Zero 2 Illo - Week 5

I think we're on week six or seven already, but I finally got around to my next set of illustrations - things have still been a little hectic around here. And these are still pretty rough, but I thought I would put them up and hopefully get a little feedback.

Anyway, this first one is based on a folk tale called "How the Squirrel Became A Bat" Long story short, the sun gets caught on a branch, all the animals look for it, but the squirrel climbs the tallest tree, finds the sun, and chews off the branches holding the sun. In the process, his fur gets singed, the skin on his arms melts into wings, and he loses his eyesight. I think the moral was, "Never do any favors for the sun."



The second one is just another one of the things I draw when I can't think of anything else - wizards. So, uh, here is a wizard eating a sandwich.

Illustration 2

Still super-behind on my Zero2Illo challenges, I am reworking the puffin one based on some feedback I got, and here is the rough sketch for the second one.



If you slogged through my earlier post about the kinds of things I wanted to illustrate, then a) why did you do that, seriously, and b) you would have seen that I was thinking about focusing on editorial illustration. However, a few upcoming conferences have caused me to change my plan, I am going to try and get in a few more children's illustrations for my portfolio, and maybe one or two science illustrations if I get the time.

Thanks again for looking!

Zero 2 Illo - Week 4

Whew, had a rough week this week, plus I had a bad case of creative block and all of the ideas for illustrations I thought I would do suddenly seemed like they were either stupid or too hard to pull off. So I did what I usually do when I can't think of anything else to draw: I drew some birds.

Specifically, I drew a puffin.

It actually started out as this drawing, which I did about a year ago as something to possibly put on a business card. See, it's supposed to be clever because he caught art supplies instead of fish.



So then I drew this, adding a body and a little background (He did have feet at one point)



But it seemed pretty stiff, so I redrew it. I obviously have more work to do, but hopefully this will make a better composition.

Too Much Information

For the first week of the twelve week challenge I just joined (see previous post), we were given the seemingly innocuous question "what do you want to illustrate?" But it is a question I have struggle with a lot as I try and pin down my personal style. To try and answer it, I have kind of been thinking over where I was headed in the past and what that was pointing towards in the future.

(Like I said in the title, this kind of rambles on and is probably pretty boring for anyone who isn't me- feel free to skip it if you want.)

So, first of all, I had graduated from college with a degree in biology. I had started to take a few art classes for fun, and I had the vague idea I could combine the two interests by going into scientific or medical illustration. I was lucky enough to live near a college that offered a major in scientific illustration and I was able to take some of the classes they offered.

Here are some of the pictures I did:


I really enjoyed the classes and would still like to do this kind of work (although I abandoned medical illustration partly because I lacked some of the requisite classes and partly because, ew, cadavers). However, I was sort of struggling to find work and make it a full-time career.

While I was figuring this out, I met a woman who was working on a children's book. So I ended up illustrating a children's book, which I enjoyed more than I thought I would. People seemed to enjoy seeing funny cartoon animals more than they enjoyed seeing, for example, a drawing of a spleen, so I headed in that direction for a while.

Here are some children's book illustrations:



Finally, most recently, I took an illustration class which focused on print illustration for newspapers and magazines and the like. It was a bit of a shift in subject matter, for instance, here is a series of illustrations for an article about a brother with schizophrenia who fell through the cracks of the health care system:


I really enjoy the process of coming up with ideas for these stories (finishing them is another matter of course), so for the 12-week challenge I think I am going to to try and push myself to do some more editorial-type illustrations do develop that section of my portfolio.

Whew! That was way longer than it needed to be. Thanks for bearing with me!

Act-together-gettening

So, for a while now I guess I have thought of myself as an aspiring illustrator, with some vague notion of someday becoming an actual illustrator. But that would require getting my act together and actually accomplishing things, something I am notoriously bad at.

Recently, however, Jonathan Woodward of the blog Zero2Illo also decided to work towards becoming a full-time illustrator and put together a 12-week challenge designed to help him achieve this goal. He also invited others to take part, and already there is an impressive number of talented people joining him.

It's a little intimidating, but I am hoping to follow along.

(Thanks to Mr. Woodward for organizing this!)