Choose Your Own Adventure

I love inking with a brush, and I love that I've had the opportunity to do it for almost every assignment this semester. I also love that it can be cleaned up in a variety of ways.

This was for Style and Substance. The assignment was to illustrate a particularly annoying noise in black and white (and all the colors in between). Every Sunday morning, the church across the street from me rings its bells at ten thirty. For eight minutes. I know that hating church bells may seem...petty, but the timing and duration and irregularity of the noise is a perfect storm of very, very annoying. For me, at least.

This is Speedball ink with a brush, cleaned up a little in Photoshop. It reminds me a lot of Frank Miller.



And then I tried the whole thing with a 50% gray. Which, I think, feels completely different, and maybe a little noisier.


I know that there's still a little humor (and even cuteness) to this piece, but I like the darker, rougher feel, and I think I'm going to push more in that direction for Editorial Illustration.

Featuring Tock, the Watchdog

For my most recent assignment for What's Your Story, a class about narrative illustration, I had to distill a play or novel into three illustrations. I choose "The Phantom Tollbooth." These are all in ink and watercolor (as usual. I'm going to take another crack at acrylics this week).


Milo and Tock meet the Humbug (and the Spelling Bee).



Milo tries to steal a sound from the Soundkeeper.



Milo, Tock, the Humbug, and the Princesses Rhyme and Reason are surrounded by the Demons of Ignorance.


These captions may make the book seem overly serious, but it's really a sweet, clever book about language and learning. Read it if you haven't.

I am an Illustrator

Instead of doing dishes, two quick pieces, with more to come soon.

This would be my successful-as-an-illustration-in-itself-but -not-necessarily-for-this-assignment piece of the week, in ink and watercolor, as most things are these days.



This was for Editorial Illustration.

And this was for Style and Substance.

This is a book cover for "Juggling for the Complete Klutz." I love Klutz Press and I am one of the least coordinated people I know. This was fun once I got a composition nailed down. The shadows need to be revisited, but I think it's a nice start, since it was the first piece I did this semester (after a summer of Illustrator and InDesign...by the way, the work from the summer will be posted soon. I swear.)



Like I said, more to come in the very near future. It seems like every project from this semester is 89% done, but this week should see a lot of things finished.

Things are Getting Done

Time to take advantage of an inexplicable chunk of free time (that is, the fifteen minutes between putting the finishing touches on an assignment and when class starts).

This was for my editorial illustration class, for an article about bloggers. One might argue that the concept got away from me.



I'm still surprised that this is watercolor (and Speedball ink for the linework). The piece represents my triumph over the medium by beating it into submission over three days and about a million layers.


And this is for my narrative illustration class (What's Your Story).



The assignment was to illustrate an historical scene with an extreme horizontal or vertical shape. We also had to put ourselves in the scene. And now the 1-inch-square self portrait is my new icon (and one of my favorite things I've done this semester).

More work is coming. I've found a faster way to post, so maybe that will spur me on a little. I've certainly doing enough work.