Our SVS Virtual Studio OCTOBER 2🎃2🎃

[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.

[VeronicaMui]

I just wanted to share another one because I’m super excited about this! I’ve been working on discovering a process I love that consistency produces results I like. I’ve been deep diving into this for all of 2020 and usually I’m just slugging through making a bunch of trash BUT I every so often, I’ve been getting little breakthroughs that inform me, and today I feel like I got one of those! I made the image on the top right a week ago sort of by accident. I printed the background first and just wiped an area clean to draw the girl in and misjudged her height by quite a lot!! But I crammed her into that space anyway, and just really liked the result.. But I didn’t love how she had no color.. So next I tried the version under that one. I actually did about 5 prints before I got to this one which I liked somewhat, but the dress wasn’t doing it for me still. Today, I tried modifying a sketch I made yesterday to print. The sketch I did had pretty accurate proportions, but I wanted to try to replicate the short smashed proportions I had done last week by accident so I shortened her arm and dress by a fourth, and smashed her legs from above knee height to partial calf and enlarged her head. I tried giving color to her as well...And I feel like I nailed it! I’m just really happy with it. I ended up asking my three kids their thoughts also ( I do sometimes, but never with this much intention) after listening to an SVS ( I think it was? ) talk mentioning how in children’s illustration, adults might be the gatekeepers, but KIDS are your actual audience, and wrote their likes and dislikes under the image. They all had an opinion and made really good points! I’m excited to see if I can continue making consistent results in this way!

[burvantill]

@Braden-Hallett i realized today that I don’t have to wait until Christmas for an easel to relieve my neck pain when drawing. I’ve had an easel in my art room for 30 years!!

[braden H]

@burvantill said in Our SVS Virtual Studio OCTOBER 22:

@Braden-Hallett i realized today that I don’t have to wait until Christmas for an easel to relieve my neck pain when drawing. I’ve had an easel in my art room for 30 years!!

Nice! Can't hurt, might help! Though your arm may get tired of the new drawing position for the first little while