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.