Delicious cigarettes

I decided to have a shorter and more eye-catching blog post title this time (which I noticed other bloggers do, so I thought I ought to try it out too :P ).

Anyway, this my final illustration for Illustration Topics, in progress. I really like where it's going right now; I'm using some elements of texture that I have not really done before, and I'm excited about the color as well (I have to give credit to Tom Garrett, and also Teagan White, for some of the color suggestions. One of these days I will absorb their color know-how into my brain well enough to think of good backdrops and line colors and such). I'm not sure how I like using the realistically drawn figure; BUT, I do like how I have it kinda surreal, with her cut off, and the floating cigarettes.. in some weird way I like that...weirdness, instead of a completely realistic illustration.

Oh, and what it's about: we had several short phrases or just single words to select from, and I chose 'Delicious' (I also considered 'Chain Reaction'...so, somehow this may be related to that, too). Anyway, it's about cigarettes and people who smoke them, and how 'deliciously addictive' they are, but then at the same time obviously unhealthy; but people for some reason like doing this unhealthy, maybe 'edgy' thing, and sometimes they even try to make it look glamorous or sexy. But in the end it's just unhealthy, and I personally don't understand why people smoke, and I think the attraction factor goes way down (in my book at least) when I find out someone smokes. So, it may be about seeing an attractive person, then finding out they smoke, and then that's all I can think about, forgetting about the initial attraction.

It MAY change in composition for the final, but probably not. There will be more textures on the smoke probably...we shall see where it goes. It's going to be a 30" x 40" print out :O

A biographical comic from Intro to Comics

Intro to Comics was a while ago (Spring 2009), but I was going through some folders and finding things I thought would be fun to post. So, here's a 2-page, biographical comic, about the war-time journalist Ernie Pyle (World War II), pencils and inked pages. The inking's a bit rough looking, but it was only my second time doing real 'comic inking'. I've always liked stippling stuff, so I like how those parts looked. Figuring out where the larger black spots and middle toned shapes should go was more of a challenge, and I think I've improved in that area a bit, but could still use some improvement (though I don't do a ton of just plain black and white stuff like this as much anymore).

New Much Better Quality Children's Book scans

Here are scans of the sheets that I have my storyboards on (now in their entirety, and scanned at 300 dpi and then merged together...I used Curves to make them more viewable, which also made the paper and eraser marks and all that visible, but oh well). One thing I'm noticing is that I need to work on line weight more, even in my sketching phase.. otherwise I like most of the page layouts. I have the writing done too, though it could change in the final version.

Anyway, here they be.

It's way later than I should be up right now, considering I have class tomorrow at 1 pm, and then night class, and will probably be tired through all of them.. :P O well, I really wanted to post these new scans.

Children's Book Storyboard Snapshots

Here are some snapshots of parts of a storyboard for our final 32-page dummy in Children's Book Illustration class. I am pretty happy with how it all turned out, even if some things may be adjusted in the final version. I just felt good making this, and even for the pages that aren't as clear yet, I still felt like I liked where I envisioned it going; it feels pretty close to the kind of way of drawing that I'd like to continue doing.

Edit: I know that the quality of these aren't too great; I was using a scanner I got off the free shelf that is in my apartment (which I don't know how to adjust the dpi on yet), because I didn't feel like walking back through the cold to the main building :P I will have better scans to post later.