Posts Tagged ‘Illustration’

Before and After

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

This assignment’s theme was “before and after.” So broad, so full of possibilities …

I seem to be one of a rarity that doesn’t get completely disgusted by hair in my food. It’s something I’m kind of used to considering the amount of shedding my own hair does. Inspired by that, this cool guy’s got it all figured out with this dilemma. Snip snip.

Rough sketch:

BA_roughs

Digital color overlay:

BA_PSFinal:

2010-spaghettiAcylics, gouache on board

This assignment was mainly a style exploration. I really like this little character so you’ll be seeing more of him!

Can This Medium II

Saturday, April 24th, 2010

Second half of the Can This Medium post. Most of these pictures couldn’t fit in my scanner so excuse the photo quality! I’ll try to get an improved version as soon as I can.

Oil Paints (Water Soluble)

I was really scared to try oil paints at first because I thought they were a high-maintenance sort of thing, so I did a very simple, tentative piece. After using it, I have to say I really love the wet-on-wet technique and blendability of oils. I’ll probably revisit this one and add a bit more to the open space.

MD_oil“Beast”

Charcoal

Done on mylar, I copped out and used charcoal pencils for this one. I still have difficulty working with looser charcoal sticks, so this was mainly just a play on tone.

MD_charcoal“Twisted Fairytale”

Acylic Paints

This was my favorite piece in the entire course. It’s a square man, who wouldn’t like that? Been trying out geometric abstraction (you’ll see more in a bit).

MD_acrylic“Man and Machine”

Mix Media

Last project was a free-for-all-do-want-you-wanna type of assignment, otherwise known as mix media. Mine’s got pencil work, some paints and a big leafy collage paper.

MD_mix“Urban Legends”

And that’s it for this course! Next media studio 2 is all digital I hear. Fun stuff! I’ll need to get myself a functioning tablet by then …

Can This Medium

Saturday, April 10th, 2010

The 2nd year illustration kids were really lucky to get Harvey Chan to teach our Media course. He’s pretty much the master of all media and has so many different styles under his belt. All his demos were extremely useful and it’s really fascinating to watch him work.

I’m breaking this into a two part blog post of showcasing selected works in this class. Some tools and materials were completely foreign to me so I got pretty mixed (some could say “pretty ugly”) results which probably won’t make it onto this blog.

Ink-Gouache Resistance

This was the first assignment. If you don’t know what it is, it’s a really cool technique that gives a grungy effect to inkwork. In a jiffy, you paint in the negative space of your illustration with white gouache, let it dry then go over the entire surface with water-resistant ink. Dry and rinse with water and viola!

A combination of doing this last minute, concept complications and inexperience with the technique left me with this less than satisfying result …

MD_gouache“Love Is”

Ballpoint Pen

Pretty simple: drawing with ballpoint pen only there was a limitation using just the colors blue and red. I was surprised to find out that some of my classmates never actually use this medium. I use it all the time because you can get soft sensitive drawings without the smudging (like graphite does).

MD_ballpoint“Juxtaposition”

Chalk Pastel

I hadn’t used these since art class in middle school! I always loved chalk pastel because it was so smooth and blendable but for some reason never actually used it since then. I had a fun time doing this one and will definitely be using chalk pastels again.

MD_pastel“Portrait of a Clown”

Watercolor

I’ve used these before obviously, but only in either tube or palette form. For this one I tried out watercolor pencils and wow, the amount of control you get is awesome.

MD_watercolor “Recurring Dreams”

Part two will be posted in 2 weeks when I get my last piece back!

Lord of the Flies

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

Lord of the Flies (by William Golding) book cover redesign assignment. What a mouthful. I admit, I’m usually really lazy when doing rough work but I’ve been trying to invest more and more time. It really cuts the work in half in the long haul (awesome!):

LOF_Sketches

Rough Color in Photoshop:

LOF_PS

Final piece:

LOF_Final
Acrylic gouache background with colored pencils, graphite and ink.

Poster Reject

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

Another one of Gary Taxali’s assignment for my illustration class: create a human right’s poster for the Green Movement in Iran. My original concepts weren’t working. After sketching and sketching, I came up with this concept:

ILL_Iran

The night before the deadline, I decided to scrap it completely … too cliché … to ominous, and not really digging that face. After brainstorming with my sister,  I decided to go for something simple:

ILL_Iran2

Censoring journalists. I went ahead to go color it with watercolor and gouache and came out with this eye-sore … which I tried to helplessly fix in Photoshop.

ILL_Iran3

Still doesn’t work.