I'm alive!

Hello everyone! Sorry for the extreme length between my last entry! To be honest, I really haven't had anything to present to you guys! I've had such a busy quarter so far and have produced nothing really illustration wise! I'm taking an oil painting class, and we just finished our first two projects, so when I can photograph them I'll be sure to post those. We also just learned how to build our own canvas frames and all that jazz, and I must say was pretty proud of myself for managing not to mess mine up!

The illustration course I'm taking this quarter is Type and Image, and it's pretty much all about the graphic design aspects that relate to illustration and I haven't really created any imagery. This has been really frustrating for me since I'm obviously trying to build my portfolio. I'm sure I'll be eating my words when I'm actually taking the portfolio class next quarter, haha!

I've been sketching in my sketchbook though, but otherwise I haven't made any personal pieces due to lack of time. I now teach Zumba five days a week, on top of my presidential duties for Zeta Kappa Delta! I'm trying to take some time for myself this weekend to get some personal imagery completed though, maybe for Illustration Friday or something. I'd like to get back to updating this blog regularly as well, but to do that I of course have to have something to show you guys! So though it's not much today, I do have a little spot illustration for you.

"Pixies play poker on petals to pass the time"

Illustration Friday: Caged

Here's my entry for this week's Illustration Friday theme! I tried a bunch of new things with this work. First off all, I painted the whole image on Illustration board, and realized I love watercolor paper a WHOLE lot more! I also tried to work some colored pencils over that, but I wasn't really pleased with the texture it added to the water color, so another lesson learned there! What I did like however was all the digital editing to the piece. So slowly but surely, I'm figuring out a way of working =)

Anyway, I'd love some critique on this! Let me know what you think.

Paisley

This piece was meant for an Illustration Friday a couple weeks back, but I was too busy with choreography at the time to get it all scanned in and put the separate scans together in Photoshop, but I had some spare time this evening so I fixed it up. I'm inking another piece right now and I'll post that tomorrow, both inked and uninked. Opinions and critiques are, as always, welcome!

Illustration Friday: Giant

Hey guys! This is my entry for this weeks Illustration Friday! The theme this week is Giant, so I went ahead with a children's book interpretation in watercolor and ink. I think I'd like to really get away from inking my work, so I think I'm gonna try some new approaches involving either gouache or acrylic, so we'll see what turns up over the next couple weeks.

summer projects

hey guys! I hope everyone is having a wonderful summer season! Mine has been so hectic the past several weeks as I have been choreographing a production of the musical Back to the 8Os which has been a really fun experience, but very time consuming! However my time on the production is coming to a close and I've been really trying to get organized with my illustration work so I can start sending out mailers and emails. Unfortunately, a major problem I am running into is my lack of a large scanner in Louisiana, enabling me only to scan in my smaller projects and sketches. Does anyone know of a solution to this? I'm going to stop by the UPS store tomorrow to see if they can scan images, but if anyone knows of another place I could try please let me know! Otherwise, I can't post much that I'm working on until I get a hold of a scanner. Until then though, I have a piece I completed that I'm considering for the homepage of my website and I need some opinions.

Ink, or no Ink?

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. =)