Acrylic Paintings!

I made a couple of acrylic paintings over the summer. Some were experimental pieces while others where commission work.

This is an 8 X 10 inch watercolor illustration I created for a contest. Unfortunately I did not make it far in the nationwide contest, but I managed to create something I didn't know I was capable of. This contest was the Michael's Art Challenge competition and the top 10 pieces selected were awarded cash prizes. The public voted for their favorite out of the ten and the winner was awarded a trip to London to study in an art studio. So, as I was saying, I didn't make it to the top 10 and now I'm going to move on and talk about my work.

When I first heard of the contest, I wanted to use London as an inspiration. The first couple of ideas I had were pretty cliche so I made a list of English icons and I thought 'tea party.' But I wanted to go further so I tried to imagine the last thing  at the table like a dog, Now that I think about it, I wish I did something more outrageous like... cows? Anyways, I did dogs and this is how: I made a sketch. traced it on tracing paper. Transferred it onto watercolor paper. Then I painted away.

The Painting process was a bit slow for I was researching as I was working. My Google search history was very interesting during those weeks, Suggestions like 'window light,' 'tea pot,' 'teacups,' 'tea lunch setting,' and 'cupcakes' would come up when I was typing. However, it all paid off in the end. My main goal in this illustration was lighting. I put a very light blue wash over the background so everything would recede. I haven't perfected it but I will explore this technique more in the future.

When I was finished, I took the painting outside to take a picture on a sunny, morning. I don't know why morning light is the best for taking photos but it works wonders. When converting the photo to a digital format I didn't have to make any changes because the photos turned out beautiful.

This piece has taught me how I was able to take something from my fantasy and make it a reality. I never knew I could pull this off and I am happy with the results.

watercolor sketchbook

Above are two pages from my watercolor sketchbook that I'm trying to fill up before school starts in the fall. It's a watercolor sketchbook but the medium that I am using is gouache which is also a water based paint but, unlike watercolor, is more opaque. With this sketch book (which is 6" x 9"), I plan to explore different styles and techniques in the medium and hopefully use them in future projects.

Irish Fest Poster Contest

For Illustration II we had to make designs for this summer's Irish Fest. One design from my class will be chosen to be printed. This process has been nerve wracking for me because not only would it be cool to see people buying my poster but I also felt that I had to make my ancestors proud. So throughout this process, we had several mock ups of the poster and we would get feedback from somebody who is involved with the festival. I don't actually know who has been giving me feedback we just call them Irish Fest people. I always imagined these people sitting at a large round table in a dark room with our posters on a projection screen. But its probably nothing like that at all.

This was my tight, rough sketch that I sent in for the first critique. I wasn't planning on having the 'globe' in the center of this poster but my instructor told me it would make the piece stronger. That is because this year's theme for Irish Fest is 'Celtic World' so anything with globes gives the poster better chances of winning. This is the same with icons from Milwaukee or the festival itself. The judges love that in the poster.  The feedback for my poster was that it looked unfinished, there are no sheep at Irish Fest and that the poster needed to be more 'festive' but they liked the boarder. I thought it was weird that they didn't like the sheep because my impression was that Ireland was covered in sheep. 

I decided to make my poster look more 'finished' I would re-create it in  Adobe Illustrator.

For my near final product, I changed almost everything. I made the instruments each by hand and scanned them into Illustrator where I image traced them and colored them. The same was done to the wolfhound. I drew him three times to get it right and then scanned him in. The knots on the sides were surprisingly easy. I just pen tooled one set and played with the copy and paste button. The lines I also did by hand and scanned in. This was supposed to be sent in for the final but we were granted on last critique. This was when people started to be cut. I made it to the top two. 

When I was given this news, I got even more feedback from the judges to make little changes. They wanted the globe in the center to show more North America.

So right now I can't do anything but wait. I may or may not win this contest. If I do, I will be presented a check of $800 and will be signing posters on one of the days of Irish Fest. If I don't, nothing will happen. It's only me and one other poster and I have to admit the other poster is really good too. 

Character Designs

For my figure drawing class my instructor wanted to try a new assignment with character designs. The assignment was that we had to come up with two characters one male and female. These characters had to be adults, not children nor senior citizens. Through the project the class had a critique. At that time we had to talk about the character's background story and answer questions like, "Why are they like this? What made them like this? What's their favorite color? Food?" and so on. The answers to these questions helped design the appearance of the character to tell a better story.

My female was a girl of about 23 or 24 named, Olivia . She was shy, awkward and a bit of a bookworm. Because she was shy, she liked to hide behind books or in her big fuzzy sweaters.  She majored in English and writing and worked in an antique shop. 

My male character was the weird next door neighbor named Shawn. He was very outgoing and loved to do skateboard stunts that never ended well. He cared little about his appearance and said "radical" a lot. He was 24 and lived in a duplex that his dad owned. However, living by himself didn't teach him anything about being a responsible adult.

 Once we had the two characters down, we had to combine the two to create a third character.

This is Amelia. I imagined her to be some sort of long lost child of the the other two characters (from the future). She was 19 with the smarts of her mom and outgoing like her dad. She would be awkward at times but she never let that slow her down. Before she went out with friends she always made sure her homework was done. Her favorite colors are yellow and purple.

Hey! I know its been a while but I've been super busy with school and I haven't had the chance to upload recent work. I'm beginning to learn how to create gifs in Photoshop which I know will help me down the road. For those of you who don't know, gif is short for graphics interchange format. Basically, it's a file that plays looped animations. I had to learn how to do this so I was playing around with gesture and quick sketches and voila! I hope it works on the page, I was having problems uploading.

A couple of days ago I finished a commission to wood-burn hangers for a wedding party. From left to right is the date, name and role in the wedding. I penciled out the numbers and words but did the little ornamental work by the name free handed. Before starting this, I was afraid that the writing would look amateurish since I didn't have a fancy wood-burner but eventually I just didn't think about how it should look and focused on how I can make it look. Its a little confusing, I know, but what I'm trying to explain is that I didn't let the pretty, polished examples on Pinterest intimidate me. I embraced my skill set and tools knowing that I can still make the hangers just as pretty.