Halloween!

This was a project for Children's Book illustration- essentially we had to create a wrap around cover for Cricket magazine with an autumn/harvest/halloween theme.  I came up with the idea of monster children going trick-or-treating in normal folk town and scaring plain folk.

After thumbs and what not, we arrived at a final layout

Playing around with color schemes

Final color comp

We then had crits in class, and the teacher felt in terms of the magazine layout, I should flip the image to have a more rewarding lead in to the back cover.

And finished!

All in all I'm not super satisfied with how it turned out, but there are aspects I can't help but appreciate.  

Landscape Painting

(a rare "artist habitat"- presumably the artist ran away into the brush)

I figured I would give a more in depth post on what occurs on location when painting at parks for this class (mostly because I had time to goof off with my camera this last time).

The park we painted at last Friday is the Highbanks metro park (about a 30min drive outside CBus). It was a brisk day but the hike from the parking lot to the back field we painted at keeps you warm long after you're done walking. Basically we hike until we something that we want to paint then stop and set up. Everything was going really well (nice overcast conditions, nice weather, nice space, nice trees, nice colors....etc).

(le in progress painting)

But about an hour and a half in Mr. Sun decided to peek out and being the genius I am I had forgotten to take pics of what I was painting before it became sunny. The sun was also shining directly on my painting making it really difficult to figure out the colors I had down compared to how they'd been and how they were now. This is where that photo opportunity sneaked in.

(bad sun BAD SUN)

(as lovely as this lighting is it was ALL WRONG)

I got to play around with my camera buddy for a while before some clouds decided to creep back into view and I was able to shoot my reference and essentially finish my study.

(macro shots are fun)

On the way out I took pictures of everything (terrible side of college- deprivation of nature)

(NOM)

(some of the trees were just fantastic!)

(this guy and several slugs wanted to hitchhike back with me for some reason)

We're blowing these studies up in class as studio paintings and I'll post more on that when it gets further along.


This weekend however I will be at Illuxcon- if for some reason you read this blog and are attending as well shout at me and I'll say hi or something.