Product Illustration

For my product illustration, I illustrated a former favorite toy: a Rubik's Cube. I think it turned out pretty well! I think shading in the colored squares shows where the light is coming from. The hardest part was shading the black so that it looked like the individual cubes were there. But I think it turned out pretty well!

Midterm Blog

While searching through my illustrations from earlier this semester, I was shocked at how different the older illustrations look from the more recent ones. These sensations made me feel a little better about the watercolors from the past few weeks that in my mind I’ve deemed terrible. Here are a couple examples of the beginning work compared to where I am now technically.

This is an example of one of my first line and watercolor illustrations. Dreadful, I know. The line is incredibly too thick on most of it. I also used it just to outline, not to add depth. The use of color also resembles more of a coloring book than modeling and shading and washes. Despite the abundance of negative comments I have on this, I do like the edge of the shadow of the flower sitting on the windowsill.

On the upside, these shoes look much better! I think using a monochrome palette helped with a lot of the issues I was having. I was able to achieve a better range of values, creating the folds in the fabric. The painted line was also pretty successful in this one. It added the right amount of structure without looking like a coloring page.

I know that I still have a long way to go, technically speaking. And as frustrating as this process can be sometimes, it is encouraging to see the progress I’ve undergone already.

Final Red Barn Illustrations

They're done! Yay! I'm pretty satisfied with the way my illustrations for the Red Barn brochure turned out. For the inside illustration, I simplified the metal framework, letting some other colors show through the gray. I also blurred the "Antiques" sign and put a light wash over it. For the outside cover, I tried to make the booths a little more fall colored and darkened the sidewalk. I also tried to add some more depth and detail to the hand. I feel like it was pretty successful. On the front, I used some very light line work to add a little structure and differentiate the foreground from the background.

Ryle Mural Comp

It's done!!! ...hopefully. I made the puzzle pieces a little bigger and a little more square and even than they were in my last sketch. The process still took about 3 hours longer than I had anticipated. I think it looks pretty good though...it's hard to read some of the organization names right now, but I think that if it was done up for real, then there would be much more space to work with and the names would fit in the pieces much better. I'm just so glad it's done!

Red Barn...again

Alrighty. Red Barn comps. For some reason, I had serious trouble getting the right skin tone for the hand. It's still a little too light. So I'll probably up the intensity on that a little for the real deal. I think more saturated color will make the painted line look not so obvious as well. For the background this time, I wanted to give a better feel of the festival, which was a major complaint last time. I think the sidewalks need to be a little gray-er though...looks a little beach-y. People still aren't feeling the the cool pipe. Oh well...2 options at this point: go with it anyway, or change the pipe to a wood post with the antique sign instead. Not sure which one I'll go with at this point.

Ryle Mural sketch-in proportion

I decided to go with my puzzle idea for the Ryle mural. I think it is an easier concept to understand quickly, and although it has lots of little parts that have the potential to be a serious pain, it should be pretty easy to execute. Hours and hours of drawing tiny little puzzle pieces and of course I didn't think to make them bigger and simpler. Duh. DEFINITELY will be doing that for the marker comp! I think I'm going to separate the letters more too. In this, I was trying to link them all together by not really having a border between them. But I think it gets a little to blocky and confusing in the "UM" area. So I think I'll separate them and have a thicker outline of each letter.

Red Barn Sketches for client approval

Here are the quick little watercolor sketches to show the "client" for the Red Barn pamphlets. Markers and watercolor seem like very different media to me...so to get a more realistic feel for what the final illustrations will look like, I did these preliminaries in watercolor as well. I got a lot of mixed reviews. Some people thought the hand gave the impression of saying "STOP". Others like it. I went with it...I like it. And I don't get the feeling of "STOP" out of it. The look I was going for was someone having RED BARN written on his hand. Something a little more youthful and contemporary to give the festival a little "cooler" vibe. The trees in the background are a trainwreck....I was running out of time and ideas, so I just threw something on there. Those will definitely be changed. I thought the rusty old pipe was cool and antique-y looking while still being kind of modern. I've seen lots of older, vintage-y things out lately. Most people weren't really feeling it, but liked that it would frame the copy on the inside. Maybe if I work to improve the illustration of it....

Running out of ideas....

Two more watercolors??? I'm running out of subject matter!! I've been through the pictures on my computer about a hundred times now. They're boring. Searching for inspiration....Roommates playing with makeup! Lipstick!

This one turned out pretty fun, I think. I had fun doing it at least. I wish the color of the actual lipstick was a little flatter...I was going for a more graphic feel. But this works too.

Ok...more inspiration....so tired...can't think....coffee!!
This is pretty disappointing. Should have drunk some of that coffee first I guess. The left side got pretty muddy and the shadow could be miles better. The logo is starting to look ok, but some of the outside line work could have a little more weight to it.

Ryle Mural Sketches

Community. Campus. Global Diversity. Bleh. This is what we had to work with for this mural for the Ryle cafeteria though. I came up with a couple ideas. The first one showed nested rectangles, gradually increasing in size. The smallest rectangle represents Truman campus then growing out geographically. The second idea is just a graphic design, featuring some of those "key words". The last idea shows bold letters spelling out TRUMAN that are made up of puzzle pieces. Each puzzle piece then would have the name of a different student organization, showing the diversity on campus that relates to global diversity.

Oh baby...

I knew I was bad at illustrating people. So I thought I would challenge myself and do my next two 8x10 watercolors of people. Turns out, I'm still bad at illustrating people. Terrible actually. I tried different techniques on each. The one of my sister is mostly monochromatic. I thought since that worked for me before with the shoes, maybe it would work again. Eehh. The line work definitely helped with it, but still not great.

I really didn't want baby Evie to look like an alien, so I decided more realistic tones would be better. I think maybe I just did it from a weird angle, because her features still look funny. She was sucking on her lips, so she really doesn't have a mouth. And I had a hard time with her fine baby hair....it was there, but super light, so didn't really know how to go about that. I think her arm on the left side of the image looks pretty successful....but that's it.

Shoes!!

Finally! I got an illustration that I like! I think making it all monochromatic helped a lot. The shoes were purple, so I thought it would be interesting to use only purple, even in the white areas where I used a light wash. The well-known saying "There's color in a white goat" stuck with me, so I decided there should be a little color in the white toe of my shoe as well. Doing the illustration at a large format helped too, as I could incorporate some more details without getting overworked or muddy.

Poi poster

The background of my first attempt at this illustration was a total disaster. So I started all over. I forgot about trying to make the background look like stage curtains and just gave it a dark blue-black color instead. It's kind of boring, but I think it was much more successful than the first attempt. The fire-y rings still look cool too. Other than nearly going crazy trying to find a working USB port in the computer with the larger scanner, scanning it in and patching the pieces together went smoothly and pretty quickly. The viscommie in me isn't in love with the layout of this poster, but overall, I think the illustration came out well. If I had had some more time, I would have played around with the type more.