illustration 3 final

i haven't posted in forever. i'm sorry. hopefully i'll be better about these things. part of not having updated recently is because i wanted to edit some of the images a bit more before posting them. i also wanted to add a big ole' write up accompanying them to explain my process and thoughts. that's nice, but i shouldn't have to worry about that and should just let the image speak for themselves. i'll do my best to add a write up here and there, but i'll just leave it up to the images for the most part.

starting next post...
but i'll try to be a brief with this.

my Illustration 3 final, which was half of the course and the grade for the course, was a project we had to design ourselves. this proved to be pretty tough for me cuz there was so much i wanted to do and couldn't narrow it down to anything at first. long story short, i ended up choosing something loosely focused around character design, so my Illustration professor suggested i should come up with three highly contrasted characters and set them in two highly contrasted settings. so here they are. one setting is playing video games where all the focus is on the screen and the other setting is school where the focus is everywhere and nowhere.

yep! and now that school is almost over, i'll focusing my attention on Super Mario Galaxy this winter so i can finally beat the damn thing. hooraay!

The Fleas of De-Industrialization

figured it best i post before i put it off any longer.
this is an assignment that was due two weeks ago for my digital illustration course. the topic of the illustration focused on the De-Industrialization of America. talking with my friend, we thought that it was the assignment where we had to do a bit of digital work first and then print it out and continue to work on it with paint and then scan it back in for finishing touches...but i guess it wasn't. oh well, though because it worked out a bit easier doing it this way.
i sketched something up (the something being the two figures: a Northeast factory worker and a cowboy from the Southwest). scanned it. did line work in painter. printed it out on watercolor paper. watercolored over it. then scanned it back in.
to fix up the minor error i had when turning it in, i did the same process with a sketch of fleas and then layered it over a zoomed crop of the two figures and preceded to blur it to give motion.

i was originally going to focus on outsourcing as a major cause of the De-Industrialization of America, but had read in a wikipedia article that de-industrialization also occurred because of internal problems. mainly that factory workers from the midwest and northeast had migrated to the southwest and southeast for more jobs and for something more open and free, since this migration happened in the early part of the 20th century. so i decided to go with fleas moving from a Northeast factory worker to a Southwest cowboy because the cowboy looked healthier and brighter compared to the greyed, overworked factory worker. sunnier skies and more blood to the west.

i dunno why i'm explaining all of this. i think it's because it's what i'd probably say for a critique. explain myself = explain my process.

portrait of Aurum

Digital Illustration project that was due last Friday. we were paired up with students from our class and were then assigned to do a portrait of them that captured their "essence." we were also supposed to incorporate into the composition some of the objects that the other student found.

i was paired up with my girlfriend's friend, Aurum. i'd say she's my friend now, too, since learning more about her and talking to her more.

what i tried to depict in this image is how Aurum, a native of South Korea, is will be facing a predicament once she graduates. she's only here on a student visa, so unless she can find work right out of school, she will have to return home. she wants to stay and is hoping to find work in California, possibly go into animation (3D stuff like Kung-Fu Panda. i guess the character designer is Korean as well.). her father on the other hand is wanting her to return home and find work there.

the balloon from her cell phone is in the shape of Korea because it is her father calling her home. i tried to take a portion from Aurum's shoe and layer it into the piece. it felt like i was just slapping stuff into the background, but the further i got it seemed like i was trying to emulate waves. waves with detail and ornamentation from Korea that carried her to the United States. on the left side of the image i tried to have the final destination of Arizona, where she wants to stay. i had fun manipulating her lipstick into the shape of cactis. also have a chain running from her phone to her wrist because she said that it's always by her side, so i wanted to embellish that by chaining it to her. also thought the inclusion of Korean would be a nice touch, too. Aurum's saying, "Hello, how are you?" while her father is saying her name in Korean.

i had fun with this. liked how it turned out. also was well received by Aurum and my professor, so that was great.

this class is supposed to be about progressing our skills in a digital medium while already possessing a basic understanding of Photoshop. sadly i have none of that right now (i did this in Painter IX) so i'll need to jump on that and check out the tutorials posted...somewhere. i think U of A's computing resource site?

iscribbblesss

yep! this time with my friend Jed. (usually i use iscribble with Angela. i'll have to post those soon.)

did this with Jed last night (090608) and i really like how it turned out. i was feeling pretty loose and ready to draw so you could see that in my barbarian girl. i had the idea that we should draw our significant others all beefy and amazonic, but i guess we took a more barbarian approach on this one.
he drew up his wife, Belem, with the awesome skirt and Xena-influenced outfit. i really like how he did the detailing on her, too, as well as the axe. pixel art is really awesome when done well.
i drew up my girlfriend, Angela, as the barbarian on the right. i was going with this one pose that wasn't work and decided to change it up and trade out her other hammer for her mom's dog Momo. i thought she turned out pretty well over all. tried to make sure i got her face and hair down, as well as her long torso. thought hammer was pretty sweet, too.
i had her saying that she'd kill me for drawing her like this because during the summer i was showing a coworker my sketchbook and she was saying that i should draw Angela like some of the muscular women i had been drawing. i told Angela about that and she was all like "NOOOOOOOOoooo. Don't draw me like that!!" so i thought it'd be interesting to try drawing her like that anyway, and brought it up to Jed who liked it and went along with it when we were iscribbling.
it was funny though, because i thought she would freak out when i showed her today, but she said she really liked it. (only cuz she didn't recognize it as herself. makes sense.) i told her i wouldn't spell it out for her but then i told her anyway and she was all like "WAHH?" but she just laughed and said she still liked it. thought it was funny that i included Momo and all that.
wasn't as bad as i thought!!

update: burned toast

need to update. too long since last update.
so i thought i'd post this sketch i did last night.
i've had the idea for a while now to start doing a daily drawing or something or other showing what my girlfriend wore that day because a lot of the outfits she wears are really cute.
and she's pretty cute anyway, so good outfit or not, it'll still be an enjoyable image.
so....i guess i should call thisss.....Angela's Outfit-A-Day? yeah, i'll just use that.
no...Angela-A-Day?
or Angela's Outfits since i'm not sure if i'll be able to do it every day since i won't see her every day due to work and not living together. but i'm going to try and shoot for something every time i see her.

The Amazing Adeline: Girl of Wonders in "Raisin Hell"

i finally finished my mini comic for my Sequential Arts class this summer.
here's the cover:

if anybody is interested in a copy, feel free to e-mail me.
i may try to post the first couple pages later this week, generate more interest.
i may just leave it as a class project though, and move onto another comic project.
who knows.

color test

i had wanted to do something for the competition that Jacob Covey held on the BEASTS! blog earlier this year. someone hadn't replied to him in time about their submission so Covey held an open call for entries asking people to submit pieces featuring a creature/beast/monster/thing that has some basis in fact, like folklore (ie. Thunderbirds..some..thing) or possible sightings in the news (ie. The Lochness Monster, Bigfoot).
the call for entries actually closed a long while back but you can check this entry for more info if you're interested.
i tried testing out materials on illustration board because i thought it'd be good to make it on something on a nice paper/board. this of course ended up being last minute for me, so i never submitted anything. oh well.
Angela was able to submit something though, so you should go check out her Korean Kumiho here.

watercolor and brush and ink and a little bit of crowquill on the left side. the figure on the right is marker and micron. illustration board is pretty good for absorption.

mal makes music

if you haven't listened to Bryan Lee O'Malley's music project Kupek, then go listen NOW. it's awesome, laid back stuff, but also some upbeat awesome stuff, too. you can also check out his PureVolume profile here.

balled hair

sketched this on the back of a drink order slip at work. i wanted to draw a girl with different hair and thought balled hair would look different and quasi-futuristic or something like that.
drew it with yelloworange colored pencil and then went back over with mechanical pencil.

Jams with Jed

i was talking with Jed on msn and said i'd be willing to do some warm up sketches with him since i needed to warm up a bit more, too. he sent me a scan of sketch he just did and i worked off of that.

this was his. ^
these were mind. v

this was supposed to be the couple going to someone's place to look at a car after seeing an ad in the magazine. apparently the gentleman's really skilled with his words.

with this one, the couple saw the amusement park had a new ride that looked tempting but it wasn't as fun as the guy hoped.

man, i really need to draw more autos.

COFFEE MONKEY

thought i'd better get this blog rolling.

i doodled this little thing around April this year while i was at work. i work at the coffee shop at my student union, so that's why he's a coffee monkey.
i inked this with a Micron Graphic 1 pen.