12.30.2008

Nicole & Matt :)

One of my very good friends from work, Nicole, is getting married this January & asked me to draw a picture of her & her fiance. They were so much fun to draw & I'm so happy that she loves how it turned out! They are the cutest couple ever :) I even had that song "So Happy Together" running through my mind while I was drawing it (& I'm sure they will be)!

12.11.2008

One more for the road.

I think we all feel like this sometimes. I'll probably do a finished version of this someday.

MONSTERS!

Well, this is definitely not the best thing I've ever done, but it's also not the worst. I wish I could carry the energy from the sketch stage through to the finished piece. (Wow, check out that rustic-looking chalkboard - looks like it was pulled out of a lake!) I was a little concerned about the chalk boxes looking like they were cigarette boxes for some reason... apparently Goobley's a two-pack-a-day monster! (But he's trying to quit.)

Anyway, enjoy these monster sketches:


11.30.2008

The Birds

Start with an abstract shape - then make a bird out of it.

11.23.2008

Comin' at ya in 3-D!


That's right folks - break out the old 3-D glasses & take a gander at them snowflakes! -
Thanks to Jake for the idea! :)

Poindexter


I think this chair is an optical illusion.

11.22.2008

Blair Style



I have been pretending to be Mary Blair today. Heard of her? She was an incredible concept artist for Disney during the 1950's & worked on films like Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan & she designed the characters from It's a Small World! She has the cutest way of drawing children - So I drew up a little girl in footy-pajamas. It reminds me of Christmas when I was little, although I never actually had footy-pajamas, but I did get a brand new pair of pajamas that my mom sewed for me. They were so special, I just loved them!


This is just something out of my head one night when I was really tired & couldn't get to sleep. :)

11.07.2008

B&W!



I just love working in black & white! It's so much easier than color!! :)

These are from when I was young & naive... okay they're actually from a couple of years ago. I was digging through my old things and can remember how much I loved working on these two pictures.

The first is sort of a mechanical "unicorn" I drew while I was watching Aliens and the second is the interior of a car, both were done as assignments in illustration classes. :)

10.20.2008

Just for Fun

Whoa - I just realized that if I had made this girl a blonde she'd look like Janice from the Muppets! (well, sorta...) weird.

10.18.2008

Tea Party


Who hasn't imagined having a tea party with a dragon? This little girl is trying to teach a dragon the proper way to hold a tea cup - with your pinkie up! Well, this was done for an assignment and it was intense! -- I had to do about a zillion sketches & crank it out as fast as I possibly could. It was fun though. :) I was thinking of making the dragon more colorful at first, but opted for a more traditional looking one. I wish it looked a little more like the one from my thumbnail sketch. I need to work on carrying the spontaneity from my sketches through to the finished piece!

10.10.2008

Foxy!


More col-erase sketches! I would love to do a children's story starring these characters! -- The bunnies were so fun I couldn't stop drawing them! (I think I have about 10 pages of just bunnies!!). :)

10.07.2008

More charcoal dust!


Another charcoal on newsprint. I really struggled on this one - it didn't look like it was going to make it until the very end. I wish I'd been able to sit on the other side of this model - she had a few of these seashells throughout her hair and all I could see from my angle was the one on top. :( Great model though, lots of fun to draw.

9.27.2008

Figure Study


I think this is my favorite figure study from last semester, although the bandanna she's wearing should have been much lighter and I wasn't able to finish the body (oh well...). I was trying to work the whole dark against light and light against dark thing, along with lost edges. Charcoal on newsprint.

9.05.2008

Who Likes Art Nouveau?

This was a practice piece I did last summer. I was trying to practice painting on the computer since I hadn't done much art for about a year. (Seriously, I had to spend a year taking only general ed. classes - long story short not all associate degrees transfer...) It was probably the worst year I've ever spent in school. Anyway, I was transferring schools and was worried that I'd forgotten how to even draw. (It could happen!) So, this was practice so I wouldn't embarrass myself at the new school. I did a few sketches and picked one that I liked:

First, I sketch the drawing with a col-erase pencil, usually magenta or cyan. Then I do a line drawing over top of that with a super soft (6B-8B) pencil.

I scan the drawing into photoshop and remove the color-sketch in the Hue/Saturation menu by adjusting the lightness of that particular color. I do a few more adjustments (like levels, erasing stray lines, etc.) and then I set the layer mode to multiply. I chose an old paper for the background to add a little texture.

I started painting the BG first because I knew I wanted to use this blue color and set the mood with it. I like the way art nouveau has color washes, so I think I was going for that look. What I did here is select everything I want to apply the color to and made a layer mask over a gradient of the blue. I use layer masks all the time. Same thing with the texture, it's on a layer with the same layer mask as the gradient.

Again with the figure - layer masks. Once I make a mask for what I want to color, I don't ever have to worry about staying in the lines and I can do fast gradient or texture effects on a specific area if I want to. My favorite brush to paint with is the very last one in the dry media library. I usually set it to a low opacity.

This is really kind of a long process and I'm not really sure if I like it that much. It's probably not that much faster than traditional methods, but it's way easier to make changes. There's so many ways of doing the same thing that I wonder if I'm not doing things the long way.

So, here's the finished piece. I'm not completely happy with it (that drawing - yikes!), but I've definitely done worse. I learned a lot about digital painting by doing this piece and it helped me dip my feet back into the digital-water.

8.26.2008

This is what I draw in my spare time...



So, this first picture probably needs a little explanation. My sister Emily was telling me that her Native American astrological animal is the owl. So we looked up mine and it's the otter. I was a little jealous that I didn't get a cool animal like the owl or the bear. We ended up looking up everyone in my family and that's where this doodle came from. Left to right: My mom - deer, Emily - owl, Me - otter, Audrey - salmon, Patrick - goose, my dad - raven. (In case you're wondering my mom is supposed to be hiding a bunch of deer toys in a closet and the deer is her partner in crime. It's not really based on actual events, but it sort of is...)

The second picture was drawn in Ikea.

8.24.2008

Just Can't Get Enough

This little girl actually gave all these books to her mother and went back for more. True story.

8.21.2008

8.07.2008

Plastic Bag Kite

Well, I actually did see a little girl down the block flying a plastic bag like a kite. It was absolutely adorable.

7.18.2008

Just a little somethin'

So I got a new pen, it's pretty potent. These were really fun though.