A Tough 5th-Grader
For my last project in my digital painting class, we had to do a character design, choosing a prompt from a long list of sometimes incongruent ideas: space cowboy, alien violinist, octopus teacher, and so on. I picked “the world’s toughest 5th-grader,” because I need to learn to draw kids better since I want to do picture books. The obvious mental image that comes along with that phrase is a boy bully with a wide neck and fists. I thought I’d turn it on its head and make it a girl who is a math genius and is impossible to beat in math competitions. My image searches to find a cool-looking kid yielded a bunch of ideas, and then I decided that she could be something other than white. I actually found a picture of a really cool Navajo kid with a few different angles. She looked like a humble…
A Change of Plans
As most of you know, I’ve been working on an illustration degree with Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design. I’m actually seven or eight classes away from graduating, but the upcoming first fall term had me so stressed out, just thinking about it. I was going to have to take 2 classes plus the portfolio class, one of which was the landscape painting class I dropped in the first summer term because it was too much to handle with my other class. I’ve just been a bit overloaded lately. They wouldn’t let me out of either class I was enrolled in this coming term, so I decided to withdraw. Maybe I’ll go back next year, but I’m not sure one way or the other. Really, I got out of it what I wanted—I got better faster than I would have working on my own. But I’m far from done…
A “Fantasy” Illustration
My second-to-last assignment in my second digital painting class was to create a “fantasy” illustration. But it was strangely limited—we had to take a public domain story and illustrate it. I’d wanted to do a spin on one of my books (from a TikTok video I made bringing dragons into one of my novels) or do the winged cat character I’ve been working on, and the instructor just flat out said no. So I picked Puss in Boots and made him Puss in Chucks instead. We had to write a “summary” of the story we were illustrating, so I just riffed on the original Puss in Boots (part of it, anyway): The Story Puss in Chucks There was a poor man who had naught save for a tabby cat. He was starving so he thought he would have to kill the cat and eat it. The cat read his owner…
A Genghis Khan Assignment
We had to do a digital painting of Genghis Khan for my class. I was actually annoyed by this—I already knew he’d killed an insane number of people, but when I looked into it, it was even worse than I’d realized. He killed like 40 million people, or 11% of the world’s population. Like, what? One man, in some megalomaniacal quest, killed over 1/10th of the humans who existed then. I am so sick of the way we put historical figures up on pedestals and ignore the horrible things they did and just talk about the “good” things. People are like, Oh, he was just a man of his times. I don’t care. Killing people just for personal gain is evil. So I knew I had to do something that would really highlight the monster he was. Thumbnails and Line Drawing We had to thumbnail, like we always do. I…
A Playing Card Design
For my Digital Illustration class, we had to make a single playing card. One of the common characteristics of many playing card designs is some kind of interesting background. I love Islamic art (the patterns, specifically—both the geometric and the vegetal ones), so I decided to make a geometric pattern inspired by this style. And since cards often have some kind of figure on them, I (of course) decided to try a cat. I decided to do the 9 of hearts (for 9 lives, and the fact that I love cats). Thumbnails The first step was twenty thumbnails. I was developing the two separate ideas, the cat and the pattern. Then I combined them for a few of the last ones. Cat Thumbnails Here are some of the early ones: The last one was me just being ridiculous. But none of them quite spoke to me, but I liked them…
A Digital Cat and Castle
We had another assignment in my digital illustration class, with the prompt Castles in the Sky. I missed the “in the sky” part and just thought it was supposed to be fantastical. I also didn’t realize at first that there was supposed to be a character in it. We had to do a bunch of thumbnails and value and color studies. Some of my thumbnails below. I first thought of doing something with books, and I did a few with that idea: Then I thought of the onion domes you see on Russian churches, because I’ve always thought those we kind of cool. But after doing a rough thumbnail with them, I had a more interesting idea: cats heads instead of onion domes. I ran with this idea and did several different castles this way. Here are a couple: I decided to try a noncircular shaped castle and came up…
Early Steps in Digital Illustration
I’m taking Digital Illustration 1 this term, and I was a little scared because it’s pretty much totally new for me. I did take a class early on that taught the basics of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. We did a collage and I came up with these hilarious images (this is my friend’s cat): I also made some very simplistic illustrations in Illustrator: I have also been using Illustrator to do color studies (I put all the shapes for the different colors in for the first study, which takes some time, but after that it’s just a matter of swapping different colors out in the shapes, so it’s fast and easy). But really, it’s new to me. About a year ago, I bought an iPad Pro specifically to learn Procreate, a popular (and much cheaper) digital painting program that a ton of people love. However, I’ve never gotten around to…
A Hoarder’s Dilemma
Although my new term has started and I’m taking landscape painting and digital art 1 and I’ll be posting projects from those, I thought I’d share the final project in my illustration class this past term. I had to do an illustration of one of a list of mostly made-up “phobias.“ I chose the one where someone is afraid to throw things away, so naturally I went with the idea of a hoarder. I had a few ideas in my thumbnails: My first thumbnail was my first and favorite idea, of someone in a hoarder situation trying to find that important thing, and knowing exactly under which pile of junk it is. I worked that one up into a rough: I ended up not loving this because I was having trouble with how to depict the person looking under the pile. So I though of someone literally struggling to throw something…
The Cat Librarian
In my current illustration class, we had another assignment involving an animal, so I had another great excuse to draw more cats. The prompt was to put an animal into a situation that normally only humans would do. Of course I also love books, so I first thought of a cat reading or being in a library or bookstore. We had to start with thumbnails for this, as usual, so here were some of my ideas: My favorite were the ones with the cat as a librarian rather than just reading. And I liked the idea of a poor librarian trying to work while other cats wreak havoc. So my favorite was #8 because I loved the cart, especially with a cat sleeping on it. I also liked the one of the librarian sleeping on the job, because no way could a cat work an 8-hour shift without a nap.…
The Musician and the Dancing Cat
I’m in another illustration class, and we had three prompts to choose from for our first assignment: Dining with a robot. The musician playing for the dancing animal. How the magician sawed the woman in half. Obviously I chose number 2 so I could do a cat. My understanding of the assignment was that we were supposed to be doing the figures in silhouette, so entirely black. But it turned out that that was just for development of the idea. We had to do a bunch of thumbnails, so I did those, although I didn’t have any amazing ideas. I basically tried a person playing different musical instruments, and a cat dancing in different ways. Here’s what I came up with: I liked #7 because the idea was it was a line dance, but I developed that and a couple new ones for three rough sketches I had to do.…