I know you’re all probably still buzzing from the Homestuck update and hungry for fanart, but alas! I’m in school and still need to do my homework. At least it’s cool homework??

As the text might suggest, this is a sketch for a promotional poster for a food and wine festival. The elements the client wanted included were smoky mountain scenery, wine/grapes/wine bottles/casks/etc, and black bears, and they wanted it to be fun, but classy (so it would cater to older demographics). A lot of the suggested ideas had to do with bears drinking wine but I know at least one or two of my classmates are taking that approach and I thought that was maybe a little too silly… One of the other suggestions was a cask of wine with a bear brand on it, though, so I took that and ran.

I only ended up doing one thumbnail for it before moving on to the full-size digital sketch, partly because I really liked the direction it was going, and partly because I have so many projects going at once that I just don’t have very much time to spend sketching this week!

I’m fairly certain it’s just up to the committee in charge of the festival to choose which design they go with, so no public voting this time, but I’m really pleased with the way it’s going so I think it has a fair chance.

Speaking of unleashing the internet on a public vote, though, my guitar-playing statue won that contest thanks to you guys! All I need to do now is add a couple event details to it and it’s done. The event itself is in about a week and a half, so I need to get some print stock ready. Excite!

I’m now rolling ahead full steam on the main project for my Directed Projects class! I’ve settled on the poses and overall composition of each piece, and just finalized the palettes in this color study, which I’ll discuss a little later in the post.

The idea behind it was to do my own take on Mucha’s Four Seasons with ladies of different fantasy races. I didn’t want to adhere strictly to the rules of art nouveau style so much as pay homage, however, since I’ve been working hard on developing my own distinct style of rendering and I don’t want to try to shoehorn myself into someone else’s.

I initially thought I’d remove it a step further from Mucha’s typical work and deck the ladies out in armor and give them aggressive, dynamic poses, but I quickly discovered how difficult it was to do so within such restrictive canvas dimensions. I also felt it lost too much of the softness and serenity that people expect from art nouveau. Maybe I’ll recycle some of these unused poses in future works?

As for the palettes, I wanted them to mimic those that were used in the original series, but with the more typical saturation levels of my own work. Part of what I liked best about the original four was that they were essentially the same color sets with variations on hues, tones, and dominance. Colors that are present in all four pieces are pink/red, purple, green, brown, and gold, so I tried to tap into that directly.

The next step will be to finalize the borders. Although the source images don’t have any, ornate borders are sort of a trademark of the art nouveau style; without them, I don’t think the homage will be as identifiable. Due to the amount of detail I want to include in the drawings, I don’t want the borders to be too overbearing, so I’m looking to this piece for inspiration:

As recommended by my professor, I’ll be rolling all four pieces forward together, rather than bringing each one to finish individually, so I’ll try to document my progress. It won’t really be a tutorial so much as a glimpse into my methodology, but hopefully it will be helpful in some way to people who are curious about the way I work!

Another assignment finished! This one will be one of five up for vote for the Savannah Rock and Roll Marathon, which is a combination marathon-and-a-half and music festival. It’s for my Illustration for Publications class, the projects for which are actual client work. The winning artwork will go on this year’s promotional materials.

Since it’s a national marathon series, I wanted to draw something unique to the city. Many of my classmates had the same idea, but no one chose to do anything with the Forsyth Fountain, which decorates the marathon medals. SO, I drew an approximation of the statue atop the fountain, keeping her sash and pose, but replacing her robes with running gear, and her staff with a guitar like the one in the logo.

As far as I’m aware, it’s a public vote that will be held over Facebook on Monday (Oct 17th). If that’s the case, I’ll post the link when it goes up; the winner not only gets their design used, but they get a free booth at the event! And that would be pretty awesome :>

As promised, these are the thumbnail sketches I did for my first project in my Directed Projects class, which is sort of like an independent study. I took them a step further and turned them into color studies to help me decide which to move forward with.

1 and 3 are the ones I’m favoring taking to finish, since I’d like something portfolio-worthy (as usual). I’m not keen on 2 on account of the stylization, though it’d be worth pursuing another time, and 4 makes a nice study, but probably not a very exciting finished piece.

Thoughts?

Second homework sketch of the quarter! It’s for my Illustration for Publications class, in which all of our assignments are for actual clients for magazine covers, spot art, and promotional posters. The one I did about breast cancer last week was also for this class. Sadly, the article got pulled, so we don’t know whose art would have gotten chosen.

This is for the cover of the technology edition of Chesapeake Family magazine, for which the theme is “the wired family.” I thought it would be funny to draw a family of robots entertaining themselves with mundane things; a newspaper, a magazine, and a paper airplane, instead of an ipad, an e-reader, and a handheld gaming device. I actually meant to have a robotic dog with a TV head under the table, but I took it out to reduce clutter in the initial sketch and didn’t have time to add it back. If mine is chosen to take to finish, I’ll see if I can sneak it back in, along with a holographic bowl of fruit in the center of the table.

First homework sketch of the quarter! This is for an article about a mother wishing it was her, not her daughter, who was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Kind of a downer :c