“A Collection: Coral”, acrylic gouache on paper

A Collection is a year-long series of small gridded paintings updated bimonthly. If you’d like to see the progress so far, take a look. 

For this Studio Sunday, I’ve unearthened some rough work to show you guys the beginning stages of how I create an illustration.

Inking The Ideas

My sketches are pretty small, about a quarter page. I go straight to ink on paper based off a few crude penciled thumbnails I make beforehand. After the sketches are inked, I’ll go back in with a bit of graphite to flush out tonal values.

All The Colors! 

Picking out the colors is my favorite part of any illustration. Color determines a lot about the mood and atmosphere and is extremely important to me. I do all of my color roughs digitally because it allows me to explore a slew of different palettes quickly and efficiently. It also lets me to play with bold, and downright ugly color combinations I wouldn’t normally use which often time leads to pleasant surprises.

If I have access to a color printer, I’ll print out a few color roughs and swatch them in acrylic gouache. Otherwise, I work straight from my monitor.

Tools of the Trade

India ink, 0 / 4 fine sable brushes, 3/8” square brush, H and 3B pencil

And onto the final …

I’ll create another blog post with the nitty gritty progress shots of a final illustration in a few Sundays. 

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“That’s it for the penny. Now, about those nickels…”

Here’s a little spot illustration celebrating the disappearance of the Canadian penny (good riddance to those pesky things!). If you’re out of the loop, on February 4th, pennies have stopped being distributed to all financial institutions. Hmm, maybe that cool penny collection you have will be worth more than its weight in copper in the distant future.

Painting process for A Collection: Tropical Seeds.

“A Collection: Tropical Seeds”, acrylic gouache on paper

A Collection is a year-long series of small gridded paintings updated bimonthly. If you’d like to see the progress so far, take a look. 

Spot me in 3x3 Issue #20 of the Student Show Annual (right side), alongside a bunch of talented up and coming illustrators who I love and admire. This book is packed with really vibrant, awesome artwork so if you have a chance to nab one I highly recommend it!

(Source: jeanniephan)

“Start-Up Uses Portal Game as Recruiting Tool”, acrylic gouache & ink on paper

I haven’t played any of the Portal games, but I am very familiar with game mods (Re: my current obsession with Left 4 Dead 2 custom maps). I thought that this article would be really fun to illustrate, especially using the same color palette as the beloved companion cube. 

This week I had the pleasure of working on a short video project - a good excuse to set up the tripod and bust out the DSLR.