Wow.. School.

So.. I've been busy, but you probably can't tell from my blog. I just entered my first illustration competition and I'm excited about it.. not about the outcome, just that I did it I guess. For a long time I felt like none of my illustrations were good enough for something like that but now I've learned a lot. Anyways.. Here are the two that I entered. The skull is to be used as a surface design on a spanish class binder for high school kids. It would wrap around so that the middle of it would be the spine of the binder. The presidents was my first editorial assignment, I had about 5 different versions of it before I made one I liked. It was for an article with fun facts about the MN state fair including which presidents have been there (in their lifetime). I have much more work ready to post, it's just finding the time to post!

Completed Children's Book Finals

Here are two of my four completed spread illustration for my children's book project I posted before. The originals didn't turn out as I had planned but, i guess you win some and you loose some. These images i photoshopped a bit and added the text as I designed it. I started out just using magazine clippings which went well until I started trying to layer with other things.. lesson definitely learned.

My first Children's spread

I know I mentioned it before, but I'm currently taking one summer class, once a week for Children's Book Illustration. I completely love it, and I didn't think I would. Usually when I tell people I'm going to school for illustration I am a little disapointed when they say, "Oh! like children's books?" In the real world children's book is more of a niche thing for illustrators to do. Don't get me wrong, there are people that go out into the real world trying to be a pictures book illustrator.. but usually Illustrators get trained to do editorial, advertisement, and sometimes artwork for products - and some of them end up traveling the children's book path without doing other work. Most childrens book artists start doing other work because Children book's don't pay as much per piece of artwork as others - it can also be a lot harder to get a book project. It's a lot of work getting a plot to flow visually! And there's a lot of art to be made for a whole 32 page book - which is the norm for children's books. It can take artists almost a year! But anyways... those who do make it big in the children's book world don't have to worry about financial problems and get as much time as they need to produce books. I'm currently working on sketching out an entire book for my final which I will post soon.. I'm doing the song "Tree Hugger" by Antsy Pants in children's book form (the song is from Juno - if you've seen the movie you probably know the song) ANYWAYS this is the first piece from my class.. to introduce us to the horizontal dimensions and children theme we were supposed to create an imaginary spread based on real childrens book title. I chose "There Once Was an Old Lady" for mine. I'm pretty pleased with it because I got more than enough time to finish it, I used acrylic for the first time in a long time. If you couldn't tell I've already learned a lot from my class and will be posting all my sketches for an entire book next. But for now enjoy this crazy lady! you can click on the image to make it bigger

Pirate Tree

This was the second illustration for my Children's book class I'm taking this summer. I used watercolor for the first time in almost a year. It's for a book I had never seen the real illustrations of. The text would go in the bottom right corner and talks about Emily and her younger brother pretending the big tree in their yard is a pirate ship. More of my children's book illstrations soon!

the start of a productive summer

Now that it's summer I'm trying really hard to stay productive. I had a big urge to paint one night and decided to just go ahead and do it. I decided to use a magazine to help me figure out what to paint, in it I found this picture of Snoop Dogg. Did I ever thing I'd make a oil painting of Snoop Dogg? No, but I just couldn't resist. This is just the first coat of paint, but I will probably be doing more, it was really just nice to get the oil paint out again.

celeb practice

Sorry for the bad quality of these pictures, I'm in New Mexico visiting my brother and couldn't help but take pictures of my sketchbook using the crappy little camera on my macbook. I'm very excited to start making more celebrity illustrations and these practice sketches were really fun to do! I'm just going to hope you all can guys who they are of :)

I swear this isn't about consumerism.

For my drawing midterm I chose to sit in my car in the parking lot at work and draw. This happened to be mcdonalds because it was a color class.. and i found the faded red against the blue sky very interesting. Then our teacher wanted us to really push the same ideas from the large work and make many small ones, it was a tedious process but I love the final series. Most of them are acrylic and collage, but the last piece is a failed monotype print!