And before I forget...

Hello everyone whose visiting via my roomy's DA! If you're not venturing here from over there be sure to check out her stuff (and especially her sculpture :) ).
http://rowkey.deviantart.com/
http://thierolfolis.blogspot.com/

Dsn For Illustration

Some icons for homework (film genres would be the overall theme here....). Not completely done with some of them but I rather like a few of them.

Face Fishing

Complete with fully functioning light-up lamp! Catch those faces and make some gruesome masks to entertain your friends (or something or other whatever you people do with faces).

Well he's finished enough for class but I still have a few bones to pick with him *glares at hands and feet*

He was good practice and quite the entertaining bit of homework.

Experimenting, Sophomore Reviews, and Fairy Tales.

Ok. Now this was a fun piece to work on. Mainly because I didn't know what I was doing most of the time. Haven't experimented with media like that for at least a year and it was definitely worth while. Now I feel all loose and free (in an artistic style way, mind you.) I do have to point out that the scanners weren't large enough for the whole image so it's kind of cropped- in real life it's compositionally spaced out on the page much better. (Also, media used- ink, charcoal, gesso, graphite.)
And wow- sophomore reviews were today. (If you want to hear me gloat and rave, read on, if not skip to next paragraph...) I was nervous, I didn't really want to go, my work wasn't up to par, blahblahblah. Now they did point out a couple of things I need to work on but nothing major and nothing I didn't know already. Overall they really liked my work ("they" being a few teachers from the illustration department). Apparently my line work and sketchbook nonsense has a lot of energy and I know my anatomy well. Also I'm strong on design and shaping (?? their words, not mine lol) and my type integration is pretty good too. About halfway through CF Payne wandered in (apparently he was kind of bouncing around randomly) and I'm pretty sure my face was something along the lines of this:
He looked around and LIKEDMYSTUFFHOLYCRAP. His only critiques were to respect my artwork more and take a little better care of it and to work more with environments and interiors (knew I was right on that when I posted before....). Overall though it was a much needed confidence boost. Since the beginning of the year I've felt like I've been drowning but now I found a raft. And Wilson.
And life is good.

But that's not to say any of it got to my head. I'm ready to buckle down in my extra time off tomorrow and this weekend to get some stuff DONE. For instance- fairy tales. For Electronic Illustration our final has a theme- Transformation. We have to do at least two digital illustrations. Ok cool. The past couple of weeks I've been digging up obscure fairy tales and trying to pick a few to illustrate (the plan is to do a book cover and two page illustrations- each for a different fairy tale). I have one picked for sure- The Ram (http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/aulnoy/1892/ram.html). Rather sad and beautiful but I have that final scene burning in my brain so that's on the list. Now I'm hoping to be smart enough to post all my process here so first off- reference! I've been digging up these images yesterday and today (no I don't own any and am not taking credit for them).
Obviously- rams. More specifically in this case- Dall's sheep.



Then there's the princess. For her outfit I want to do something that looks like it has historical roots yet modern.
So, some Marie Antoinette (can you get more extravagant?)

But for the modern bit....um yeah Alexander McQueen all the way. Hauntingly beautiful to say the least.



Then the princess herself- well while looking up images of McQueen's work I came across the model Gemma Ward. Now, I'm not a big fan of models typically- something very alien about their bone structure. But Gemma has such an innocent, young, and fragile look about her that there's going to be some definite inspiration there.

Then last but certainly not least is the environment. For some reason I keep envisioning it as a really grey winter scene but I need to do more research on what kind of trees are the most common in France, what some typical landscapes could be, etc.

I'm really psyched for this project and need to keep going on research and pick out my other two fairy tales so we can get some thumbnails going.

Advertising, what you doin'?

Hrmm, I know I've complained here and there about advertising class but today I feel like I got slammed with a full-on wtf fest.
I won't go into detail because it'd probably bore half of you to death and enrage the other half so we'll just go with "this class is really silly and I haven't learned a thing".
Either way we got an in-class exercise to do- basically create an illustration for a short story she had printed out. I don't know who wrote it and it didn't even have a title but it was basically a really preachy teenage-level Philip K. Dick rip off. It was painful.
ANYwho, I could rant all day about the quality of the story (which I probably will- to those of you who know me in real life I apologize in advance) but I feel like it spawned a decent little cover comp so figured I'd share.

(yeah I spelled his name with an extra "L" *forever ashamed :( *)

-insert some moral about how a terrible idea can still spawn some decent designs-

In other news we're pretty much in the finals run of school now so expect some very in depth process posts.

INK

I take back everything I ever said about ink man. It's a pretty rockin' media.

Things!

Hrmm, some random things- a charcoal drawing from commercial figure (only really happy with the shoes and hat)






(^and sneak peek of the face fishing sculpture- really like how he's turning out)