Amethyst

I have been obsessed with Brianne Drouhard's Amethyst Princess of Gemworld since the moment I saw a preview of it for DC Nation. I've been meaning to doodle her for a while, and after a silly twitter conversation with Brianne yesterday about the fate of Gemworld, I decided it was time to. I hope y'all enjoy it =)

~Joshua

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

So Much for the Cake

A recent challenge at the Square Carousel Illustration Collective was to create an illustration inspired by one of your favorite movies. While it was a tough decision, I eventually went with one of the movies that inspires me most visually. I really wanted to try out some hand lettering because I have such admiration for artists who are able to do it well. I definitely hope to explore it more in the future!

So, I saw this fashion blog recently and a couple of the images inspired me to depict my District 1 ensemble for the Opening Ceremonies of the Hunger Games. For those unfamiliar with the Hunger Games, after the tributes are selected(to compete in a televised fight to the death), they are showed off to the Capitol during the parade of the Opening Ceremonies and are all garbed in really outlandish outfits that are representative of their District. District 1 is the luxury items district. 

The concept behind the outfit is to resemble a white diamond, so the tributes’ bodies would be painted white, and there would be structural, prismatic shaped translucent fabrics containing fiberoptic material that would wrap around the figure to create the effect of a jagged, jewel-like texture. 

Also I thought you might like to see some of the process work for the piece below. 

Also, Blythe Russo and I have some time again to pick back up on our character sketch blog Glitter and Graphite! As our welcome back post, we each depicted our favorite Harry Potter characters. It was a close call for me, but I think it had to be Fleur Delacour. Goblet of Fire is my favorite of the books, and not to sound superficial, but I relate a lot to her in the books. I also identify with certain aspects of Hermione and Luna, but I think in the end, Fleur is who i have to hand it to, haha. 

Keep an eye out for this next weeks post with the goal to design a mermaid character. This has actually inspired me for a small project that I'm looking forward to sharing with you guys, but I'm going to have to keep it under wraps a bit longer! In the mean time, I hope everyone is having a wonderful new year and you haven't given up on those resolutions yet! 

Girl on Fire

I'm currently planning out a large illustration of Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games, but the books are really important to me and I want to make sure I really get it right. So I've been sketching up Katniss in a number of ways and this is one of the more finish sketches so I thought I might just throw it on the web to share with you guys!

Rue's Death

This image has been sitting around in my sketchbook for ages, so I took some time off from all my preparations for grad school apps to have some fun and bring it to a finished piece. Though I've done many Hunger Games inspired pieces, I realized this is the first illustration I've actually done based on the book. I hope you guys who are fans enjoy it! For those who haven't read the books yet, hop to it! There are just seeping with inspiration! 

Some recent challenge

I'm afraid I've neglected my blog the last couple of weeks guys, so I'll have to apologize for that! Between the sites I'm a member of, commissioned work, and teaching painting lessons, I have been a bit swamped! All of the craziness seems to be dying down a bit now, which is great because I have graduate school apps to start preparing! Anywho, here are some illustrations I've been working on between Square Carousel and Glitter and Graphite!

Taking home with you

This is my second challenge for the Square Carousel Collective. The theme was "Home away from Home". Initially, I really wanted to illustrate the opening scene from The Hunger Games when Katniss is in the woods she hunts in. However, upon my re-read of the first chapter, I realized my illustration would have been kind of forced to fit in the scene and also, that wasn't the scene from that chapter that I would really like to illustrate. For a while now I've been planning to illustrate the Hunger Games chapter by chapter and after re-reading the book, I am now in the thumbnail phase! So you can expect to see that going on over the next couple of months.

Anyway, back to this challenge. After realizing my first idea wouldn't work, I had to go back to the drawing boards. When I think of my "home away from home" there are some locations that definitely fit the bill, but I really didn't want to take the concept too literally. Then it hit me! Whenever I travel, I like to bring anything and everything with me! I'm prepared for any situation and basically like to bring my home with me wherever I go. So I took that to mind and came up with an editorial piece of a young woman traveling with a ton of luggage.

Be sure to check out the other artists work on the theme over at squarecarousel.com! There are some really fabulous artists on board.

Announcing the Square Carousel!

Hello everyone! My small hiatus is finally coming to a close as I close the show Once Upon a Mattress this weekend and I wrap up my last week of teaching summer painting lessons! I have a lot of exciting projects coming up that I can't wait to share with you guys. The one on the forefront though is the Square Carousel Illustration Collective that I started a couple of months ago with a couple of my talented illustrator friends. Though we got started on this a while back, it took some time getting everything into order and we have finally made our big "launch"! The site features the work of myself and 9 other illustrators. We compete in bi-weekly challenges selected by the artists in turn, and we post updates and news on the illustration world. For the first challenge, we thought it most appropriate to do a carousel animal of out own. I chose to do a noble lion (a unicorn was a close second though, haha).

I have a couple other projects going on, some personal, others that I can't speak of at the moment, but I'll let you know as soon as I can! One that I can speak of though, is that a local theatre has just hired me on board to do paintings to be projected as the set for an upcoming production of the Children's play Pinkilicious! The play is adapted from a popular children's book. Though I haven't read the book before, this definitely sounds right up my alley, so I can't wait to get started!

So be sure to check out www.squarecarousel.com and add us to your bookmarks! We have a lot of great content in store for you guys!

well hello from a recent college graduate!

Hey all! I promise I am still alive and well, and busy working as always! I have to apologize for the month and a half absense! What with college graduation and moving and taking on three part times jobs I had about zero time for the last couple of weeks.

So as I mentioned, I graduated from SCAD at the beginning of June. Looking back on my four years there, I have to say that they were truly the best years of my life so far, and I think it will just keep getting better! I grew so much as a person and an artist at that school and made some of the greatest friends I will ever know, so here's my thank you to SCAD for every opportunity that they have given me and the many more that await because of that!

So, since graduation, I have moved briefly back to Louisiana for three summer jobs I was offered. I teach painting lessons to children for four hours every morning then I am choreographing a musical and helping with some set and costume work for another show. In between I had a three week stint as a secretary for a local government office. That last job reminded me a lot of Parks and Recreation, for those who watch the show, so merely pretending I was April in the office got me through that haha. Luckily now, all three of those jobs are winding down. I also designed the posters for the children's productions being put on by a local theatre this summer! I can't share all of them because some copyrighted material had to be used in the posters due to contracts with the production company they are being licensed from. Here are two of them that I can share though:

I have a couple more weeks with the painting lessons and the show, but the temporary secretary job is now over and my free time is starting to open back up thank goodness so I can finally get to work on some real work! Here's what you guys can expect from me over the next few months: a huge load of work coming in! I have so many techniques and so much subject matter I am just itching to get my hands on. I'm vamping up my portfolio to get ready to apply for grad schools for next fall some time around the end of this year. You can also expect some revamping of my portfolio site as well as the blog and my other social media aspects. Importantly, on the blog, I will now be making weekly blog updates. If it comes to a point where I'm making a lot, I might end up setting up a certain two or three day a week schedule for it, so stay tuned on that. Also, for the first time EVER! Get ready all of you convention goers because i'm making the transition and I'm going to be attending cons this year! It's such a great social networking opportunity, and honestly they all just look so freaking fun, it's about time I finally made the plunge and started traveling to some!

Lastly guys! I have a VERY exciting project that I will be announcing somewhere around the middle of the month, involving some very talented illustrators along with myself. So get ready to have your socks blown off!

Thank you all for sticking with me through the small quiet period and get ready for a lot of upcoming work!

a Victorian study

Hey guys! I hope everything is going well! Things have been really busy here in Savannah what with getting ready to graduate, the career fair, sorority business, teaching fitness classes and school work too, of course! One of my courses this quarter is Survey in Illustration, which is half studio, half art history. All of the projects for the most part are just sort of for fun, and our first assignment was to do a small piece inspired in some way by Victorian illustration.


Within the next couple of weeks, you can expect some new self promotion pieces, as well as the branding and redesigning of this blog, my website and my twitter! I'm also trying to find sometime to get back to doing some small pieces for Illustration Friday! So stay tuned! =)

and the winter continues

I don't know about y'all but I have to say that I am just SO ready for the spring! I'm absolutely tired of the cold weather. In illustration news, I have a fair ammount of projects going on at the moment so there is a good bit of in progress stuff to share with you guys as well as a couple of finished pieces! The first thing I wanted to share is from my Portfolio class. For my first assignment I decided to do a mock book cover for an imaginary novel of my own invention.





I have a sample with type as well, but I haven't decided whether or not to include that in my portfolio yet, so as that decision is made, I may or may not upload that here.

I also wanted to share the final poster from my Fahrenheit 451 project with you guys! I think that we will be informed on Friday of who's poster will actually be used! Keep your fingers crossed! Even though it's not really my style, I think it would still be pretty cool to have my poster selected.




And I know I don't normally share process work on here, but I thought that might be a nice change so here are two projects I'm currently working on. This first is an in progress painting for my portfolio class. It's an illustration for a children's poem about a girl and a harpy sharing stories.



And lastly, these are the sketch/color comps for my next project in my advertising illustration class. We are designing tissue boxes with the theme "Issues for Tissues". So I came up with the idea for these little pollen sprites who live in the flowers and make people sneeze =).

something completely different

For my Advertising Illustration class this quarter, our first assignment was to create a poster for the theatrical adaptation of Fahrenheit 451. For those of you familiar with my work, I'm sure you are all aware that this is not a subject matter that is very suited to my usual style and painting in watercolors. So in pursuit of artistic versatility, I made the tough decision to drop my normal methods of working and work in a digital, graphic style for this assignment. I feel this was definitely an appropriate route to take, and although I still prefer my usual stuff, it was nice to step out of my comfort zone and try something more adult for once. I made two variations, hope you enjoy them.