This would also go on a T-Shirt. I really like this one more than the organist because characters (cat characters!) are the focus of the image. I found out that my two favorite things are texture and shape from this piece. I really revised the characters in the final sketch to get a nice silhouette. I notice a lot of my peers using textures pulled from online texture libraries and I didn't like how things kept reappearing. A friend and fellow illustrator makes her own textures; I like to paint mine. Both solutions are infinitely better than using an image bank for texture.

It's good to be back :) Here we have a multi-limbed organist with a Dickensian city as his instrument. Silly me, I did a lot of character development for the organist and you don't even see his face.

This is my entry for the Savannah Music Festival's T-Shirt contest. Actually, this is the illustration which was modified for their template and palette of shirts. So the end result would be a little different. I'm pleased with both. Generally the music festival gets a great number of artists submitting some very colorful, upbeat designs. My favorite last year was from Jeff Powers, an illustration major, who did an anthropomorphic tree playing a cello.

Tomorrow I'll probably post the development work that went into this one. And since I left myself some time before the deadline, I will probably get another one done.

Last week I went and revised the characters in my story. I know, stop working on characters and get to illustrations! This is the end of character work for a while, and it was helpful for me. I learned a lot about character design this summer from combing over websites, interviews, art of books, and a very thorough book on character design for animation.

One very practical idea I gleaned from my research is that characters should not be designed in a vacuum but in a group if that's where they'll appear. So I started with the girl (probably the cutest and most innocent element of the story) and then followed with the papa monster who appears to be the most grotesque and worn of the characters. I played with scale, detail, and color in relation to each character. Putting them all in a lineup at the end was the most fun for me (even if the little monster got his foot clipped by some accident).

Right before I started work on an illustration for the savannah music festival, I experimented with how I paint things in Photoshop. The two characters under the scale chart took about 1-2 hours in Photoshop. I like my color and rendering choices but there's still room for improvement. Hopefully after I get this illustration done for competition I can devote some more hours to practice and make some nice additions to my portfolio :)

This started out as a sketch of an alien priest that would have had a following of little alien parishioners behind him. Then a combination of the way the drawing was going and something I was listening to in the background made me change my idea (wish I could remember what I was listening to).

I pictured the guy as a thespian and turned him into "Alien Hamlet" with an alien skull of Yorick (Jen really liked that part). It's amazing when you don't have a plan and let the drawing take you on a ride. This could have easily become another drawing and another world. It's fun to think about the Chaos Theory and how any number of drawings could develop based on external circumstances and whatever flotsam in your brain comes to focus at the time.

I decided to do illustrations in my sketchbook as well as random characters. It's good practice and it really focuses my mind on making something unified. Today I started with Miyazaki in my head and came up with a robotic scarecrow that would patrol the cornfields instead of standing there with a pole up its back, being mocked by birds. The mixing of such advanced technology with very quaint, old fashioned clothing and people interested me. Eventually robotics technology will come to every part of the world!

These are the last of the "lost sketches". I am caught up now (finally). You'll notice that sometimes I don't fully commit to a drawing and leave it at the blue line. If I'm not enjoying where the drawing is going in the initial stages, then the touch ups won't change my mind. Abe Lincoln Alien was fun to draw :).

These sketches were done within a couple of days of each other. Just playing around with body types and exaggeration. Haha, I think the old man superhero has a passing resemblance to Dwight from the Office. Maybe I'll run with that. Super Raptor is definitely going to appear again (I love him too much).