Unicorn lions and feather girls

Not too much to report at the moment, just plugging along with my consistant workload. Despite my constant pursuit of the holy grail that is a good nights sleep, I'm really loving this just non stop work mode I'm in. I'm really enthused about all of my projects, and my views on illustration and design are rapidly evolving. 

I believe I previously mentioned that we recently had a patterning workshop with the amazing Julia Rothman here in the MICA ILP MFA program. I have an entire collection in the works, but I really enjoyed my sketch from the workshop so I decided to bring that to final. 

Additionally, I have an upcoming assignment that requires depicting an obscure fictional land. While it is not the one that I have chosen, I was fascinated by the concept of feather island. The inhabitants are all women who instead of hair have feathers and are birthed from exotic bird eggs. Their queen is born from the phoenix egg and therefore is ever reborn. The lowly citizen come from furry caterpillar eggs and therefore have wiry hair instead of feathers. This is definitely a world I plan to explore more in my spare time, but I took some time to doodle these lovely ladies in the meant time. 

That's about it for now, so until next time, best wishes!

~Josh

We're not in Kansas anymore!

The Wizard of Oz (along with most fairy tales and stories from my childhood) holds a very dear place in my heart. Most importantly, I associate the story with my late grandmother who played a large role in my life and really helped to pave the yellow brick road to my artistic career. That being said, it's been something I have been wanting to address for a while, and I was really excited when I finally got the opportunity to do so.

I really find myself enjoying working digitally these days. I have several other pieces on the horizon, a few of which are traditional, so I am excited to see how my recent work in this format will speak to my hand with traditional media. I look forward to sharing this with you all, and until next time, Best Wishes!

~Joshua

Tarot cards again

The Queen of Wands

Judgement

So for my latest assignment in digital, we were randomly given two tarot cards and had to choose one to illustrate. Being a grad student, I decided it would behoove me to go ahead and do both. I definitely had a lot of fun with both of these, and I'm excited to continue to explore more digital work. For those of you unfamiliar with the meanings of these cards, you should check out Biddy Tarot, it's a great site that has a pretty detailed account of each card. 

Interestingly, I've done a tarot assignment before. It was in my digital illustration course during the first quarter of my junior year at SCAD. I actually think one of which was the Queen of Wands. Unfortunately, I think I lost the files on my old laptop, but I would love to show you all a comparison. From what I recall, these would be a major improvement haha. 

Coming next, I'll have my reinterpretation of The Wizard of Oz with some sample publishing work. I'm really excited to plow through that work this weekend. Until then, best wishes!

~Josh 

Happy Valentine's Day!

Here's a quick little doodle I did for my good childhood friend for Valentine's day. We've been "married" status on facebook for the past four years to save each other from those awkward facebook relationship status moments haha, and we usually celebrate valentine's day and our "anniversary" as well for fun. Since we've been friends since we were four, she's also probably my longest running Valentine =).

Anyway, I have a lot of other projects coming up on my front including: Space Oz, a couple tarot designs and some patterning stuff which I'm pretty excited about. I look forward to sharing all of this with you guys in the coming weeks! Until then, best wishes!

~Josh

I'm going digital!

So I'm two weeks into my second semester of grad school, and it is already busier than the end of the last haha. It's all totally worth it though, and I'm really loving my classes and projects this semester! We have an amazing unit coming up with licensing and patterning with Julia Rothman that I'm really looking forward too. So far though, I think the highlight of my course load is my digital course with Kali. I'm feel that I've already gotten a great deal out of it and we still have plenty yet to go. My first piece for the course was an editorial illustration with the prompt "giving up something in order to gain".

This image was my solution to the problem. I really love my large, floppy hats, and the more decorative the better! We also did a really quick, fun character design collab to prepare us for our next assignment where one person made a silhouette and the other completed the design. I wanted to share it with you guys because my good friend Lisa Perrin and I worked on this together, and she's really talented so you should all go check out her work! 

(I did the silhouette and Lisa did the sweet line details!)

And to wrap up the post, I did a quick doodle of my Sugar Rush Racer self again to try out something a bit different while working digitally. 

I have to say that I'm definitely excited about using digital media again, and I think finding a balance between my traditional and digital techniques will really help to evolve my work. So in the words of Walt Disney, I'll just KEEP MOVING FORWARD!

Until next time, best wishes!

~Josh

P.S. did anyone catch the Digimon reference in the post's title, or am I just an uber nerd?

Dorothy Gale Redesigns

These are some rough sketches for a current project in my Book Illustration course. We had to take a well known character and redesign them in five new ways. Next we will be selecting one and move forward with a completed illustration. I'm not sure which I'm going to go with yet. Though I'm drawn to the space Dorothy most, I'm already doing so many other space girl projects that I think I should branch out a bit haha.

~Josh