Illustration Friday: Worn

After drawing pandas all (last) week for my Traditional Animation Basics 2 class project, I decided to draw....pandas. This little guy sums up how worn out I am at drawing pandas, but I still think he's cool. I had fun coloring him and then adding all the crazy tiny pandas everywhere. For some reason this is making me want to read Zen Shorts. hmmmm......

What else could go wrong?

On Saturday night, I scanned my illustration friday drawing and saved it to my computer before going out to celebrate my friend's birthday. Got home really late and went straight to bed. Woke up Sunday to a swimming pool in my living room that was rapidly encroaching on our computers. One of the attachments to the bathroom sink had broken and was flooding everything. Yay.

Long painful story short, our house is in disarray and we just now got one computer back up and running. Since it isn't mine, I still can't post my illustration friday picture. Hopefully we'll get mine back up and running before the next IF post is up. Beyond that, we're trying to do our best to get back into routine after being really frustrated and bummed out the past two days.

Illustration Friday: Drifting

I don't know what it is about the Illustration Friday topics that makes me want to do the least obvious thing related to that phrase? I guess my brother-in-law is right. I'm just ornery.

This sketch was a result of a confluence of inspiration (oooo! big words!) First, I spent the last portion of my workday on friday researching urban youth imagery (aka, graffiti) for my current book cover project. The bright colors that street artists use are incredible and inspiring. Second, I was catching up on my illustration blogs and I started reading Irene Gallo's posts about the illustration masters class (which I hope to attend one day). Looking at the assignments offered during that workshop, I was immediately drawin to "steampunk wizard of oz" it sounded like fun. Third, I got slightly confused between what steampunk is, and what my husband likes: cyberpunk. At least I got the goggles in there!

Thus, the urban steamcyberpunk drifters.

Fleeting Turtles: stage 1

I'm working on a finished illustration of the Fleeting turtles post I did for illustration friday back in April. This picture is about 1.5-2 hours into working on it, although I didn't include the final line art in my count. I'll post more pictures as it gets further along, but I don't get to work on this as much as I would like to because of my art classes.

I've gotten a lot looser and bolder in my work since I started working in colored pencil a few years back. For an illustration of topiaries I did a long time ago, I meticulously rendered each tiny leaf ON the trees. I ran out of time and I had to loosely lay in a background, and I remember getting more compliments on my background leaves then any of the meticulously rendered leaves. Go figure.

I'm also using this nifty invention for artists called a grayscale chart! It tells you how dark (or not) your colors are, so you can get the proper values in your work. I've had this chart for years tucked away in a drawer and I came across it again recently. Since I've long had the trouble of working too light, I'm going to try ACTUALLY using this chart for once to give my illustrations more depth and presence. So far, I've only hit a 4 in my tones--10 being white, 1 being black--so I still have further to go to push the darks.

Illustration Friday: Unfold

"Little Joshua got more then he bargained for when his paper airplane began to unfold..."

I haven't posted an Illustration Friday drawing in a while, so it feels good to get back into it.

I'm not quite sure just WHAT little Joshua's airplane turned into...a paper viking robot duck? No matter what, he's kinda cute and silly...pretty much what you'd expect from me. He was fun to draw, and the airplanes were too. Except for the one at top center that didn't work as well as I hoped. I also couldn't even begin to write the technical manual for this origami robot...

Zoo...week 1

I am taking a class on animal drawing at the LA Zoo (through the animation guild) and I had a pretty successful first week. The teacher wanted us to loosen up our work and try drawing without looking at the paper, use continuous linework, or draw with our off hand.

My most successful drawings of the day were partially blind...i'd occasionally look down to see if I was more-or-less on track. what I liked about them was the fact that I got in so much more detail then when I tried to use the construction approach to building the animals (think boxes and spheres to create the volume).

I also used my brush-pen a bit and enjoyed working with that too.

My husband is awesome!

Yay! He got my site running again. Huzzah for the husband!

Technical Difficulties

Most likely, you won't be reading this until after the problem has been solved. There have been technical difficulties on my end...namely, my website is down. It is down for the very silly reason that the domain name registry was not renewed on time. Oops. We are working on solving the problem and hopefully we'll be up and running within a day or so.

Regardless, it sucks. (especially since I haven't posted anything since May 17th!)