Grow

Done for The Grey Journal's April Theme: Seeds, Roots, and Growth.

Watercolor and cut paper, photographed on a rock outside my apartment.

It lives!

Small illustrations from my final project of my final semester!

Drumroll Please

Finally getting around to posting those final prints for the printmaking assignment, and here they are!

Printmaking drawing/sketches

There is No Spoon and That's a really BIG cat

Get Something From Almost Nothing

When it comes to characters, a silhouette can be extremely informative, telling everything from their age to their attitude on life. Because it's essentially just a shape, you have to lead the eye to fill in the details and information itself, using what you do have to make the suggestions.


I might not have been thinking quite that far when I created these silhouettes for an assignment two years ago, but I think I understood the gist of attempting conveying a character and personality through a silhouette. Shape, angularity, posture, hair, props, actions and more all went into each of these character prompts. We were given the description and the template for the "album pages" and told to portray the characters. Take Aunt Adelaide the fortune teller and compare her to Aunt Reba the hairpiece saleswoman (below). They both have sharp features and almost angular faces, with overall round forms, however they both feel like very different people. Reba looks very prim and proper, possibly prudish because her posture is perfect, and everything from her clothes to her hair is exactly in it's place and fits perfectly - because of this and the position of her fingers she feels very stiff, and thus stuck up. Yet, Reba also feels like she's trying to hard, possibly because of the fact that she's trying on her own wares. Adelaide, on the other hand feels much more laid back and much less put together. This is conveyed through her slouch, the rumples and folds in the clothes that don't seem to fit quite right, and the hair that seems to be not-so-carefully done - another detail is the string the crystal ball is hanging from, which tells you that she's not too honest in her trade.


So even the slightest differences between the silhouettes of different characters can have a huge difference.

That being said, were I to be given this project now, it would likely be done rather differently just from what I've learned between then and now.

Excuse Me, But Do I Know You?

Well that was a lovely hiatus in which I worked way too much, finished a semester of school (only 3 left!), got engaged (To the wonderful mind and voice behind the Public Servants Quarters ) enjoyed a wonderful Christmas and break from school, worked entirely too much again, and started a new semester of school.

And here I am back again! Though only one image for today, because I think I'd rather have more frequent smaller posts than large posts that only happen once in a blue moon.

This image is from the 3D design class I took last semester, and more specifically from the Soft Sculpture project, which we were to use in a website design.

Clouds, Shiny Bowl, and Snow!

Our latest project in my Advanced Graphics class was a book cover series project. We each read three stories and did a series of three book covers for it. Simple, right?

Wrong. The difficulty lies in making the covers similar enough to be recognizable as a series, but different enough to make them individually interesting as well as not making the series boring. Basically you don't want your series to just be a fill in the blank template. I made them similar by using the same style and organization of the type (same fonts, put together the same way, separated by three lines, etc.) as well as by making the illustration be a mix of a photograph and a drawing. They're made different by the placement of the text (this is a big thing that it's flexible), using different media for each drawn portion (Top: Ink, Middle: Charcoal, Bottom: Graphite), as well as just having different illustrations.




My favorite is The Snowfall.

Come One, Come All

This time, I display the circus poster done for my 3D illustration class, made via paper sculpture and photoshop. Enjoy!

Snow White and Rose Red

Not to be confused with Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. No relation other than the name.

This was an assignment for my 3D Illustration class. We picked a fairy tale from the list, found a model and had them pose for us and then adjusted/aged the image and created a page layout for a collectors style book.

So without further ado:


And this image by itself in all it's fake aged glory:

With a Flourish, Part 3

See, I said I'd keep going.

This is a continuation of my discussion/explanation of the why and how behind my design at this blog. (Part 2 is here, Part 1 here).

Today's discussion? Vectors.

Most images you see around the internet (if not all) are what's called bitmap images. These images are composed of, essentially, a map of colored dots, or pixels, that all form the image. The way that bitmap images are composed means that when you enlarge them, all you're doing is enlarging the pixels, so the result you get is a blocky, or 'pixelated' image. Vector images are different. Instead of creating a line by putting one pixel after the other, after the other, vector images create a line by using math, an equation, which tells the program that this line should be so wide, should start and stop with this length/proportion and should be this color. Because of this, you can endlessly enlarge vector images because the equation stays the same, you're just proportionally increasing the numbers in the equation. Okay, so thats how I understand it to work, anyway, but I haven't had math in years, so I'm a bit mathematically challenged at this point.

Anyway, the point being that vector images can be much sharper at every size than bitmapped images because it's relying on math instead of a colored sequence of pixels.

Because of this quality, I wanted to create the swooshes and swirls for the background design as vector images, both so I wouldn't have to worry about the rough edges from my pen marks, and I could make sure it was much more even. I wanted my circles to actually be circles, instead of my shaky hand's approximation of circles. It also allowed me to have consistent line widths where I wanted it - and over all, just have much more control over the forms.

Unless people are curious, I won't go into the intricacies of how exactly I created the image via vectors. Lets just say I made use of lots of circles and ovals as guidlines for myself.


The headline was also vectored - but for that, I wanted to incorporate Art Nouveau typography (which was very flowing and hand done. Made to fit the specific area) But I also wanted to tie the background into the header to make them relate to each other - but I didn't want it to just be text stuck inside a border.

I tried several sketches before coming up with one I could work with.


I started off with only partial borders, encorporating the same kind of swooshes and spirals in the background, but they weren't quite working for me. So I tried again.


I found this one to be more in the direction I was looking for, so I decided to run with it. I had to change the dimensions from my sketch in order for it to be the right size for the header, and some other changes and additions were made during the vectoring - but that tends to happen anyway.

Here's the final header:

American Proverbs

The assignment? Take an "American Proverb" and illustrate it with found objects.

The result? Take a look:

Studies

Just a couple more sketches and studies from the Twelve Dancing Princesses project. This time using marker to help with making the sketches more readable.

The Original Invisibility Cloak?

The train derailed again, and this is me trying to get it back up. Part three of the blog design stuff will come soon. But for now, have this. It's a motif-thing to go with the story/Fairytale The Twelve Dancing Princesses. Displayed are the branches with the silver, gold, and diamond leaves, as well as the goblet from the dance.

Yay for quick photoshop jobs! There should be more to come on this, possibly with an explaination.

(Read the story here)

With a Flourish, Part 2

In my last post I mentioned the work that went into the graphics of my design here, at Laura's blog. I also mentioned that I'd go into a bit more depth about it.

This may become a few part series.


I started out doing a good amount of research, looking at different styles within Art Nouveau. For each one I found that I liked and though might work, I sketched it down in my sketchbook, both to keep it in my mind, and so I've have everything in one place when I needed references. This way, I could also have all the different styles all there to look at so that I could mix and mesh the different things. The sketches with stars and arrows pointing at them are the styles I thought would work best. I wanted something more flowery, flowy, and less geometric.

Once I had these images in my head, I mulled them over, turned them around, mixed and matched them in my mind. And sketched. A lot. On whatever was available when the idea or urge came to mind.

Like my arm, for example.

Soon, though, I was working on finalizing a design I liked. I started here.

I wasn't quite satisfied with this, it seemed a bit too much, too involved. So I tried again.

This one felt much better, the trapped flower worked well, but it didn't quite have the feel I was going for. I thought maybe something between this and the first one.

My third attempt was better, but it just didn't flow nearly as well as the first two.


This was my last try and the final inked design. This is the one I ended up vectorizing. It had some of the more flowery aspects of the first design, while also being a bit more open and simple like the second, but still flowed well, which fixed the problem of the third.

Next up: Vectoring! And possibly the header.

With a Flourish

I've mentioned it a few times this summer, but in the void of work that was this summer I had a wonderful friend, Laura, who hired me to redesign her blog. As a French major, she writes her blog in French -- anything from translation tips to information about the internship she did in France a couple years ago. Amusingly, this didn't help me much, because I don't know a lick of French, but thankfully she was there to translate for me when I needed it.

The blog started out with just the Blogger Minima Template. Two columns, black and white text, and that's about it. Laura wanted a more open layout, one that didn't squeeze the text of the blog space into a tiny little area like the template had it. She also wasn't big on the one column of text being the only thing that made it to the bottom.

So, my directions were to un-squeeze the text, to make said text seem not so alone on the bottom portion of the page, and, lastly, to give the blog an Art Nouveau feel. Otherwise I had almost complete freedom.

(For those that don't know, Art Nouveau is a style/time period of art and design in the late 19th, early 20th century. It focused on very organic, flowing forms. It was VERY decorative, and quite frankly, it's my favorite period in art. Read a little more about it on wikipedia -- also, if you know who Alphonse Mucha is, he was one of the more famous artists for the style and period.)

This is the finished result.

I started with the layout, and once I got that fixed up I went onto the Art Nouveau portion. I did research, sketches of that research, and sketches of my own for the background image - and then for the Header. The sketches were vectored (A vector image is one that can be resized without losing quality) as a way to give them a clean, crisp look. But the thing I had the most issues with was the transparency/opacity behind the main portion of the blog itself - the coding was a bit difficult to figure out and find.

I'll be posting again soon to show a bit more of the thought and process that went into the design and graphics of the blog.

Past Due

Remember that children's book illustration for The Giving Tree? Well, I've been saying for a while that I was going to show the character design sketches for that. Now that I've finally dug that sketchbook out of the box it was in (I'm one and a half boxes away from being completely unpacked!) I can share!


So here we have the typical character turn around on the top of the page (And on a few of them, you can see the base shapes and forms I used to make the character), but what made this one interesting is having to design him at different ages. The age difference is so vast, that I was worried about not being able to recognize the character as the same -- So, to prevent this, I made an effort to keep some of his features similar. For example, his head-shape doesn't change through the years, and though his nose gets somewhat bigger, it stays the same basic shape. I also kept his eyes the same.

Oh! And for those wondering, I have found a job! I'll be working at my campus bookstore - yay minimum wage?

Brother Wart

So while working on the graphics for that blog I'm working on I was reminded of an old assignment, one from a couple years back, an avatar project. We were to pick a person - living or dead, real or fiction - and create four avatars, or representations, of them. These avatars had to represent different aspects of that person.

Obviously I chose King Arthur, British legend, king, and hero. I chose, also, to use birds as the avatars, partially because according to some versions of the legend he was turned into animals by Merlin as a child as a way to learn lessons. I also really like birds (This reason outweighs the first). The songbird represents the fact that he was loved by his people, the eagle represents his power, the owl his wisdom, and the heron his nobility.



The originals had all the bird with little crowns, but I thought that looked silly and unneccesary when I looked things over today, so I took them out. However, the owl still looks pretty keen with his crown.