Our SVS Virtual Studio OCTOBER 2🎃2🎃

[braden H]

@burvantill naw. All the cables and stylus and such go in nicely, but the cintiq I carry in something a little more padded.

[Nyrryl Cadiz]

@Braden-Hallett

[Mairin Kareli]

Here is some of my "Votetober" series I have been doing!

[miranda-hoover]

@Mairin-Kareli Beautiful work!

[Jade Vaughan]

I’m attempting a short story comic this month, fitting the spooky season. I haven’t done backgrounds in FOREVER so it’s already pushing me in uncomfortable areas. I’m relatively happy with it though.

So far doing well, at the rate I’m going it probably won’t finish until November regardless I’m seeing this through.

[Coreyartus]

Another show, another set of Costume Designs for a semester's undergraduate theatre production. This piece is a commissioned piece about love, loss, grief and hope. It's inspired by the Phone of the Winds in Otsuchi, Japan, where survivors of a 2010 tsunami that killed almost 20,000 people come to call their lost loved ones...

This piece isn't going to be performed live, obviously, because of Covid, but recorded digitally and underscored with music. The text is lyrical and poetic and simultaneously grounded and realistic. Each of the five characters represent a stage of grief as they find the phone booth and call their loved ones, delivering their stories in monologues. They're all packaged in an over-arching framing mechanism of stop-motion animation that tells yet another story of loss, and features overlays of photography and footage shot by the student themselves as their monologues unfold.

Some of the students have been hit hard by Covid--one of the actresses lost four people in her family. One of them is working on his tennis career while majoring in Theatre, and his roommate came down with it, forcing him to go into quarantine after just getting out of a 14-day quarantine when he traveled in from Denmark... Ironically, he's in more danger here than he would be at home. I think this play will allow them all to grapple with what's happening in our world and to them personally in a way that will also help others who see it.

We don't quite know how it's going to turn out--we're figuring it out and collaborating on it as we move forward and it's scary as hell to not know what we're doing... Theatre people are about planning and anticipating difficulty, and this is so outside our wheelhouse... We're all learning together (mostly the faculty!!) but it's also very bonding. We'll see how it works!

[VeronicaMui]

Here’s what I’m playing around with this week. I was doing some master copies of Ezra Jack Keats and was having so much fun with the cut paper I decided to have another go at this months prompt (I don’t want to talk about the last attempt ).

I’ve also been working on putting together a dream portfolio and I noticed that there were reoccurring graphic shapes, a sort of randomness, and some neon colors, so I’m trying to mix those in here too. I’ll probably mess with it digitally when it’s all done to get rid of the shadows and such and smooth out the lines... Also, I don’t feel like wasting an entire piece of watercolor paper to make a perfect black border so I’ll probably finish that digitally as well.

Not sure where I’m going with the bottom left corner but I don’t want to make it draw your eye - maybe some rolling black/gray/blue hills rolling down towards the kid with a tilted table of candy in front getting thrown into the air? I may add another kid running towards us....or a couple...

[Jacy13]

@Jade-Vaughan That is looking absolutely incredible! Wish I could draw a background like that

[Jade Vaughan]

@Jacy13 Thank you! Honestly it just takes time and effort. Took around 2 days of working to get it right. The hardest thing for me is keeping sizes relative to one another and adjusting line weight. I'm much more character driven x)

[Heather Boyd]

This isn't Halloween or fall related that's what the svs contest is for combining the two (and I am almost finished the drawing) but I did this some time back. 1 jellyfish done 4 ways.

[Mairin Kareli]

@Heather-Boyd This are really charming

[Mairin Kareli]

[Jon Anderson]

Had to get this one out of my system.

[Heather Boyd]

@Mairin-Kareli Thank you. I try to create charming/ delightful work.

[Jacy13]

Here are a few of my inktober pieces I've finished up this month! It's part of a series I'm working on called "Funky Frogs", haha Some of these are just loosely based on the prompts.

Bulky frog:

Wisp frog:

Radio frog:

[braden H]

Workin' on the environments of some book interiors. My process is now paint the background and environment, THEN doodle the characters

[jdubz]

@Braden-Hallett Interesting - you completely polish the background before you add anyone else to the scene? Is that more so that you can more accurately use the light and shadow of the environment on the characters??

[braden H]

@jdubz yup! It's because I have the bad habit of doing exactly the opposite (finishing and polishing the characters first) which means I need to fix the environment to match the characters instead of just rendering the characters to match the surroundings.

[jdubz]

@Braden-Hallett Very cool! I'm currently trying to break the habit of over finishing characters too early so I can attest to that pain

[Coreyartus]

The local San Diego chapter of SCBWI hosts a once-a-month "Illustrator Shmooze" where we all draw together and socialize and get to know each other. Lately everything has been happening on Zoom, of course, so we've had fun watching life drawing videos from YouTube together and trying our hand at some prompts. We used the Inktober prompt list to play with a couple. After an hour of life drawing (argh, that was painful!!) we did: "A Character and Floating" as one 5-minute prompt, and then "Slippery and Disgusting" as the second 5-minute prompt which became 6-minutes because it was hard to finish... Haha!! We shared and laughed and it was a good time.