Silver & Celebrities.

Like I mentioned last December, one of my illustrations had been nominated as a finalist for the 2nd annual SCADDY Awards. Well, yesterday was the ceremony, and I got a Silver Award for it! Yay! Also I was informed that I became the finalist for the local Savannah ADDY Awards as well. So double yay!

Here is the with-type version of the piece I won for:


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For my caricature class, we have to come up with 2 celebrity images, one horizontal and one vertical. Being a shameless avid Hannah Montana & High School Musical fan, I decided to do Miley Cyrus & Zac Efron. Here are the sketches:

^ Yeah, half Hannah Montana/half Miley... sort of creepy.


And a sneak peek of the color comp sketches in progress:

Yes, I have a TON of references.

Upload Overload.

Alright, I've got a lot to post today:

First off, here are initial sketches (from life) of my fellow classmates in my caricature class:


And here are the final finished pieces:

One had to be graphic/geometrical (top, dyes) and the other one more naturalistic (bottom, graphite).

We also did a fun little in-class exercise today, where we had to draw the Statue of Liberty in various facial expressions:

They were definitely fun to do! Why can't Lady Liberty actually look like one of those in real life? :D

Up next are a few random doodles in my sketchbook:

My personal (=not for class) sketchbook is a small 6"x6" square format, so I tend to just put it on my lap and draw things from all sorts of angles... hence the sideways bears... Sorry, I guess you'll just have to tilt your head sideways!

Another one, drawn during a long winded critique...*yawn*:


Finally, my friend Shiho Hoshino put up pictures of her worktable on her blog the other day, so I thought I'd be a little copycat and put my own up:

You can sort of see the finished version of the piece I had been working on...the sketch is in the previous post. I'll be sure to post a good res scan of that soon!

Springin' Into Action!

Here is a comp sketch of theme park mural art concept I've been working on for Portfolio class:



Just started the final piece. It's going to have a very bright spring-y feel, and I'm using mostly concentrated dyes to get that kind of vibrance!

As for the concept, I just wanted to draw something fun and appealing to children (and not tying myself down to THEME PARK subjects). So what's more fun than a girl and her dog (in a space suit..) skipping through a plain on a rainbow-y path?? And random mushroom-y creatures sprouting?

Girls & Yusuke Nakamura

Been drawing a lot of girls lately. It's a weird trend/cycle (?) that comes and goes: sometimes I draw animals for weeks, sometimes I draw boys non-stop, and right now I'm drawing mostly girls.

Speaking of drawing girls, 中村祐介(Yusuke Nakamura) is an amazing illustrator, mostly famous for doing artwork for the band Asian Kung-Fu Generation. He also does bookcovers, shirt designs, and various other freelance work. His graphic style of drawing girls within a design is truly phenomenal. More of his stuff can be viewed here.



I emailed him several years ago to tell him how much I love his work, and he was so nice and humble in his response. It's nice when really talented artists don't let their success get to their head, and stay grounded. I'd like to be like that one day (well first I need to get famous...).

Posh & First Illustrator Link!

Here are some recent doodles. There are actually more (and of better quality), but I'm going to hold on posting those til I turn them into actual illustrations.



I drew these while I was accidentally locked out of my friend's apartment. Sitting in that hallway somehow helped me get my creative juices flowing, but not enough for anything superb. I was hungry.



I then decided to take a walk to a nearby park, and drew this while sitting on a bench:



The middle face is supposed to be Posh Spice, but I had no reference.... so I don't know.

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ALSO I decided that this sketchblog is a good place for me to post up links of illustrators/other art-related things. Here is a link for my favorite children's book illustrator, いもとようこ(Yoko Imoto). Her site may be kind of hard to navigate for those that don't understand Japanese, so the link goes straight to her illustrations.

While I can't say I'm super familiar with every book she's ever illustrated, I love her distinct style-- the way she's able to make everything seem warm and fluffy through her color schemes and textures. I'm totally going to buy her 2008 calendar. I mean, how can you not love this??



Here is one of a book I actually own:



I guess my parents bought this for my sister and I when we were little. It's been hidden in our bookshelf for quite some time (20 years?) til I found it recently and realized how amazing the illustrations are. Anyway, enough talkin', check out her stuff.

SCADDY finalist!

Yay!

I entered a bunch of my artwork into the SCADDY Awards again this year, and my Robbie Williams portrait was nominated as a finalist for Advertising Illustration! w00t w00t.



My Screaming Jack wine label was also nominated as a finalist for the same category last year. I didn't win anything last year and am not going to have my hopes too high for this year either---- but it's still quite a rush to get approval for my work. :)

Old(er) Pieces

When my Portfolio Site was updated, I originally had it planned to put some old/irrelevant work under "archives." However I didn't want to overload the site with too many images, so that ended up not happening. I figured this blog is a good place to put them up, so here they are:


I might have posted this somewhere else, but this is an anti-smoking poster made for a class. The smoke is made up of little tiny text that reads "Smoking Is Not Glamorous." Spring 2007.


Spring 2006. A piece about life and death. I personally really like the concept I came up with, I think it was pretty clever :)


Also Spring 2006. A cover for an article about toxic everything.

"I Had A Nightmare."

Brrrrrr!

When the weather gets chilly, I naturally draw people in autumn/winter clothes.





These were drawn on two separate days/occasions-----now I realize that I have a thing for knitted caps with fluffy balls at the end.

Super Blob!

Here is a 16"x12" collage-painting I made recently, based on the sketch from the previous post:



I've been wanting to paint on collages for about a year now. I improvised the entire thing, with hardly a clear vision of the final product... a total no-no for most Illustration, but I like how spontaneous and fun it turned out. Here are my impromptu steps:

- ripped magazine pages glued on canvas with watered down gesso
- yellow dye for tint
- peeling off some glued parts off to create ripped texture
- graphite to transfer the sketch
- putting down gouache with a paintbrush
- putting down gouache with a toothbrush (splattering)
- industrial duct tape to rip the surface + create further texture
- black and purple Sharpies for outlines (oh, how un-artsy)

I entered this into the SCAD Small Works exhibition call for entries, alongside random pieces from the past. We'll see how that goes.

I will definitely continue doing more fun personal projects like this!!