Friday, January 29, 2010

WIP - Roadblock

One of my goals for this year is to really start experimenting with a watercolor painting style. I've never really done it before and I think it's a medium that works really well for picture book illustration. I don't actually have watercolor paints, but I remembered that I have these really nice calligraphy inks that my aunt gave me one year for my birthday (probably back in high school) that I never really used. They ended up working wonderfully!




I only have one sized paint brush that works with watercolors, so things are starting to get a little muddy, but I'm happy with the direction this is going - especially for a first attempt with the medium! I still have a little more work to do before I'll feel like it's really finished. Pictures coming soon!

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Winter - Final

Here's the final version of the second print in my seasons Glicee print series: Winter. The biggest change from my original sketches was to make the foggy breath curl into an ice crystal/icicle formation. I've been limiting myself to 6 colors in each design which gives me a nice design challenge to work with. I really loved the rough shading that I had in the original sketches, but to keep it visually similar to the first in the series, I went with a flatter coloring method. I'm going to wait to have this printed until I have the other two images in the series complete, but hopefully that will be pretty soon!

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Winter WIP - Color blocking

Trying to figure out some quick color blocking on my Winter illustration. I think I'm going to go with the middle option.

Monday, January 25, 2010

"Winter" print -WIP

I've finally started to finish up the series of Mucha-inspired prints that I started with this illustration!
This is my initial rough sketch for "Winter." I wanted her to have a 1920's sort of style to offset the very nymph-y look of the original drawing (I also wanter her to feel very cold, while Autumn was very earthy). My inspiration for her outfit comes from all of the really creative street fashion blogs that I've been browsing lately. I'm still planning on doing a small run of Glicee prints for this illustration once I finish, and once I finish the entire series I'll do a collection of all of the four images together.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Viking Cat

My kitty loves to chew on my legs. I can only imagine why....

Drawn as a warm-up exercise in Photoshop. I realized that I've actually drawn a number of Vikings in the past 6 months. Strange...

Monday, January 11, 2010

Robots! Preview - Possum edition

I've been a busy little doodler this past week working on cranking out pages for the 3d web comic that Adam and I are preparing to launch in early February. I wanted to give a preview of the work I've been doing without showing off too much of the pages, so for now, enjoy this fine selection of possum drawings (taken from page 2 and 3 of the comic)!


I love drawing ugly little critters

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Illustration Friday- Renewal

This week's Illustration Friday theme is "Renewal." Because I was home last week for Christmas, I thought it would be fun to "renew" an illustration that I did when I was a kid. During pretty much all of my elementary school years I was obsessed with hamsters. I had them as pets, I played make-believe that I was one, and I would draw them all the time. Strangely enough, the hamsters that I would draw all had a few common features: they had giant heads, incredibly blood-shot eyes, and they all wore propellor beanies (I chalk this up to watching too many Looney Toons). I tried to find an example of an old hamster drawing, but the only one around the house appears sans beanie. The color scheme is a bit atypical as well since this particular hamster was drawn for an art class assignment where we had to use magic doodle markers, but you get the idea. So we have:

Creepy polka-dot hamster circa mid 90's

And my new, beanie bearing (and still incredibly creepy) hamster from January 5th, 2010