Product Illustration

Well I haven't blogged in a while.. also I am super tired so I don't have much to say. Here is my product illustration.

Yep, it looks way better smaller. Haha.

Finished gouache painting!

I finished the gouache pick-out painting that I was doing for my friend for his birthday. I figured I'd post it on here to show you guys. I thought it turned out alright!

Yay! :)

Midterm! Oh no!

Alright so here is my midterm. It took my a while to pick out my worst - that's really sad, isn't it? Looking back I realize how many bad watercolors I painted. They're terrible, haha. Well, for my WORST piece I chose this building. It is so bad - I think that seeing it is self explanatory.

It has absolutely no line work to give it structure. Also, the colors are bad - the saturation is really bad. I attempted to make it better by adding some vines on the building but it wasn't successful. It just looks like a block with silly windows on it. Let's just say I've done better work, haha.

For my best piece, I actually chose my red barn cover illustration. I think that it has great saturation and great style to it.  I really like the colors and how I handled the paint on the surface. It makes the piece look a bit sketchy/blurry, but it fits with the overall style I was going for.

I also chose it to show the difference from the buildings that I did before and the ones that I do now.

It's really neat to look back on all of your work and see how much you've improved. It seemed like I wasn't but once I looked back on those old watercolors I realized how much I really have improved. It's pretty cool.

Anyway, have a good fall break!

Gouache Progress

We started painting with gouache last Friday. We are using the "pick-out" technique, where we draw an image on the board and then coat the illustration board with a mixture of matte medium, gesso, and water. Then we paint a solid color over each of the areas of the painting and let that dry. Once it is dry, we use water and a paintbrush to "pick-out" the colors and move them around, enabling us to make highlights and stuff like that.

So my one from Friday is really bad, but I expected that. Here it is:

I was just trying some things out and getting used to the gouache so it was more like a test.

On Monday we started another one for practice. I am painting a picture for a friend, for his birthday. So far I think it has turned out really successful but I still have a lot more to do. I am starting to enjoy painting with gouache - I definitely like it way more than watercolor. Here is that one:

I'll be working on that one again on Wednesday.

Final Illustrations

Our final illustrations are due today. Since I really liked my front cover from last time, I wanted my final to look like it except making it better with more detail. So that's what I did with the front, and I think that it came out very well. With the inside illustration, I fixed a few things with adding painted line which I think makes the illustration turn out better. The illustration goes at the bottom right corner of the paper. (My brochure opens to a poster like format with a landscape cover)

I am happy with both of my illustrations. Sorry that they aren't really in scale to what they are in real life - the inside one is smaller.

Mural Design

Hello everyone. Here is my final mural design. We had to make a design that encompassed campus, community, and world diversity.. or something like that. One of my scans was bad (the middle one) but I couldn't get it to scan evenly for some reason so I just gave up. So the yellow hand is really blurry because the pictures don't line up. Haha. Just ignore that.

The quote says "We must build a new world, a far better world - one in which the dignity of man is respected." -Harry S. Truman

That's it for now!

Red Barn Color Comps

So for today we had to have our Red Barn illustration comps to show what our final piece was going to look like. I am actually really happy with mine so I was excited to bring it to class. Also I got some very good suggestions to work with. Here they are:

The front illustration.. it is landscape format.

The inside illustration.. it is in the bottom right corner of the paper, leaving enough room for a lot of text.

Have a good week!

More 8x10 Watercolor

So.. we had to do two more 8x10 watercolor. Here are my results (also there is one from the other day in here too). I don't like them at all.

I don't feel like I'm getting better at all. Watercolor is frustrating - no matter what I do, my work still sucks. Oh well I guess I'll keep trying.

-End rant-

8x10 Watercolors

For class today we had to do some 8x10 watercolors. 2 for Monday, 2 for Wednesday. I actually do have 4 of them but apparently I left the fourth one in my dorm room so I have three to show you all for now. I only like one out of these three - the flamingo bird one. I like it because I had more control over the values and paint because I only had one color to deal with.

Overall I think that it turned out well.

The next two I don't like at all. I was trying out some different techniques and I don't think that were successful.

The water color of the sky has some good qualities about it but once I started messing with new techniques I kind of messed up the way that it looked. Hopefully for Friday I will have some new, really good pieces to post on here. Until then. :)