Week 9

I'm going on a roadtrip in about 2 hours and won't be back on until later tomorrow night, so i thought I'd go ahead and post this here.

For my "cover" assignment, I decided to create a Splash Page for the Black Feather Gospel website. With a little help on the coding from my comic co-head (who is WAY more fluent in coding than I am), I used some of our art from the story and created this:

BFG Splash Page

I chose those two Chibis (Hee hee, new word, Emily!) because they're the most familiar to fans visiting the site, and they're the main characters of the story.

Fear it. The website overall has a cute and playful aesthetic while still being relatively easy to navigate.

For my free entries for this week, I ws stuck in a moving vehicle, which left me at the mercy of the bumps of I-80. Actually, this caused me to loosen up my lines and deal with what happened as I was trapped in the back seat of a minivan crammed with stuff. Music was the only thing keeping me sane, but for the sake of the assignment I decided to keep it to a Black Feather Gospel theme.

The first drawing I did was a psuedo portrait of sorts of the archangel Raphael. She's usually quite prim and pretty. So this sketch of her with sketchy brows and not so lovely hair was quite a surprise. I almost like it, but I'm not sure about changing her design to this look...



The next entry is caused by my listening to Archangelo Corelli, one of my favorite composers ever. His classical music is just fantastic, so I wanted to do another piece remiscient of old fashion. This time I took the character Mammon from the story and dressed her in a Marie Antoinette Getup, I didn't want to be too stereotypical though, so instead of giving her huge hair, I gave her a huge hat with plumes, ribbons and roses. My mom said the roses were crappy. I don't think they're TOO terrible. I mean, they DO look like roses..right?


And the third entry is a companion piece to the above, strring Mammon's love interest, Belial. This piece was done while I was listening to Kevin Rudolf and Demi Lovato. ....Yeah, I know. Hush. Demi Lovato's got a really cute cover of "Thats how you know" from Disney's Enchanted I've been obsessing over for awhile. And Kevin Rudolf's song "She can get it" is almost Belial and Mammon to a Tee. And I dig bassists. Hypothetically I think this could go along with the Michael T-shirt design I posted last week, but I don't want it to get too redundant. Although someone on Deviantart DID ask if I was going to do all the characters. i think I'd get sick of that way too fast.

Week 8

Also I cannot find my camera cord, so until I do, here's proof that my comic is done. If I don't find my cord in the morning, I'll redraw it digitally

Photo

It reads: "Oh Boy! An Online Course! Groovy!"
Mom: "HEY, NAT, WORK 4 U"
"Hooray! They like my idea! BRB, DISNEYWORLD!"
"Time to get on the internetz!"
"no internet 4 u!"
"Right, the fans want more comic?"
"3D Assignment"
madison: "You suck!"
"AND that is the story of my Semi-recovery. I suppose we all have our off days, or weeks, or summers. But, Black Feather Gospel is progressing and is being well-received. That has been my hope for the class, to progress it. Hopefully things will speed up though. Otherwise I'll be 30 by the time the first "book" is done. That'd be disgusting."

And here are my free entries for the week...Two and a half pages from the comic

Here Here and Here

And More Music related, here is a T-shirt design..of sorts I did. I know it needs work. Its missing SOMETHING I just cannot figure what. So any crit on this would be super mega appreciated. Thanks so much, fellow art students. Its inspired by a CD I've recently ...acquired. its full of all these pop songs by has-beens liek Alanis Morisette, Third Eye Blind, and No Doubt, but they're rock covers. Yum.

Week 7

Sorry its late and lacking the other two entries. Its been a weird day, I will get them up tomorrow..today =D

So I decided to follow Emily's suggestion and make a very, very, campy piece. This pained me to do, and I wanted to kill myself afterwards but decided against it as that would be rather messy and I don't want this to be the last piece of art I do and the only thing I'm remembered for.

I went as camp and emotional as possible. I've recently started getting issues of Advanced Photoshop Magazine and decided I love it, so I've used some of the resources they provide me with - stock photos, brushes, tutorials and stuff. And decided to go ahead with a PHOTOMANIPULATION~ Combining my Digital Skillz and some photography (Although its found and I didn't take it myself. The next piece will be entirely done by me tho)

So here is the original photo from the disc.



And here is my "Amazing" Manipulation, I was going for a campy, whiney/Emo mood.

NOTHING SET IN STONE

and..here is the music I was listening to while doing it. Its a sad piece. but if you're a Zelda fan, I think you'll enjoy it ;D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0ZTyCxbdok

I'm gonna give Photo manipulation another shot tomorrow to wrap up more of these, with some newfound knowledge. I think a more naturey...swirly..pretty piece. yes! ...Because I've been listening to disney parade music like woah ;)

Week 6

" I find it’s so important to keep jotting down ideas, even if they’re the worst ideas in the world, because each one leads to something bigger and better. Everything derives from that little scribble jotted down on a napkin or in a sketchbook."

Erica Bohanon

The last few days I've been idly working on the comic Black Feather Gospel, Coloring away, each page a 3000x4500 file at 300 DPI, on my tiny little macbook with minimal processing power. and Trying to use the smudge tool on top of it all has turned my process into Lag-Central. It is a slow, painful process. I can plan plan plan away and plot and 'ideate and process' until my hands turn blue, but there comes a point when I just have to buckle down and do the not-fun work. nitpicking and getting things like Lighting, shadows, reflections all right, which takes up a lot of time. A lot of dead time.

When I reach this point in the artistic process, I plug into music. Not only does music drown out the noise of my household (mom on the phone, my little sister throwing tantrums, lawnmowers and dogs barking outside), but the moods and lyrics of certain songs can help me to work better, and give me ideas for new illustrations I want to do. Far too many times have I gotten some sort of mental image inspired by a piece of art that makes me say "Oh I wanna DRAW THAT!!!", and if its lucky, it gets sketched, but never anything more than that.

I suppose in a way I've forgotten that this comic is for fun, and I shouldn't have to sacrifice my creativity and artistic drive in order to meet an unofficial deadline at the fans' whims.

So at this point in the class, while I am working on getting shading and lighting and things like that all accurate in the comic, I also want to allow myself to take a break. as of Midnight, Owl City's new CD has been released, the first CD I've eagerly anticipated every single day for months since the Spice Girls' Spice World CD back in Elementary School. Owl City, among other bands, have become my chief soundtrack when working. I want to be able to tell myself to just shut tup and draw whatever I FEEL like drawing. If I'm shading and I get an idea for a drawing, I want to stop what I"m shading and DRAW my idea before it fades into nothing and I forget all about it. Far too many picture ideas have escaped me this way.

So am I taking my journal in a new direction? No, I think its more like switching gears for awhile. When I feel like I can be a little bit more creative with some aspect of my comic, I'll bring that back into the spotlight.

One piece I KNOW I want to do, is in response to the "Ikana Valley Soundscape" by Project Zreo (Zelda Reorchestrated), I left it playing one night and it actually helped me to rest. But the wind, crows, singing and instrumental is a little creepy but awesome cool. You can listen to it here ....I have it playing every night now.

To Accompany this entry, here is some recent work I have done to, relating to, or in response to my recently most-played musical choices.

Victorian Character Design - a Character design I got the urge to do after hearing "The Headless Waltz" by Voltaire, I would love to finish this and color it. Its not for anything in particular..just for the sake of designing!

A Panel from the next installment of Black Feather Gospel I did today - I did this panel while listening to Owl City, my absolute favorite band in the universe.

And because it is essentially the focus of my artistic career right now..here's some mini previews of the comic. here and here.

MY QUESTIONS FOR YOU ARE AS FOLLOWS:

Will Incorporating lyrics-as-text be a little..well, campy? Should I avoid it in the obvious ones (Like if a song is about being a hot air balloon, should I avoid text about hot air balloons there?)

Would it be better to use characters from the comic in the hopes of incorporating the image later on, or coming up with new people to use in drawings?

Also. I'm primarily a digital artist during the summer here at home. Digital Illustrations mostly. ....Dare I venture into using photography/Collage/Traditional media? I suppose a trip to Michaels is just 15 minutes away. What about Mixing traditional and Digital? (For instance, coloring something with marker and then adding sweet effectz in photoshop)

Week 5

1 - Content I'm assuming you're doing character design for more than just Leviathan (but if not, this should work for him to!). I think it might be interested if you expressed the soul of Leviathan, the inner story that you know, on the page without actually drawing Leviathan. Take images you have and find, write quotes, words that are important, play with paint to get the expression of his movement down - cover a page in everything Leviathan... but don't draw out the character in completion. You said that your characters have a lot of back story and complications, and I'm interested to see how you express that and visualize it for yourself. 2 - explode over the page! Fill 'er up! If you dare.. no, but really :) I challenge you to draw at least three images on one page, and have at least two of them touching each-other.

Ahhh, here we go.

The text is

"Dolphin Tank" - A song I've been obsessed with, "In the dolphin tank" by port blue. it has this beautiful, dreamy feel to it.
"You can only blame your problems on the world for so long" - Ah ha..Fall Out Boy. Fitting lyrics. from "The {shipped} gold standard"
"The Grass is always GREENER" - this one's not lyrics, but a phrase we all know. The grass being greener on the other side of the fence. Green is often used to symbolize Envy.

Week 4

I'm a failure, I admit it. But here's week 4 anyway...the other work yet to come :D

"...one monster, a female named Leviathan in order to dwell in the abyss of the ocean over the fountains of water" 1 Enoch:7

Her humanoid form in Black Feather Gospel is that of a teenage girl, as Leviathan is said to be the demon of Envy. And we all know how envious teenage girls can get. and vicious. I always imagined her as a serpent-type monster, however, every time I tried to design her, I ended up unconsciously borrowing qualities from other peoples' leviathans designs instead of really trying to pull one together on my own.

So my mission today was to design a Leviathan. I've never been one for drawing animals, much less dragons, so it was a challenge.

after studying images of water dragons, here is the first sketch I came up with. I was happy with it until i realized it looked too similar to Haku from Spirited Away for my taste. http://images.absoluteanime.com/spirited_away/haku2.jpg

here is the first design:

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/ninnykins/Levi-Original.jpg

As you can see, I had a sort of Loch Ness meets Japanese Dragon thing going on. But I felt it was stiff and I didn't like the feel of it, I thought I'd like the wings but I really didn't. So I started looking up pictures of fish and settled on beta fish. Here's two doodles I did of betas. I didn't use color because I wanted to focus on the form of the fish instead of its priddy colors. Betas are so pretty, after all. The first one on the top left is more of a realistic study of a basic Crowntail-like beta. The one below is more of a stylized beta with a big ol' tail, probably teh biggest inspiration for Leviathan's final design. And then there's a quick doodle of Leviathan herself inspired by the music video "Michael (jump in)" by No more Kings (if you like catchy music or animation, check it out on youtube)

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/ninnykins/Fish-Studies.jpg

after looking at fishes, I dove into redrawing Leviathan. here is what I came up with. I like it a LOT more.

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/ninnykins/Leviathan-Final.jpg

FInally content with myself. I decided to get into the mixed media portion of my assignment. I had a pack of synthetic feathers from Michaels, and a carousel of Copic markers. Curious, I started picking out feathers to color. The colors didn't bleed down the feathers' veins as well and I would have liked, but oh well. its all about trying new things.

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/ninnykins/Favorite.jpg

This is my first attempt and my favorite. These are the types of colors I was thinking for leviathan, which got me to wondering if she would be a feathered dragon at all. that could be really cool, but seeing as she's a water dragon, I'm not sure how sensible that would be. However in Disney World recently I saw a bird come out of the water and bask in the sunshine for awhile to dry off its feathers. It stood there forever as I sipped my margarita and watched. Possible inspiration? Possibly. I'm not sure where to take it though.

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/ninnykins/random.jpg

Here are two more I did, they somehow seemed to take the ink differently The first one was more of an intentional design and shape with the stripes and dots, i was thinking instead of a Leviathan Blue/Green scheme, Blue/purple could also be a possibility. I don't like it as much though, it seems much less Sea-like to me.

Beside it is the reject of the batch. Awhile ago, an acquaintance of mine designed a color who had a color scheme of Light Blue, Forest Green, and Orange. and it was uuuugly. I wanted to see if it would still be ugly if I did it. I think it is, personally.

Then I decided to see what would happen if I took a lighter to a faux feather. I was expected much awesomer results, but alas, being synthetic, it just curled and melted and charred. Woe. I was going to throw it away after I soaked the end in water, but then I decided to take some Olivey greens and browns to it instead to see if I could get a toxic, rotting effect. I think it turned out rather cool.

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/ninnykins/Rotten_feather.jpg

so I'm going to keep the Blue/Green feather, and the rotten feather around for references for coloring feathers in the future. Feathers can be incredibly boring to color.



As a bonus, here is a cute picture of my dog Pip, or at least his nose.

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/ninnykins/OHGOD.jpg

Week 3

Coming Soon