Featured Student for May

[Jeremy Ross]

Hi @AustinShurtliff, you can’t win if you don’t play!

[chrisaakins]

@AustinShurtliff When do we hear who was selected for April? Has the student been selected?

[ArtofAleksey]

Technically these have text but they are titles (made up) and part of the image so I thought I would leave it.

[Wen Sylvestre]

@AustinShurtliff hi, I'm "self taught" (with the help of youtube and such), new to the forum and I just started the curriculum at SVS. These illustrations below are done last year, before I joined SVS. Now I'm learning about the structure of shapes, perspective, etc and a whole new way of working opens up to me. A much more solid approach, so I can't wait to see where that's going to take me!

First piece, with and without text: The wolf got bigger....

Second image, an idea for a counting book:

[SpencerT]

Am I doing this right? hahaha

[Heather Boyd]

@Wen-Sylvestre

Just lovely, no doubt your work will grow.

[Wen Sylvestre]

@Heather-Boyd Thank you so much Heather for your kind words, that is really encouraging! I just had a look at your instagram feed and I really love the style of the newer posts. Did you use pencils and watercolour?

[Heather Boyd]

@Wen-Sylvestre

The two friends (boys) I used thin layer of gouache and then pencil crayon. Thank you for looking at my work I appreciate it very much. I prefer to go the "Benji Davies" route with more selective details on top of flat applied paint. I just bought his "The Storm Whale" 2 books.

[Wen Sylvestre]

@Heather-Boyd I see now that you tell about your process in the descriptions of your images on instagram. I love that! It's so nice to see what kind of materials are being used, thank you
I have the first storm whale book and absolutely love it. Beautiful story and beautiful illustrations.

[andreazupcsan]

I always forget about this, I need to make a point to push myself for next month!

[A Former User]

Why not try. Here is one of my illustrations.

[Kaela McCoy]

It's worth a shot! Here's "Cloud Gardening"!

[AustinShurtliff]

@chrisaakins yes they were selected the first week of April. They will be announced when the blog post with their Q&A goes up next week. I will post about it on the form as an announcement too.

[AustinShurtliff]

@Jeremy-Ross too sure. Thanks for participating agin! I really like the concept in your first piece.

[AustinShurtliff]

@Wen-Sylvestre Thats great! Thank you for sharing your work. The new curriculum is pretty cool. I would love to hear more about your experience with the curriculum.

[Dima Eichhorn]

@AustinShurtliff Here's my entry! Good luck everyone!

[Dima Eichhorn]

@SpencerT You should post this wonderful image in "APRIL CONTEST: Lisa's robot invention worked great, until it did this..." Good luck!

[SpencerT]

@Dima-Eichhorn I did. Thank you!

[chrisaakins]

[Wen Sylvestre]

@AustinShurtliff thank you, I'd be happy to. I started only recently and am almost at the end of the first course, the shapes one by Jake. And learned a LOT. He's really good in breaking down the steps and making his points clear. Already I find myself drawing differently, thinking more in building structure through shapes instead of randomly trying to figure out a complex shape and then ending up with wonky stuff. And I also automatically started seeing the negative space. The tools Jake gives in his course do this trick.

And what's more, usually I'm rather impatient when it comes to learning and I tend to skip steps (and find myself in trouble later on). But not this time. Jake gets me happily drawing basic shapes and stuff that I usually wouldn't think of drawing (like a toy canon). So many thumbs up for this course and looking forward to the rest of the curriculum! I'll try not to skip ahead but really stick to the track this time, because the way the curriculum is structured seems really logical to me. I think it will give a great foundation.