wrapping up the quarter and the school year

Can I just say that I am beyond happy this quarter is finally ending! It has been so stressful on so many levels, but I would say it has been by far my most productive quarter yet. I feel I definitely learned a lot about watercolor and painting in general. As you may have noticed, my strongest suit has always been drawing and I've been too intimidated by color media for far too long. I feel I've grown tremendous amount as an artist this school year and I can't wait to see how much further I've grown by the time I graduate next spring! Over the summer I plan to experiment with some other media and play around with my style some more so that I'll be ready to start developing my legit portfolio in the fall.
So without further ado, here is one of the illustrations from my book project this quarter as well as some of the preliminary sketches.

spring!

So this quarter all of my work has really been in watercolor, and I have to say for a while I was pretty discouraged about where my work was going, but then I read an interview with this one artist I really admire. She spoke on breaking into the industry and what now, but what I found most valuable was her display of images from her beginning and where she is now, a few years later, and the comparison was astounding. It made me feel so much better about where my work is not and where it has been heading and I look forward to the continuing growth of myself as an illustrator and fine artist. So continuing on my journey, here are two illustrations from this quarter.

This piece is one of the full page illustrations in my Book Illustration project. I'll be uploading other finished works from this assignment over the next week or so.

This work here was actually my first work of the quarter for my watercolor class. The assignment was to create a cover illustration for a children's food magazine. I'm not very happy with this anymore, as I feel I have made great improvements in my watercolors since completing this six weeks ago, but I'm posting it because I feel that I should be proud of the progress I am making and show where I am coming from. =)