Happy Holidays!

I am happy to say that I have a revised illustration to display for everyone! I have been taking a break and trying to recover from this past semester. Yesterday I had the desire to fix my snowflake girl and here she is! I made the extensions from her body bigger so you can see them, rotated the snowflake for design interest, and lots of other tweaking. I hope you all are having a wonderful holiday! Happy New Year!

Snowflake

Hello all! It has taken me unusually long to get a new post up this month due to the last week of school and finals week. However, I have many updates to share with you. Here is today's illustration. It's the same style as my moon, but for the holiday season I made a snowflake. You are welcome to leave comments. I enjoy hearing them.

Bikers: Alex and Mindy

So I have finally finished my bikers piece that I will be mailing out to art directors at the end of the month. I did this piece in acrylic originally, but I was doing what Illustrator is best at...a graphic style.

Mural

Hello everyone!
So for the past year I have been working on Trevor's uncle's theater room. I had to divide up the columns into even spaces then I drew all the hieroglyphics on the columns. Now I am painting them with house paint. I finished one column today and here it is!

The Transfer Experiement

Hello all! So this week I have learned a new way to transfer and image on to illustration board. My husband, Trevor taught me it and I have to say I am glad he is going into Art Ed.
So here is the process: you print out your image reversed onto regular printer paper. Then you cake on the gesso on to the ink side of the image (no ink is showing through the gesso). Then you put the paper on to the board or canvas (make sure there is no gesso on the other side or it won't work). Then you take a bone folder or any thing that can smooth out the image on to the board. Once again, try not to get gesso on the back of the paper. Then you let it sit for at least 24 hours. When time comes, you fill a cup with water and you out your fingers in it. Then gently rub the paper away with out removing the ink. If it starts turning white you rubbed too much. When the paper is gone you have finished the transfer!
Now, I rubbed too much so you can learn from my example, but it was a lot of fun to do!

lunch color study

Hello friends and family! I am happy to post up my color study of my kitty trying to get a meal. However the colors are slightly desaturated compared to my original in illustrator. I am going to make some more design changes and then print it out. I will then put mat medium on top and paint on top of it. Hopefully the finish will have lots of colors and nice modeling. I can't wait to start the finished product!

Final of Dancing Moon

I am finished with the Dancing Moon piece, and I must say I am pretty happy with it. I am also happy to hear such wonderful comments on it too. Thanks for the support!

Lunch

I realized it was time for another post and luckily I have been working on a project. I decided to do a fun piece where a cat decides to go fishing for lunch. The top one was my first time trying to render it, but the body of the cat was stagnant and I changed it to look like he was in water. The second one I want to push the values some more and start on color. I have been playing with it already, but I am finding it difficult with so many elements in my piece. I just need to finalize a palette and go with it. I love working on this piece and I can't wait to start painting it!

Hiker

Here is a project that I finished a week or so ago. It is for my landscape painting class and we needed to incorporate a landscape with a figure in it for the assignment. Since we are painting the Provo landscape, I thought a man hiking would be appropriate. Although I am not finishe with the piece yet, (some more design fixin') I am pretty happy with it so far. This was done in acrylic paint on illustration board. I have fun playing with textures and color as well as painting in a stylized manner. Enjoy!

Updates

I just wanted to follow up on past blog posts to fill you all in. So as for the pumpkin carving contest, my husband and I got 3rd place, which means we got $25 off of our rent this month! It was pretty cool. We were succeeded by a Hannibal mask, and possibly a storm trooper, which were nice, but I still like mine better. :)

Now as far as the Dancing moon goes, I still have some revisions to make. More anatomy fixes and some color changes and it should be good enough to send out next Wednesday to art directors in the Children's book publishing business. There will be a final post on that this next week.

The other mailer I am doing with the animals on the bicycle are still with my professor. I can't wait to get it back and show all of you what it looks like!

I will post some more pictures of new projects soon!

Newest Moon

Here is my newest illustration of the moon. I made her more anatomically correct and added some silver paint to her bodice and shoes. I am still deciding if I like it or not. The great thing about doing an illustration on the computer is that I can redo the print as many times as I'd like.
Sorry about the poorly taken picture of the detail, I need better lighting as well as a camera. One day when I have some money I will purchase one. In the mean time, I will do my best to get the best pictures I can.

Happy Halloween!

I hope you all are having a wonderful weekend of costume parties and trick-or-treating! On Friday our apartment had a pumpkin carving contest and here is what I came up with. I was inspired by the book "Play with your Pumpkins". The 1st place winner gets $100 off their rent. I hope I at least get into the top 3.

Here is the dancing moon illustration. I was originally going to go with the 1st one. I went through an hour in the printing lab to print it up right. I later was playing with it in photo shop to see what texture looked like and I love it! It gave a starry night feel and added more stars to her hair as well as decorating her bodice. I am very happy with the results. What do you think?

dancing moon

I am excited that I am doing a new project! I decided to do a Art Deco influenced illustration. I am illustrating a poem called The Night Will Never Stay and this is what I came up with. I tried to recreate the moon to avoid any cliches. I drew a female moon dancing across the night sky to give the feeling that she cannot stay in one place. I should have the finished product up in a week. Enjoy!

mailer sketches

So here is my first sketch of 2 children biking and I showed it Greg Newbold and he gave me excellent advice. He said it might be better is the children were animals like a penguin and a polar bear so that more people can relate to the piece. I sketched a lot more figuring out what animals to use and what they look like.


Here is what I came up with, but I wanted to push it some more in making the characters and bike into simple shapes.




Here is the final sketch and now I am going to paint it!

Nature and Nurture Show

I am excited to say that my "Mother and Child" piece got into the Nature and Nurture show in the HFAC. My piece is located on the 4th floor, so stop by if you can. I realized after it was up that I need to get less reflective glass so you can look at the art without looking at yourself. I guess that is part of the learning process of being an artist.

Mother and Child

So I am still learning how to be an avid blogger, and I am embarrassed I haven't put anything up lately. So here is a piece I just finished for the Nature and Nurture show at the BYU HFAC. It starts this Friday.

I wanted to capture a peaceful moment between a mother and baby, and from what I understand, it can be one of the best feelings. This time I included my sketch to show you all.
I made a few edits such as redesigning the mother's hair for compositional issues and fixing her hand to make it aesthetically pleasing.

I really enjoyed painting this and playing with textures as well as pattern. I used acrylic paint and I love the way it looks. I hope you enjoy!

Figure Drawings

All of these drawing were from Advanced Drawing last semester. They are mostly on newsprint done in graphite.

I did this piece in my Illustration 2 class during Fall semester. I had a lot of fun doing this piece because it was our first fully clothed figure in this class and I loved painting this purple kimono. I painted this in oil on canvas.

Civil War Portrait

So I have finally added some more work from last semester and there is more coming. This was an in-class assignment for Illustration 2. I had a lot of fun on this project because we were allowed to crop the figure and focus on the face. I played with the color in the face with the yellows and reds. I am thinking about submitting this piece to the Society of Illustrators competition this Friday.

Here is an outside project I worked on for my mom. I painted her favorite kind of rose and gave it to her for Christmas. I did my underpainting in acrylic and then finished it with oil paints.