Life After Art School!

Last night I had the opportunity to be a guest, along with three of my former classmates from UVU, on Will Terry's youtube vlog. We were interviewed about life before, during, after art school and what we are currently doing professionally.  It was great to catch up with my old friends and talk about the awesome experiences we all had in school! check it out!

Arrrrr... thar be Pirates!!!

  This body of work is from my final project for Will Terry's Children's Book Illustration class at UVU. For this assignment we had to Illustrate three scenes from a narrative supplied by Will about three pirate friends. Other than following the text we had to include a mammal, a foul, and a sea crustacean. 

As usual with anything involving instruction from Will, I had an absolute blast working on this project! 

Dog vs Cat!

Hey folks! For this blog post I wanted to share my latest painting from my Children's Book Illustration Class taught by Will Terry.

For this assignment we had to Illustrate the word "Action". Will gave us a brief narrative about a dog chasing a cat through the kitchen eventually destroying a birthday cake and most of the room.

Having grown up on a healthy diet of Saturday Morning Cartoons, I thought it would be fun to pay homage to one of my favorites Tom and Jerry. Everything about that show was fantastic! The backgrounds and the characters were so well designed especially in the earlier cartoons. Each environment painting could easily stand on it is own and the attention to detail was absolutely amazing!

I had originally worked out a completely different background with a fun forced perspective. I spent forever painting that version but ultimately it wasn't working. So I choose to  simplify my painting and go with the less busy wall and I think it worked out for the better. It was hard to let go of something that I had invested so much time painting, but hey that's the life of an artists.

As usual I learned a ton on this assignment and am ready to move on to the next project!

Down below is my original thumbnail sketch, final character designs and the backgrounds that didn't make the cut.

Till next time!

Sad Simon

This is my first painting of the semester. It was for Will Terry's Children's Book Illustration class, which I'm taking for a second time. The assignment was to illustrate an emotion along side a given narrative. 

As usual I had a lot of fun with this project. I loved designing the characters but, I struggled with the overall layout and the background. With help from Will and some other friends I was able to get it somewhat passable. You win some and you lose some. The biggest thing that learned is that I really need to do more environmental  studies!

Till next time! 

Even More Sketch Madness!!!

What's up everyone!? Thought it was about time to post up some new sketches to the good old blog! If you follow me on Instagram or facebook you have probably already seen a few of these.

Sketching is a very important part of my creative process. It helps get the "artistic juices" flowing. Before I sit down to a project I spend a good amount of time drawing thumbnail sketches. These are tiny sketches no bigger than an inch or two. Sometimes I will have a pretty good idea of what I want to create but, I find it extremely helpful to sketch the characters in a variety of different poses and compositions. My friend Will Terry, often teaches that if your painting can not read at thumbnail size go back to the drawing board and fix it.

The nice thing about working at thumbnail size is that you aren't concerned with the minor details. It's more about value and shape and how they relate to each other. When drawing caricatures it's really helpful to work this way because you are focused on the simple shapes that make up the person. I feel that I can usually get a better likeness if I bust out several thumbnails of the person first.

Now I have to come clean with all of you... getting in the habit of drawing thumbnails was a pain in the you know what. Most, if not all, of my college professors and instructors will be the first to tell you that I was not the best at planing out my designs in the thumbnailing stage. A lot of time was wasted fixing compositional problems that could have been solved a lot earlier in the process.

I've included a few thumbnail sketches so that you can see kind of what I'm talking about. I created a scaled thumbnail grid in photoshop  and printed them in gray paper. Using an assortment of warm gray markers I can quickly block in my ideas. I still have a ton to learn and look forward to more an more thumbnail drawings!

Baxter and the Bumble Bee

Well, finals are over and I feel like an enormous elephant has been lifted from my shoulders,  that sounds like a good idea for an Illustration. Anyhow I don't know why but this semester kicked my butt. Glad be done with school for a couple of weeks.

One class that I had an absolute blast in was Will Terry's Children's Book Illustration! It's been really nice to cut loose and paint some fun pictures. This was my last painting for Will's class. I wanted to paint something warm hearted, hence the sepia pallet. Maybe I'll write up a little story about Baxter and his best friend the Bumble Bee.

Also, being that it is the holiday season I will give the first person that responds to this post a a free 11x17 print, of their choosing, from my artwork. Take care!

Jetpack Jack and the Beanstalk

What's everyone!? I wanted to share my latest painting from Will Terry's Children's Book Illustration Class at UVU. For this assignment we were to Illustrate a scene from the classic tale of Jack and the Beanstalk. I choose to take it a little further and take the story in to the science fiction realm and rename it Jetpack Jack and the Beanstalk. I know original, right?

You can see that I changed the composition as I moved into the final painting. I felt that there needed to be more visual interest in the image so I cut out jack and flipped him. Doing this created a nice X intersection.

I really enjoyed creating this and as with every painting I learned a lot and can't wait for the next project. Stay tuned...