More Revisions~

In a bit of a pickle here. The more I work, the more my hand seems comfortable with my materials. That being said, when I look back at my portfolio to do some revisions based off some critiques I end up needed to revise most of the pieces because now those revisions are outshining the ones I thought were decent to begin with. AHHHHH. 

Will I ever be finished editing my work for this portfolio? I make a promise to myself that after this last portfolio review I WILL move on to the next one and I will say bye-bye. You've taken me seven months to do, perhaps even a year if I count pre ideas. 

For now, this is one of the revisions. I originally had a black and white piece here but when I look at the overall flow of the portfolio this one just seemed tremendously out of place because while the boy is at first in little color, he meets the Being who introduces color. So why did I go back to b/w? I don't know. Hence the revision in color! 

Since then I've been looking at the other ones leading up to this point and now have to redo them. SIGH, the life of an illustrator.

A Commission~

 Back to drawing it again, this time it's painting it again. Here we have a lovely goth girl commissioned by a friend. No, it's not what I normally do but it was fun all the same.

In oil paint, goth girl looks at the viewer with a little blue lollipop, surrounded by a warped landscape of orange and bubbles. Well it was fun to paint, also a good distraction from 12x12.

Some Bugs, just found it.

Is cute and the song is stuck in my head now... "Some Bugs" written by Angela Diterlizzi and Illustrated by Brendan Wenzel is another inspiration. The colors, the shapes and textures, and it's presentation, all makes me want to start making artwork. Good compositions and adorableness is all it takes now a days to get me doing something creative. Thanks guys~

For The Nightlight Land

yes, I AM working on things...I promise! With the overwhelming amount of work and drawing and writing and researching I'm doing I still want to make my blog Draw it Again be about re-drawing everything till a final feels final.

Anyway, I've finished the PiBoIdMo successfully now onto the the 12x12! OF COURSE I have drawings for these. I can't write without drawing (and in some cases I can't draw without writing!) so here are a couple sketchbook layouts and pieces of story building.

Watermark My Work?

Someone on a 12X12 forum posted this in response to watermarks and I couldn't agree more! I never watermark my stuff because honestly if something thinks it's good enough to copy then woohoo! Also it's not like they can make more and could I REALLY stop them? Nah, most likely they won't make enough money from it anyway. Plus if you really want my artwork that bad, then go ahead make a copy because you'll never get the original~ ;)

Oh, I will put a copywrite sign on my cargo, but will that stop all those sad people who want to copy hard work from others? No it won't but can't hurt to put down at the bottom of the website page. Thanks Will Terry.

12X12 Challenge

I just decided to do the 12X12 challenge.

Two years ago I'd never called myself a writer. Then I asked myself, "well why not?" My idiotically strange answer to that question was, "because I can't write."

Well I did get through college and in high school I graduated with over a 4.0 gpa... I think I can write. Oh my grammar and spelling may be way off but I KNOW I can at least make some kind of sentence that tells some type of information, wether it be important or not is completely based on opinion.

Not only am I an artist, I AM A WRITER TOO.

There I said it. I would have never had the guts to say that two, three, four and beyond years ago despite my sketchbooks soaking in inky scribbles of poetry and storytelling along with the sketches. I wouldn't have said it because I lacked confidence. Oh I still let myself know how stupid I am every now and then and I can't say that I'm a good writer, but now I don't make idiotically strange statements like "I can't write" anymore.

It's also time to have people criticize my prized writings that I think can make it in the world. Let's face it, if I can go through the torment of an illustration critique then I can go through a writing one.

I'll say it again...

I AM A WRITER TOO

not just an illustrator.

I found a new artist that I like!

His name Goro Fujita, a Dreamworks animator that I recently found by trying to find another illustrator that does some cool photoshop work by using collage digital images and creating portraits. What I really wanted to do was create another comparison to Fred Tomaselli's process with contemporary digital collages, making some statement that Tomaselli would be an awesome digital artist or was the start of some kind of hyper collage art era. I can't seem to find the artist I was looking for but instead I found Goro Fujita through twitter on Mayhem and Muse as well as blogger (it's called Chapter 56 if anyone reads this and wants to know or doesn't know already) and decided to post about him instead.

Gosh the reflection in this image is pretty awesome, has that stripped effect that bounces the eye up and down like most reflections of a lone lake in the woods. 

I'm also a sucker for cool light effects/artists who I think really knows how to use and manipulate light in their images. This guy has it! Though I will admit that I'm getting tired of the cartoon, anime style from many of the popular illustrators nowadays. Okay, he does work for Dreamworks so I shouldn't expect anything less and this style is nice on the eyes, fantastical, and friendly so I see why it's popular. I keep forgetting that I secretly love the old school traditional art and illustration styles more (what's with that word style anyway? I'm getting sick of it and here I use the term...) anyway yes, I think the old masters had more of a grip on how shapes, light, and movement interact with each other simply from years and years of studying what was around them in a strict, traditional manner. 

Would I want artists/illustrators to go backwards to this strict regimen of artist life of studying what was around them, incorporating their truth of the world instead of a fantasy that no one would be able to see if these artists didn't create them? No, definitely not. Besides, there's enough truth to these images to make the space reliably believable in their particular world. 

So yeah Goro Fujita isn't a Caravaggio or the candlelight painter, Tromphine Bigot, and he's not an Edvyind Earle either but hey I still enjoy his light. 

Nanny, Pop, Pat

Now back to art making...This one is for my Aunt Pat. The two people on the right are my now deceased Nanny and Pop. The original image was from a photograph with Nanny and Pop at a picnic table. I changed the background, added Aunt Pat to the picture, and added certain items on the table that trigger certain memories of them when they were alive and well. I miss them.

Just being happy about an illustrator/author of a book I like

Herve Tullet will be a keynote speaker at the SCBWI conference in New York! Woot! Talk about shapes and colors, that's what this guy's all about. I wish I could be so simple with my compositions ;_; but alas it was never meant to be. :D

My Ramble on Fred Tomaselli

Fred Tomaselli is another one of my favorite artists and another one that I'll go on a quick ramble about, making a teensy connection to my own view on art and my work and heck, life in general.

It isn't the psychedelic, tedious, and obsessive detailing that I'm in love with, I do like these aspects but there are other reasons why this artist has become one of my favorites. It's the taking from other creations and making them his own, a completely different concept from the piece's original placement and role in it's former image.

Of course any kind of collage artist holds a bit of this concept like Picasso and Braque who led the Cubist movement, as well as certain Dadaists and Surrealists like Man Ray and Hannah Hoch. Tomaselli just puts collage to a whole other different level and beyond, transcendental pieces building into one. He focuses on bringing the viewer to another world by overload of information, not showing the viewer multiple views and angles of one object or taking the viewer only into the subconscious realm or taking a political point of view against the art world.

It's this idea of information overload that I've been pondering during my life search of sorting out where I get my creativity and where others get theirs. Do all artists get their creations from many bits and pieces of people around, other artists, other writers, the internet, the thousand images everyone sees in a day, all pieced together like a hyper-active puzzle that no one would ever want to finish but one that they had to because the desire is overwhelming. For now I would say yes, every creator is constantly trying to complete their hyper-active chaotic yet orderly puzzle of information.

As a side note I enjoy watching his physical process of cutting pieces of paper, pouring on the resin, and painting over it to a finish. It's just fun to see. o.o

The Owl

This time it's the first image that I fully created for my portfolio, "The Boy and the Changing Forest Being". Again, I like the bottom one. The top is too yellow, not quit like the original, though the bottom one is a little too magenta. I like the effect so it's not too much of a bad thing. It flows much better than the yellow one in my opinion and I will keep searching ways to keep scans as close to their originals as possible. 

Am I a Goya Gag Gory Burton Ito Mixture of Whatsits?

Okay so today I'm comparing myself to Edward Gory and
Tim Burton, sadly. I like these drawings, prefer Edward Gory because
he reminds me of a Wanda Gag Goya. I can't not compare myself to these two artists because my work has similarities. I use the weird wonky shapes like Tim Burton, and I use hatching and cross hatching when I draw in ink/pen. As for Edward Gory, his stuff is just dark and strange with a sad humor however he can render creatures realistically, just look at that snailfish! It reminds me Junji Ito's Uzumaki, which is also dark with pen cross hatching and hatching... and of course the spirals with horror written all over it.

I could just be influenced by theater lighting, (I was a light tech for four years of high school and some of college...) so I like dramatic light sources and horror images give a lot of that. My natural hand that layers and layers in tiny buildups also suits hatching and cross hatching. Subject matter? Well I know that Tim Burton was influenced by quirky bad horror movies somewhere around the 50's theme or so, that could affect his weirdness. Wanda Gag was influenced by the Grimm Fairytales as she was one of the first to translate the stories from german to english. Goya just wanted to let the cruelty of the Romantic era be known  (insane asylums, war, disease).

Me? I'm influenced by my dreams, my anxieties, my depression, and my overactive imagination of darkness...so that's Goya all the way!

  

  

I might never create something considered under horror but the influence is there. 

See it?

Again to Something Different

I just watched a few videos on Mike Mignola, this one here, and he mentioned how he used to be inspired by Frank Frazetta, an earlier science fiction and fantasy illustrator. They draw the same subject matter, but their styles are completely different...but maybe I can make some comparisons.

On the left are images by Frank Frazetta.  On the right Mike Mignola images from good ol google. The top two look similar, lots of movement, the action happening right in front with no middle ground and these characters are on a roof, in combat or getting ready for combat. Mignola doesn't have that realistic rendering like Frazetta has, but the composition and the division of space he definitely does. Instead of using fabulous colors in this rendered, traditional oil painting sort of way, Mignola figures out how to show the colors flat but still with value, almost piecing the positive and negative shapes together on the page.

This time Mignola goes completely flat and shows what has inspired me as an artist, the beautiful, colorful negative and positive shapes. What I recently noticed about Mignola's work is how he sets a scene with all of these artistic elements and in this comparison I feel the similarity between the two (no not just with the round sun) but of two monsters looking in the distance before or after a battle. 

Of course the viewer behind the monster will feel different than in front, full face yet looking past the viewer in that same way, not seeing or caring about the onlookers. 

I compare the two simply because I want to see how one of my inspirations dealt with his inspiration and how this affected his art. I think I can see the bits of influence in there.

Comic books might not be my favorite type of art but Mike Mignola just might have an influence on mine, even if it is a small one. 

Another comparison with scanners

Another comparison. I'm torn between the two. On one hand I like the top one because of the light rusty, coffee stain color that's a bit closer to the color of the original. 

On the other hand I like the bottom because I didn't have to edit it in photoshop to piece the image together, so the layout is more accurate. I do like the darker wood though, so the bottom piece wins for me. 

More changes with the epson

Comparing these images makes me realize how much I love my new scanner. It scans CMYK instead of RGB, so my colors are very much like the originals. Now on blogger everything seems to have a dark gray tone that covers the image so this final is a bit darker than the original but it still is closer to the previous scanned one. The top one had colors that didn't really exist on the original so I had to try to tweak it on photoshop when I was piecing the image together. Oh yeah, did I mention my printer is 11X17? OH YEARH.

Officially going back to Draw it Again Material...

I had created these two images during PiBoIdMo for my small novel I'm writing. It turned out that these two images had given me another idea for a picture book. In the meantime however, I created this scene because it wouldn't leave my mind. It was stuck there forever unless I drew it down. So here it is, the memory lurker in the King of Everything's hall of memories.

Okay, now I'm just fan girling over artists...it's fine! All for the creative process!

It was Wanda Gag who actually inspired me to take the long, treacherous journey to becoming a children's book illustrator/author. Before my third year of college, I had decided that maybe I could do illustration...or maybe I couldn't. The criticism was harsh, the assignments were difficult for me at the time (I was so used to being a fine artist who did work for myself) and the classwork was critiquing the awful homework I produced.

The change happened when I needed to give a presentation on an artist I had researched, an artist that inspired me. I looked over all the artists under the inspiration category and this is what I came up with: Salvador Dali, Heironymus Bosch, Robert Irwin, Kandinsky, Judy Pfaff, Rothko, Chagall...none of them were illustrators. None of them really had anything in common that I could figure out. Now I can see some abstract similarities but then I couldn't. I had another project similar to this one in which I chose to write something on Fail, a group of graffiti artists who still weren't illustrators. My influences were all over the spectrum, leaking into different categories like music, books, food, riding a train by myself,  and even some of the personalities of my co workers at the time when I worked at Dunkin Donuts. Anything seemed to inspire me BUT other illustrators.

I came across Wanda Gag when I googled "illustrators who drew in pen" or something like that. I started looking for ones that used materials that I normally do. And BAM. Also BAM when I realized she liked working both fine arts and illustration. She made me question what the difference was and why I needed to do both. I found that for me, the actual creating part was no different. I added the same elements, worked with the same mixed media, and kept the same personality in the nature of the markings. The only difference was I use fine arts to connect to myself and illustration to connect to other people, to communicate the ideas that the fine art had but didn't tell.

Thank you Wanda Gag for your love of fairy tales, for I love them too. Thank you for the inspiration!

Just One More!

Just one more! >_< I want ALL the Sean Tan books! 

Some Inspiration

Inspiration for the day! Sean Tan's video "The Lost Thing". I had forgotten about it until recently when I was looking up dream inspired children's books and BAM! Sean Tan is a children's book surrealist (but I'm pretty sure there's a more contemporary term for him XD) He had given me courage for the last idea yesterday. I say courage because there are plenty of artists who create strange, dark and quirky images and being someone who has been compared to Tim Burton, Edward Gory as well as Dr. Sues, Maurice Sendak and any other weird, well known artist out there for a good portion of my humble career it's good to know that I can keep going and still feel like it's my own work. I can move on and hopefully one day people will say my work looks like a Brittanny Handiboe. Anyway, I'm more influenced by artists who create works that are nothing like mine. Wanda Gag is a favorite, David Small, Eyvind Earle, Mike Mignola, Judy Pfaff, Mark Rothko, Robert Irwin, Ellesworth Kelly and several other artists. The list goes on.

As far as writing? I really don't know who I am as a writer. I can't compare myself to anyone because I've never thought of comparing myself. Maybe I should do that with my art for awhile and take a step back and look at it from there.

Enough of the inner exploration! Time to start working on those stories!

All Done! (Also Post PiBoIdMo)

I'm finished! I completed 30 ideas in 30 days. I didn't post this yesterday because I was shellshocked at how I succeeded in the challenge, also because I was working for nine hours, though those hours of work helped me think of the last idea! (and a good idea I think)

So here is the scroll that I'll make into a book later this month. I still have pages left, and I can always unfold the accordion again and add more notes for future ideas.

Now to figure out what the heck I'm going to do with the unfinished ideas! I wanted to think of one story each day so I could work on that story the entire day, hoping I would be able to think of something to work with instead of random ideas and thoughts, though plenty of random thoughts happened I assure you. This didn't work out like I wanted but not because I couldn't think of ideas furthering the story. What happened was I would think of an idea, get stuck and leave it for the day. The next day I would think of another idea that would then lead me to more clues to the previous story. It was a build up, ideas happening because I just let each one sit. 

So I think I can easily say that because I focused on one idea a day, I managed to get a good 17 ideas that will make a good dummy, perhaps more if I work hard!