Full-page illustration of Reyes - attempt to flesh out an environment… That’s not an ambiguous desert.
Gouache/Acrylic/Ink/Digital, 2012.
Reyes, ghost girl extraordinaire.
Ink/Graphite/Digital, 2012.
Barfightiiiiin’, Ink/Digital, 2012.
A morally questionable heroine.
More SWEET THING character development, spot illustration done for Senior Portfolio.
Ink/Digital, 2012.
Also I’m pretty sure the formula for being “internet famous” as written in my sketchbook is wrong. All you need is a beard.
Having trouble picking a color scheme for your next illustration/design assignment? Look no further! Thousands of combinations in any mood you desire.
A fun challenge idea: Pick a palette arbitrarily and make an image with only those colors… If only I followed my own sketch advice.
A concept illustration for my senior portfolio class: Kilbi, a courier from the world of Sweet Thing. Ink/Digital, 2012.
Previews for another image soon-to-be-finished, another mood board/preview illustration for Sweet Thing.
Details, details…
Figures, they’re fun.
I’ve currently been obsessed with playing around in this idea of depth/flatness, with line and pattern and academic conceptions of atmosphere, light and shadow, and how things all sit on top of one another…
Currently working on: A personal image about leadership, ancient relics and a ghost army. Related to my comic.
So here’s a little redesign of Ganondorf I did last semester for Scifi/Fantasy Imagery. A fun and interesting experiment in mixed media— The original drawing is this sort of crazy mashup of ink, pencil, and acrylic paint on bond paper.
Let me tell you something about bond paper: it rocks.
It’s got the functionality of tracing paper minus those awful inconsistencies in opacity, just a very even white all the way through. Best of all, it’s really made for tracing over a pencil drawing with marker and ink— meaning it doesn’t bleed through at all! Paint is of course not recommended as it’ll wrinkle it up, but since the point of this exercise was to produce a digital image the surface quality was less important here.
I also went ahead and threw up a process sketch to give you an idea of how it evolved.
Common question: What pen do I use to ink?
You can find a black brush pen by Pentel in basically any art store or online.
I prefer it to hand-dipping brushes in ink for the convenience and portability - I even letter my comics using this pen, too. Its properties allow it to give really thick strokes and really thin marks, and since you squeeze the base of the pen to pump more ink into the bristles, you can actually allow it to dry out a bit and create scrumbling effects. It’s also amazing for large area black fills, although those I usually leave for later and do them with an inkpot so as not to waste my ink.
A Pentel is usually going to run a little less than $10, and the ink refills are only $2-3. Very worth it.
The main flaw with these is that they are not at all waterproof - when wet they bleed a rather attractive purplish ink, although that can actually be desirable in some cases.
My current favorite pencil is my Kohl graphite dispenser - the hardest graphite I could find was an HB and I’m still getting the hang of it, but since it’s so versatile I’m hoping that it’ll become the erasable equivalent of my brushpen. Before I had this I penciled my illustrations and comics simply with a 4H drawing pencil. (I prefer a harder lead over a softer lead like 2B, because the marks are lighter and easier to erase).
Everyday I’m sketching…
I generally go through pen studies and then marker value studies and then work my way up to here, although sometimes I just start with these.
