Brush practice!

I should have been doing homework but instead I messed around in photoshop for a couple hours for something totally unrelated. No regrets.

Project dump

 Integrated handwritten type project. Words are from "Little Girls" from Annie. 

And these are some sample pages from a concept art book I did for Narrative Illustration class (Minus the type because I was dumb and saved the wrong compression settings, whoops). 

And this last one is just a couple portrait experiments for a figure in light project. They're a mix of acrylic, oil, and digital. 

Character Portraits!

My favourite class is back again! Here's some portraits from Figure Illustration. The goal was to do the protagonist and antagonist of a story, so I picked Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen.

Both are done with oils on gessoed illustration board and then fixed up in photoshop, though the second one had an initial layer of acrylic paint underneath as well.

On another note, Drink and Draw tomorrow night! If anyone is at Kensington Pub tomorrow around 4 or 5, stop by and say hi!

Mascot Project

A week late to post this one. I told myself I'd wait until I fixed it up, but I already know I'd be lying to myself. So here it is.

The project was to do mascots for an original video game idea. The concept of mine is that it would be an app based sidescroller game geared towards kids and young adults. The brief synopsis is that four kids enter a haunted house and turn into monsters, then play through different levels of the house to escape and become human again.

This is more of a concept rough than an actual finished product, and I have to refine a lot of stuff, but I figured I should post anyways.

IMC Piece!

So this summer me and three of my friends took a trip down to Amherst, MA for the Illustration Master Class. I wasn't sure what to expect honestly, other than for my wallet to suffer sudden weight loss.

It blew my mind. Totally and completely. My passion for art was reignited and I feel like I came back to school much more confident and focused. The past couple years I felt like I've been under the impression that I could only do digital art or traditional art, but seeing artists like Donato Giancola, Iain McCaig, Rebecca Guay, Dan Dos Santos, and so many more amazing and talented people who work in both mediums completely proved me wrong, and I don't feel bad at all for breaking out my oil paints again this year and going back to my traditional roots.

I learned so much in just one week that it's almost impossible to comprehend. I also made some awesome friends and have a ton of new idols at this point.

I went digital with my piece this year, but next year I'm most definitely going to give the traditional rooms a shot instead.

This is the piece I worked on all week. It's done all digital because I didn't want to deal with airport security stealing my paint, (I will deal with this next year) and it's not perfect, but look how much I improved! 

After improving so much after one week, it just gave me a kind of high for art again, which I've yet to come down from. I don't even care if my work in the past has been sub par, because I'm definitely trying to make the current and future stuff make up for all of that. If anyone from IMC is reading this, thank you all! It was one of the best weeks of my life, and I can't wait to go again!

And now after updating everything to current speed, I must go and count everything in my room for a paper due on Tuesday (yuck). 

Oh and FYI, if anyone is at the Calgary Mini Maker Faire this weekend, come stop by the ACAD VCD booth! There's a good chance I'll be giving a 24"x36" poster of this away if you ask me nicely. 

Comic Expo 2013 Work

Forgot to put these in the last post, but that one was getting pretty full anyways.

For those who might not know, every year at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo, ACAD sets up a booth and hands out these funky little field guides featuring info about popular characters that people attending cosplay as. The illustrations are all done by students and alumni of the VCD program, and so here are my contributions for the year of 2013.

Comic Bane is the best Bane, sorry Tom Hardy. 

Jon Snow was a last minute request that I couldn't pass up. 

If you're in Calgary between April 25th to April 27th of 2014, make sure you stop by and say hi!

Third Year Projects

I have been a no good, very bad person and haven't updated this since February. Oops. Here's a dump of projects from the second half of third year to make up for it!

Starting with projects 2, 3, and 4 from Figure Illustration III. The objects were to design a pulp fiction story, render two scenes, and then two covers, and the final project was a procession based on a narrative. The first two were done in watercolour because I hadn't touched that in a long time and wanted to try it. The rest is digital, though my procession's lines are all pencil instead of ink or photoshop because I like my pencil drawings much more than a lot of my finished products and thought it might help.

I really like Game of Thrones, if no one has caught on to that yet.  These colours could definitely use some work though. 

Next up is projects 1, 3, and 5 from Illustration II. This class was the hardest one, and pretty much convinced me I belong in the character design stream rather than the illustration one at ACAD (sorry Charles!). The first project was to create a black and white editorial image based on a news article, and somehow relating to one of the seven deadly sins. My sin was gluttony, and the article was about a kid who indulged in so much online gaming that his dad actually hired an online hitman to assassinate his character everytime he logged on (read about it here). The next project was to do a spread and two spot illustrations for a company, and then the the last one was a book cover. 

 Daenerys is not even my favourite, but that trippy House of the Undying scene is way cooler in the book. 

Finally, we have my Storytelling and Environments II stuff. First project is a set of illustrations of a Robert Service poem (The Shooting of Dan McGrew). The second one is supposed to be settings about a character from a classic novel then reimagined in a different time period. I chose the Artful Dodger from Oliver Twist, with the reimagined time period being set during WWII. The final project was to mash up two existing genres and then depict environments, maps, and vehicles of the created world. I ended up making a sci-fi greek myth, centred on the Underworld. I would go into more detail, but I'm expanding on that idea in a current fourth year project so it will be more informative and refined, and feature characters at last. 

Overall, third year was interesting. I tried a lot of things that did and didn't work out. Most of my stuff from it are all very stylized and way more cartoonish. I'm not sure how much I'm liking that, but I tried at least! 

Obit Project

Semester 2 is here and kicking my butt again. Here's the first Project from Figure Illustration III.

We had to create an obituary portrait for one person from life, and then one of our choosing, fictional or not. Here I've drawn Patricia Van Tighem, a super rad lady who earned her bachelor's degree of nursing, raised four kids, and wrote a best-selling book, all after her face was mauled by a bear. I went a little more conceptual with this one, trying to make the point more about the bear haunting her throughout life, rather than about the wounds on her face.

The second portrait is of my roommate, who makes that face on a regular basis. Mostly I just wanted to have the opposite kind of mood from the other piece, hence the goofy cartoonish look here.

Issues with both of them as always, but I was still lazy from christmas, so I blame that. Moving on.

Just Some Practice

A digital painting I did when I had free time. Supposed to be Jon Snow, but he turned out a lot older than intended. Maybe a future version, then.

And here's a quick 15 minute acrylic painting of Sam Winchester. 

I need to scan my sketchbook more.

Princess Guillotine Comic

After a huge delay in posting, I present my final project in Figure Illustration II - The Princess Guillotine Comic!

Very fun, and incredibly draining. I slept my christmas break away because of this project. It's only 8 pages, plus cover and back, but I actually sketched out about 18. It's something I'd like to revisit in the summer for sure. There's a lot of issues I have with this, but I feel like it's way better than my last comic, and at this point I'm willing to just call them things to learn from and do better next time.

I am just bummed out that I wasn't able to get the pages with the dragon finished for final crit, I was excited about that.

Also, Waldo is in there, I hope no one sues me.