A Lady & Her Pup

Here's a quick post before I kick off my weekend:

We had a gift exchange in the AmeriCorps program I was in last year (we were a pretty tight-knit bunch) and I think there was a max of $5 you could spend since we were all broke and that sort of restriction leads to thoughtful, handmade gifts. (Which it totally did).

I had some small frames from IKEA that I wasn't using for anything, so I spray painted them black and made some pen drawings to go inside of them. I figured most people would dig pictures of themselves (I adore a portrait of myself that was done in Paris - even more so because I've had to draw myself a countless number of times for self-portrait projects) and pictures of their pets. This particular lady was the first AmeriCorps member I met in Oregon because she let me and my boyfriend crash at her place for a few days before I moved into my house. She has a super cute dog named Pablo, and my then-boyfriend bonded with Pablo because he loves all dogs. I realize I'm getting off track now, so here are the pictures:

I apologize to Megan for this portrait - it does look like her but I did not crop this image well. It makes her look much less cute than she is in real life because of the way I cut her chin out of the picture. I did a much better job with Pablo:

Such a cute puppy!

I think these were drawn with Micron pens, but I can't quite remember. Woo!

Scribbly Doodles

My life has been a smidgen crazy recently. I'm at the beginning of a lot of great things, and I haven't had much time to draw as a result (I will be fixing that soon!). I found these creature doodles in a notepad and felt they warranted a post. I drew them last year during the before-school reading program I ran at an elementary school. We had a volunteer reader come in on Wednesday mornings, which gave me a bit of time to draw. Of course, the kids always wanted to see what I drew at the end of the session. Sometimes they tried to draw the same thing. It was pretty cute.

I have more of those early morning doodles stashed away, so I'll scan them in at some point.

I love the crazy-eyed vulture-looking guy at the bottom of the page.

This doodle makes me very happy. It is the most Quentin Blake-ish thing I've ever drawn. (Quentin Blake did the interior illustrations for the majority of Roald Dahl's books, for those of you who don't have an expansive knowledge of children's book illustrators).

These were drawn with some felt-tip pen I acquired at school. I think I pilfered a few of them from the supply cabinet because I really liked making lists and drawing with them.

Blue Moon

I just realized this post could have been very timely had I posted it the night of the blue moon. However I wasn't thinking about that, so you'll get this post now.

I had the pleasure of designing a t-shirt for my high school marching band this year (I also did it last year - I'll have to find those images for another entry). The theme for their show is "Shadows" and it features "A Night on Bald Mountain". I watched the Fantasia animated clip for that tune and had a pretty complicated idea in mind involving demons and witches and skeletons. Since I'm a lazy bum I didn't do much to flesh out the idea, which worked out to my favor, because the band director wanted something involving the moon. They have a backdrop for the field of a giant moon and clouds, so he wanted that idea to translate to the t-shirt.

I figured the idea would be super easy, and I'd whip something out in no time. Not the case my friends. I struggled for a bit before landing on a concept.

First I tried using a photograph of the moon and clouds, and I tooled around with it in Photoshop, but my digital skills are limited and I was frustrated with the results:

Mind you, this is the inverted image because it would be white ink printed on a black t-shirt. I spent way too much time trying to make it work, it was so uninspired. I was also concerned about how well the image would print on a t-shirt, because there are a lot of gray tones in that image that might not come through in a one color print (I took a screenprinting class in college so I have a little bit of experience with setting up silkscreens).

I was also unhappy that I used a photograph. It felt like cheating. I am an illustrator, so anything I do that isn't drawn out doesn't feel authentic to me. Cue design disaster number two:

Granted, this isn't terrible, but I knew the image wasn't going to translate too well to the screenprinting process. Plus there was no narrative - just a moon and some clouds. I didn't like this either, but at least I got some practice with Photoshop brushes.

Finally inspiration struck! I was looking at pictures of full moons and I really liked the effect of shadows of objects in front of the moon. It was a really nice framing device. Once I came up with that concept, the rough sketch came out easy peasy.

Visual inspiration.

This is the final result for the front of the t-shirt. I was very happy I was able to add a slightly creepy narrative to the illustration and figure out a way to "ground" the moon.

Here's the back:

Whew. That was a wordy post. Next time I'll just post doodles of kittens or something.

Oh yes, one more tidbit of information: all of the images for this shirt were drawn with my Wacom tablet. I almost always scan in a sketch and work on top of it, but this time I drew on blank layers in Photoshop while looking at my sketch. I saved a lot of time by cutting out that middle step. Perhaps I will start doodling on my tablet more often.