My Little Bio :)

My little bio here makes it official! I'm a reviewer yay!

Not only will this teach me more about the market, I'm also finding new artists/illustrators and writers who I throughly enjoy. William and the Missing Masterpiece by Helen Hancocks is a super adorable PB story about a cat detective in search of the thief who stole the "Mona Cheesa." It has a cats, art, and corny, silly humor. Of course I like it. ;)

Why Didn't I do This?

Oh yeah, Lily's page goes first and that's how it would be read. OY!

Yes, I sent out Stitching Butterflies

I've been very busy lately (got a full time job in a lab testing inks woo hoo!) but other than that I've become a reviewer for children's lit! My bio isn't on the website yet, but it will be soon so I'll post that. Positively thrilled by this as I throughly enjoy critiquing what others do that I love.

Also...I sent out Stitching Butterflies to David Fickling Books for their Inkpot contest and I'll post these on here because, oh yeah, this blog is called "Draw It Again" and I definitely should show my lovably agonizing process.

To keep anyone who reads from suffering as much as I did (or as much as my mate Sean did...) I'm only going to post half the process in crappy iPhone photos. Bad photos, but it gets the point across.

THAT is just half of Stella's.

THIS is Lily's.

I wish I had documented better, but that is a lesson for next time! 

New Everything Girl!

I finished it! Though I may go into photoshop to clean up that white on the right side. It does't look that bad in the original. 

Look at the difference in just two years! It's the main reason why I'm going back to this particular manuscript, to see the drastic change in drawing technique and character creation. I think I've cleaned up a bit during the years! Now it's just a matter of cleaning up more...that's why this blog is called "Draw it Again" I suppose~

More SB Sketches

 Moar sketches, this time in color though next time I should clean up a bit. Even if it's a sketch I should have it similar to a final finish. For now though, I've figured out their color schemes and personality enough to write paragraphs about them.

"Stitching Butterflies" MC Sketches

Lately I've been making character sketches for Lily and Stella, the two Mc's of the story I'm working on, "Stitching Butterflies". I plan to send this one out as soon as I get a couple of finished drawings and a rough book dummy. So excited for this one as I think it has a chance with all the great competition out there. I really wish I was the one who wrote and illustrated "If You Want to See a Whale" which has just recently been added to my favorites even though I'm a couple years late haha.

Anyway, here are some of the sketches...the ones that are most legible. Right now I'm trying to get down their personalities, their roles. I need to get the irritated, "I can't believe you just said that to me" look out of the way but that will be put on here later today. Maybe even I'll even have a final final final of "Everything Girl" on here.

Busy March! Now it's April's Turn

So I did draw those compositions again (maybe the blog should be "Paint it Again" or "Make the final Draft 50 times or More" or even "Edit Again and again...and again") And here are the results and comparison:

Before

After

Before

After

I readied my portfolio, labored over print quality, and made everything nice and neat for Mr. E.B. Lewis. After the work I put in I was finally getting the critique that I wanted. Maybe I could even present it to an agent and finally get an illustration job. YES! That is what this portfolio will do. It's so good it hurts.

Well it did hurt. It hurt in the "what was I thinking this is awful?" kind of way and after the critique I wanted to burn and be done with it.  

I didn't I promise!

I've had worse critiques before, and he did like a couple of them but ultimately he told me to throw away everything in the portfolio besides two or three pieces. These:

That and how my presentation of the portfolio was bad and how I was doing everything WRONG. I could also go into how the story doesn't work and how the boy doesn't look the same in every image and how he doesn't have any emotion like a child should...but I won't really. 

That was what I needed.

Thank you E.B. Lewis!

ON TO THE NEXT PORTFOLIO!

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?