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!

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.

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. =)