it's time to

it's time to update. thats. that's what time it is.
jeeze...a month? i'm sorry.
it's been a while so it would be good if i did. just to get some fresh content up, add to the little i have right now, maybe keep those who've sort of been following this a little interested to continue following.

here are things that i made for my final portfolio exit interview for the VisCom program at U of A, stuff i touched up for that, and something i did that wasn't part of that.

these are a few character designs i had been playing with for the last project in my senior capstone. i had some others (i'll try to post those later) but they didn't seem to stick together as well as this group did. so i colored them up and pasted them together in Photoshop. starting to get used to the program's basic mechanisms, but could still stand to learn more about it. finished this up to use in my portfolio for my exit interview.


this is just the colored version of the Heads for Sale guy i posted a few entries back. not much else to say, other than i like how the colors turned out.

OH, and if anybody is interested, i was talking with my friend and she manged to help me out with screenprinting some shirts of just the straight inks of Heads for Sale. So, if anybody is interested in purchasing a shirt, let me know.
i'll post more on this in another entry, hopefully soon? with a better example of the art and the placement on the shirt and prices and everything.
just saying so i can get people excited and possibly interested in grabbing one.

i was playing around with some Stabilo pens, just playing with circles and working on drawing straight to pen. the fancy, hip new scarves a lot of people seem to wear nowadays. or maybe just scenesters? maybe. i'm out of the loop on trends most times. just remember this asian kid wearing one when he came into the coffee shop.
the circles were pretty challenging. not too used to just doing abstracted doodles or patterns or anything like that. need to work on that some more.
i included this in my portfolio as well. thought it was a fairly good piece, which my professors agreed upon, but thought it a bit too rough, so it'll be part of my rough, sketchy, process examples then. i guess? yeah, i'll go with that.

this was the irrelevant, just for fun piece. this was for Harvey James' sweet meme calling for Cat Girls in Hats that he busted out at the end of the activity week he hosted on his livejournal. was especially cool cuz he was nice enough to extend the deadline of the meme an extra week, so i whipped this out later that night after i finished up with my exit interview. i think it turned out pretty well. would maybe redo it or pick another catgirl to work with. might do that too..hmm.
but if you haven't seen it, you should definitely go over there because a lot of people turned out some awesome catgirl reinterpretations, including Harvey James himself.

i'm hoping i will be able to make at least one post in the next month, but if not expect an update from me in July. reason partly being that i recently graduated!

YAY.

but...technically i'm not fully graduated....

huh??

yeah...i'm actually short two credits in an upperdivision VisCom course. most likely because of taking Japanese the past three or so semesters WHICH I DO NOT REGRET. just....sucks that i'm short these credits.
so i'm going to be taking a summer course to make up for it, specifically taking advantage of the Orvieto Arizona in Italy study abroad program. i will be making books and working on picture book development in Italy! will be tons of fun. i also managed to score a flight to Paris during the three day weekend that takes place during the program, and will be hitting the town with Angela. wooooooooooooo.
will definitely be coming back with fancy French and Italian things, along with plenty of comics and pictures.

like i said, i will do my best to update during the program, but if i fail to do so...expect another large lag in my updating..hahah...ehh...and i will be starting up a more consistent posting schedule in July.
so until then! have a good summer/winter!!

sketches and a foto

i figured it would be good to try and stay consistent with posting, keep up the rhythm that was started up again by the last post. so here are some sketches of some animal-y people.
i was originally thinking this blog should be used for finalized, professional-type pieces, but whatever. i think using it as a housing unit for ideas, in-progress, sketches, fotos, whatever, as well as finalized, would be best. i can save all of the finalized stuff for a website or portfolio unit.

but enough of that.

here's Chevre from Animal Crossing (Wild World, specifically).

she's my favorite character, or at least favorite in my village so far. hope neither she nor anybody else has moved away. haven't played in a few weeks. eeshh....

and here's Carl the Lumberjack Elephant. my co-worker/friend Rian from the cafe said i should draw him, so i did. good call on everyone's part. i think he turned out pretty awesomely.

i discovered Carlos Nine's work last semester and had the need to draw an anthropomorphic/superdeformed woman, so that's where this bunny lady came from.

Bryan Lee O' Malley held a contest earlier this spring for people who couldn't make it to New York for the midnight release of Scott Pilgrim Vol. 5 so they would have a chance to win the sweet stuff the New York people had a chance to pick up. For the contest, people had to submit an image that was clever, funny, cute or whatever would most likely snag them the prize. it also had to show a plausible reason why they couldn't make it out to the New York release, including some sort of local landmark to signify that. I was in Tucson during the release and couldn't think of any interesting landmarks since i'm not too familiar with the city, so I teamed up with my friend Toby, who's a native, to take pictures for the contest.

we didn't win. which is okay, i guess. it was still pretty fun.

you can check out this image, as well as Toby's, over here in Mal's flickr set.

fixed spots

i fixed up two of the three spot illustrations for the juried VisCom show U of A had last week/weekend. it's an annual event that spans a week with 2 days for submitting pieces, 1 day for alumni lectures/same day for them to judge pieces, and then the opening of the show the next day, which also features an awards ceremony.
this was the first year i actually got something into the show, so that makes me 1 for 3 in submitting pieces to it. i submitted 7 but managed to get 1 in, so that's pretty..decent. yeah. good to think positive because some people didn't get in, so there's a brightside.
the piece i submitted also won bronze in character design so that was pretty awesome, too. hoooraay!

this year was kind of depressing for the event because it didn't seem like as many people from this year's graduating class cared about going to the lectures, the show opening/award ceremony, or the dinner that followed like last year's group of seniors did. very discouraging on my class's part. sad face all the way -> :C

anyhoo, here are the touched up spot illustrations, improved upon from last time.

the articles i used for this spot illustration exercise can be found here:
The President Will See You Now
Fetal Foreclosure
Stop Whining About Facebook's Redesign

spot illustrations

This is just for a presentation for my capstone course. Things will be tweaked and refined later.
But for now spot illustrations for some articles on the online newsjournal Slate.

Hourly Comics 09

these are comics i did for Hourly Comics Day which was on February 1st. pretty bad since it's almost a month later, but like i said i'm going to be better about posting more regularly.

anyway, i thought John Campbell was the one who invented Hourly Comics but a friend informed me that someone most likely came up with it before him. i now feel as though i've been spreading lies, telling everyone of his greatness due to this wonderful invention. either way, he made them more popular with his annual event which is still a pretty great thing.
if you haven't read his comics you should check them out. and if you haven't read anybody else's comics from the event then you should too, which you can do by following the links i placed above. they will lead you through a maze of bewonderment until you come upon your final destination of The Forum where a bunch of people posted theirs.

and if you haven't read my comics yet, well...just take a look below.

Heads for Sale

wow. it has been way too long since i last updated my blog. i'm sorry everyone. i'm sorry blog. i'll do better this year, starting with this month.
and this image.

this is something i came up with for my resume for my illustration capstone. it's supposed to be like Caps for Sale, but instead it's "Heads for Sale". I've been drawing lots of faces recently and thought it would be best to make use of them this way. and here's an extra image i'm posting. was going to try and whip up a tshirt design for the Japanese Association at the university, but i didn't make the deadline in time. think i might try to reuse him for a shirt design or something. loosely influenced by Powerpuff Girls. y'know...that one episode where they had that giant mech and had to fight some monster similar to this. was a really awesome episode.

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!