Comics & Bits from Winterlude

Since RISD's schedule is an odd little arrangement due to Wintersession, I just wrapped up a compact weeklong break from school. I was lucky enough to spend it visiting home to see some family...and get my wisdom teeth pulled. During the time I wasn't lying around wallowing in nausea and self pity, I managed to get a few minor things drawn. Here they are, in roughly reverse chronological order:

First page of a comic that I would like to continue in my free time...Kind of a light thing to explore some ideas and practice with nibz. 

I asked at the dentist's office if I could keep the tooth fragments, and they sent me home with the pieces (two intact, the rest in bits) inside a larger plastic tooth container. Pretty meta...Anyway, I wanted to colour this but I had some technical difficulties. Later.

I got to spend a hot minute at the Gauguin exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum with my dear parents and got some sketching in. I actually returned a couple days later and made some better drawings, which I can post when I return to PVD.

Very rushed drawings due to grumpy security guards.

A quick digital color thing applied to a sketchbook drawing. I forgot how much easier things are with a tablet...being stuck with just a mouse seemed to make the simplest Ps tasks a huge pain.

Pretty self explanatory? I really did often just eat slices of cheese with pizza sauce by the way. And it was delicious every time.

A couple revisions

I reworked two of my XX/XY projects slightly based on critiques I received in class and on the big scary world of the internet.

What's new? Text bubble, no more lines behind the figures, a few minor adjustments to the bodies. Most significantly, person #6 lost her giraffe legs and person #7 has top surgery scars. It's still not where I'd like it to be, but hopefully it is less problematic (visually & conceptually) than the original image. Next!

This was pretty difficult to revise since it started out as a fairly small ink drawing. Mary sat down in a chair and put on some pants (she's no longer stuck wearing an impractically long dress). Meanwhile, the plants on the right grew a an inch or so and jesus put on some brighter shoes. Half the revisions were made directly onto the original via white gouache and more ink, but the entire pants & chair area was drawn on a separate page and photoshopped in. A few more adjustments were made in photoshop to clean up stray marks. I wish I could have made Mary's halo smaller, but it turned out to be too time-consuming and frustrating a task to complete.

Sex Ed!

This week for XX/XY brought a "sex ed" assignment - to create a two page spread (implied that it is in a sex ed book for a chosen audience) or an instructive toy/game/object. The interpretation, audience, medium, etc. were all up to us. I made these two pages with the imagined audience of a fairly young girl, perhaps age seven. This was kind of about exploring a new process for me as well - I started with an ink drawing and tried to develop it to finish in Photoshop. It took longer for me to figure things out than a traditional process would have, which was very frustrating. I'm not 100% happy with it, but I feel like I learned a few things during this project in regards to brushes & workflow that may come in use in the future.

Shirt Design

I just finished up a shirt design for the Knowledge Bowl team of my dear alma mater, West Sound Academy. The zombie thing was their idea, I swear! I hope the team likes it and I'll be psyched to see how it prints in a couple of weeks.

Conceptor

This week in comics we had to make a page in colour, which was...intimidating to me. I looked very hard at some moebius comics and then made the comic you'll find below. I also included the sketchbook studies I made beforehand while I was planning it, for context. After class today, I made the digital version of the comic, to see what it would look like with cleaner, more solid colours. Next week is watercolour, so I'll be continuing this story into a second page.

first maya creation

Behold my first creation from my CGI class this semester: a poorly made cave! The assignment was to create an environment that told a story about a character without showing the subject him/herself. In the first image I hadn't figured out how to set the dropoff for lights, so the back part of the cave is still illuminated. whoops!

Electric Canvas Nonsense

Three of five photoshop collages made overnight for our first assignment in Electric Canvas (my wintersession painting studio).

see//taste wallpaper!

I made myself some computer wallpaper from my card back design. If you are so inlined, please enjoy it for your own computer as well! This version is intended for 1366x768 resolution, but in all likelihood it will look fine on other resolutions.

Card Back Design

Part of my illustration final!

Several Card Concepts

My final illustration project is to design the face cards (or more) and a backside to a deck of cards. Here are the concepts for my idea I will propose tomorrow. So far there is no king, hopefully I'll get around to that later today.

Backside Pattern

Nonsense Post.

I haven't been taking very many pictures of my work lately. So please enjoy these two random remnants from my brain this week. The first is another random printout gone wrong, the second is a comic I made while waiting around in studio about trying to stay awake in my 8am class. Better posts will follow soon, promise!

Obey Goobers

You'd think by November I'd have re-aligned the cartridges on my printer. But no. So right now my printer is in this weird limbo state of semi-functional where it gets colours wrong and puts stripes all over the image. Somehow I forgot about this, uh, special feature of my C4600 series and decided to print a photo. Rather than fixing the problem or printing my picture elsewhere, I wasted an hour or two playing around with printing multiple layers onto a single sheet of paper. Kind of like ghetto printmaking. The results were...surprising. I'll leave the value judgement up to you.

Anyway, this is one of the pieces I ended up with, I call it "Obey Goobers". This one is three layers of printing with limited outlining in micron. Weird stuff.

What creative process?

I thought a few people (ie my parents) might be interested in seeing some process images from my latest illustration assignment. The prompt was to create a New Yorker cover modeled after the original Eustace Tilley version. Our illustration class generally uses a two-week cycle of creation -- first week is concept sketches and second week is a finished product. For the first week, I submitted two digital sketches (see first two images in the triptych below). There's a lot of thinking behind each of them, but it suffices to say that they are both about bringing the character of Tilley to the digital age.

Unfortunately these ideas were not well received during group crit so I reinvented my idea to focus on Photoshop as a symbol for modern times. In photoshop, things are so quickly changed and their meanings inverted. It becomes a simple but chaotic process as toolbars and windows fill the screen; the process becomes unintelligible to anyone but the artist/manipulator.

What happens if we apply this to personal identity and style of the "hip" twenty-something?If Eustace Tilley is a symbol of the cultured, pensive individual, how would he feel obligated to dress or act today? Is changing one's attitude as simple as changing one's appearance to the outside world? These are the questions I wanted to evoke with my New Yorker cover.

The right-hand image is my first "draft" of the cover/screenshot. Below is my final piece after some revisions for clarity and composition.

Final image is an actual screenshot of a photoshop workspace with several small alterations (blue bar on left, mouse, etc.). I didn't quite accomplish what I was going for with this piece, but this kind of digital method left me pensive and curious to try again.

Hope this was, if not interesting, at least informative!

HL Fanart + Foot study + Photoshop practice

That's all there is to say...

Ink, 14x17

Ink, 14"x17"

Sketchbook, ink & pencil

Photoshop, 1200 x 2700 pixels

WSA Web Refresh

More stuff from my internship! I was assigned to create a new background (+header and footer) for my high school's web page for the new school year. The design isn't live yet, but hopefully once we have some time we can work out the details and put it up...

Stompbox Business Card Design

A month or so ago I designed the business cards for Stompbox Creative (where I'm interning). For anyone interested, here's what both sides look like:

WHY AM I SO BUSY ALL THE TIME

WHYYY???? But seriously I feel like I have things scheduled for every single day of my life right now. Anyway I still have that second page of my comic laying around with the same one unfinished panel as before. It's even drawn in, just not inked. I suck. Fortunately I was spurred to make a drawing for my fellow artist Helena as part of a quick art trade! Hooray! I drew her as one of my zombie characters and she drew me an excellent picture of me as a pirate riding a narwhal. THANKS HELENA!

I haven't worked in photoshop for a long time and damn, does it show. I'm glad I got around to picking up ye olde tablet again but its obvious that I need to dedicate more time to making character designs, etc in the program. I have about 1000 projects I would like to be working on but since I have so many other things going on in my life right now it's hard to sit down and focus on just one! Hrmf.