In addition, the assignment was first pegged as a one week job, which meant I had to rush in terms of how I was going to get the book completed. I ended up cutting out ten other holidays to be able to finish the assignment on time which was fine, but it didn't give me a lot of time to plan.