Person Texting at a bus stop

Hey Peeps!
Here's one of the works I did in Narrative Illustration this semeseter.  I got an A in the class!

This one was painted in gouache, which was quite a challenge to figure out.

 Hey all.  This was the final assignment in my Narrative Illustration class with Richard Hull.  I, of course, really enjoyed this assignment and I tried to make it something that I would be really proud of. 
The scene is from Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan.  I really like the book, but I hated the movie, and it really was not what I had in mind when I read it. 

Snake in a Box

This was my final for my Flash animation class.  It was a lot of work, but I got it done, and I was one of only a few that actually finished the assignment.

BFA Page 18 Inks

The inks for the penciled page I posted here a month or so ago.  I quite like the way that the father's body falls into shadow in the last panel.  It wasn't really something I'd planned for, but I'd like things like that to happen more often.

BFA Pencils, page 18

Found some motivation to keep working on this story for the moment, which has been a bit hard.  I've looked back at it so many times, but redrawing something that was written by someone else (something that I love) I realized that my storytelling and writing aren't nearly as good as said person.  But I was quite pleased with this page, and that can be motivating. (as well as music)

This one had me thinking about some of the ways that comics are an interesting way to illustrate, and for me, a lot better than traditional paintings and images.  In a comic, you can tell multiple facets of a story, shifts in mood and tone, and you can emphasize in ways that would be completely unacceptable in a single painting.  Things like closeups, which help express the mood and emotions of what's happening here wouldn't happen if this scene had been a painting. 
Of course, it loses that striking imagery that you often get in single illustrations, and people will spend a lot less time looking at the drawings, but I would prefer that people get absorbed by the story and feel the emotions with the characters.

S2000

A bit different sort of picture here.
Drew this one up real quick for the print sale at UVU

The Tower

Hey all!  This is a project that I've been working on for Fou Games presently called "The Tower", a fantasy card game for ios, and hopefully Android in the future.  The game looks to mix the experience of reading comics and playing games, specifically designed with the iPhone in mind.  I've been on to do the story art for the game and concept art.  This is one of my first real jobs, and it's very exciting!

These are some of my concepts and development work for designing the main character, Sofia.

 This is the first panel of the game, and the general process for creating it.

 Here are some of the panels that I like a lot that I've done so far.

Improvement

Many people, especially my teachers, tell artists to keep everything so that they can always look back... well, I looked back, and I have improved immensely.  Things like black balance, line quality and weight, down to anatomy and body language have all gotten better. 

Other than that, school starts in like a week, so gah!

Gray Eyed Tomorrow Inks

Hey peeps.  It's been a long time since I posted, and I figured I should put something up.  At the beginning of summer I was looking at this project, and I was trying to decide how to continue it, and I had the realization: I don't draw like that anymore.  I decided to cut my losses and swallow my pride and redraw the story, even though I had about 50 pages ready to be colored.  In the end, my style had changed too much, I wanted to draw at a different size, and I felt like I should do the story (which I love) justice with my best art.  So here's a start of what's to come eventually

Snake!

 I am super excited for Metal Gear Solid 5... I don't draw fanart a whole lot, so this is kind of different.

Summer

Hey everyone who might read this.  It's been a while since I updated...
I've been pretty busy, since school ended.  I decided to redraw a whole comic that I'd gotten about 50 pages into.  I love the story and I didn't want to continue drawing the story when I knew it would look inconsistent and bad.  I've gotten a lot better since I'd even had time to work on it, and so going back from the start was the best idea for me.  I've gotten about six pages in so far, which isn't great, but at least it's something. 

I've also been working (very) slowly on my BFA project since the summer.  I finished 15 pages for my class, but decided to go back and expand the second scene and redraw most of it. 

 And here are some of the pages that I am quite pleased with.

A robot saves a girl in the desert

Need I say more? When I get the edits done, I will upload that too.

BFA page 2 Process

I decided to document the process that I go through when I draw and finish a comic page.  I don't necessarily feel like I'm one to be giving tutorials or showing people how to draw/color/make art, but I do think that someone might be interested to see the process.


First I start with the blue line drawing.  I use two steps at this part where I draw the gestures and basic shapes using my 2mm lead holder with the Turquoise brand lead.  It's not as soft, and it's really waxy, so it's hard to get dark lines.  It's also actually turquoise colored, so when I go over the gestures with my .5 mm blue mechanical pencil, it doesn't show through much.

After that, it's inking.  It's pretty self explanatory, but I try to make sure I get as much line weight as I can.  I also try to make sure that there's a balance of black in the pages because I don't want the structure of the forms and the drawings to rely on the coloring to be completed.
 On coloring, establishing the color scheme takes the most time.  I tend to use a gamut masking technique where I keep things desaturated unless it's very important.  This page is very desaturated without the high point because I wanted it to have a very particular tone.  The flats are also useful because you can select all the colors and change them as you need to.  This is the second page, so I didn't actually do that, but on the first page, I just copied the original character design colors and adjusted them to fit this tone and color scheme. 
After the flats, I add a multiply layer and establish the values and shadows.  I usually try to have pretty sharp lines on the shadows, but for these pages, there's sand blowing and ambient light, so there isn't a strong light source casting strong shadows.  Another thing I did a little less on this page was framing the panels with the values.  If I were going to make something into a silhouette, I would be doing it at this stage.  I do add a layer that is a black gradient to help direct the eye around the page.  If I don't want the viewer to look at the outer parts of the panel, then I will make that part a little darker so it's less noticeable.  After that, adding the textures helps make the page look a little more lively, as well as avoiding that airbrushed-I-colored-this-in-photoshop look that so many comics have.  It can really ruin good pencils or inks to have crappy flat colors and gradients.  I've made very high resolution watercolor textures that I apply on top on the overlay setting at about 35% opacity.  Finally, I add the effects and some halftones.

 And there's a finished page :)

Red Riding Hood and the Wolf

This was done for my digital painting 2 class, taught by Will Terry.  You can check out his stuff at http://willterry.com or at willterry.blogspot.com

Cintiq!

 Thanks to the generosity of my parents, I am now the proud owner of the 22HD Cintiq.  For a long time I had been using a tablet pc (the HP tm2t, which was pretty good) as my main digital drawing tool.  Tablet pc's are nice because they are full on laptops, and therefore portable and convenient, and I thought more than good enough for doing art.  I figured that using a cintiq couldn't be that different from using my laptop for drawing and painting, but I was totally wrong.  The Cintiq is so sensitive, way more so than the tablet pc.  It has so many functions as well, including the sixteen buttons and two touchstrips on the back.

When I opened the box, I realized why these things are so expensive (they are overpriced, even though they're totally awesome); it's the highest end professional tool an artist can buy.  The intuos tablets would probably be, since it's the same technology, but the Cintiq is simply on a different level from that. The one thing I can definitely say about it, is that it makes the process much faster.  Coloring takes a lot less time than it would with any other tablet, and it's easier to make it look better.  Because the screen is so big, I can zoom in more without having to constantly reposition the picture or move around a ton.  I also have a ton of hotkeys, not to mention the two buttons on the pen and the eraser.  And, unlike my laptop, I can have a keyboard available at anytime, so I can use any hotkey that I don't have programmed.
It is a fantastic piece of technology... and I don't think anyone would regret buying it, though it is such a huge investment.

And here is some samples of what I've done with it.  Most of them are just coloring, but there's a couple drawings as well :)