Raina Portrait

Portrait of Raina from thesis. I wanted to start revisiting my thesis characters and possibly start really writing and pencilling my comic "Atelier". This project may or may not happen in the future. This was done in Photoshop CS4.

Thesis Show

These are the photos from my senior show. You can see everything came together. The dress, the character portraits, etc. My environments and turn-arounds were in the book on the table along with my artist statement and business cards. The show went great and I saw a lot of old friends! This is my goodbye to Ringling.

Colors!

Since thesis is over, I've had a little free time to mess around with the Nintendo DS homebrew program Colors! It is essentially a portable oekaki on your DS. Super cool needless to say, although I've been having some stylus jumping problems (which are apparent in the videos).

So I drew a barn owl (yay birds!) and one of my thesis characters today in about a half hour or so. Having a lot of fun messing with it. I wish it had a simple undo button though (especially due to the stylus jumps).

Thesis Revisions

Most of you at this point have noticed I am reworking all of my pieces for thesis by adding backgrounds, changing the modeling from cell shading to soft and then a combination of the two, etc. Here's some of the work I have finished. I will continuously update this post until I am finished will all 6 pieces.

Character Portraits Round Tres!

The last 3 character portraits that are going to be on display for thesis!

Round Dos of Characters

Character Portrait Mock-ups

These 6 pieces are going to be framed for the Senior Illustration show at the end of April. They are portraits of the characters (originally seen in the turn-arounds I uploaded here last year) in the comic I am currently working on. These started as being ink drawings on 20" x 30" illustration boards, when I coerced my friend David into taking pictures of these so I could bring them into Photoshop. I'm now coloring them digitally. This is the mock- up with some flat colors laid out.

Thesis Backgrounds Revised

Alright. I am having to re-paint my backgrounds. My computer fried a couple days ago and I lost 90% of projects I have been working on for the past 5 months. All of the colored backgrounds were lost. So here is the beginning of a new chapter.

Finished Environments GO!

Finished environments for thesis! woot!

More environments

in progress...

Thesis Environments

The start of my first environment. I have all of my color studies and loose sketches laid out for each piece so far. It is just a matter of drawing the tight sketches, inking and coloring them all now. This is the first half.

Thesis Turn- Around

This is the final female turn- around for thesis. Currently, I'm working on creating 2 male character sheets! Should be interesting. This is my main character. If you are wondering about the dress, I created it using 2 different lolita clothing brands' dresses and my own color palette. I will be sewing this dress for senior show.

Thesis Process

So, some people have been wondering how I work and although I wrote up earlier how I do it, I decided that it would be clearer if I took pictures of the process.

First, I find really good reference. Sometimes I take it myself, sometimes I use stock photos on deviantart.

Next, I work up some sketches that are about 2- 3 times larger than the final print. I then scan those in and print them on watercolor paper.

I then paint in the flat colors and start to render. You can see a finished rendered piece behind my cup of water. The turn- around in the front has only the flat colors. I'm painting these in gouache.
Then, I go in and render some shadows and highlights in and re-scan in the painted pictures.
After scanning everything in, placing all of the images into one document and resizing everything, I add a textured background.
The final step is adding the line-work, doing some touch-ups, and adding textures! I will put the final piece up shortly!

Character Design

Here's another one for thesis. I've been working on a lot of anthro work and doing some freelance on the side as well. I'll probably upload those later on.


These are actually really challenging for me as an artist. I start off traditional with gouache and watercolors (painting over a photo- copied on watercolor paper) and then proceed to scan all of the "finished" pieces into photoshop. Afterwards, I arrange everything in photoshop and add a textured background. I then go in and add back in line quality and tweek anything I really find that's not quite right (this includes shading, highlights, placement of things, or pretty much whatever needs to be fixed). Then I add in the shadow.

Overall, I really like the way these are looking and each one keeps getting better and better. They just take a lot of time to do, unlike my other character sheets I've done in the past and am currently doing on the side.

Beginning of Thesis

You can see my progress of this. Originally started digitally, then in gouache, and finally a little bit of both. This is the beginning of my thesis. Would love a lot of crit. on this. (will upload on DA)