It's that time again, is it?

I've reached and surpassed a school year's end, to find myself a graduate from the Fashion Institute of Technology. Hooray!! I will now post my some of my favorite pieces and sketches. I've always been fond of sketching, and my dream job is to just fill a moleskin sketchbook a day. I would love that more than anything.

Mentor Project

This was a fun project. I had to choose an illustrator as a mentor, and I chose the talented Allan Norico. This semester we helped flesh out this non-existent cartoon featuring space cowboys, desert planets, and other cool nonsense. This particular project I had to design a scene with a bartender, some bottles, and other props.

I truly had the most fun designing everything for it. The characters, the bottles, even other types of props that I did not end up using. I like the final product, but I still feel it's missing something, I just don't know what. Maybe some little extra details to set it into that particular type of universe. I was going for a "wild west" feel, with some sense of hodge-podge technology. I think that comes out better in another project I did for my mentor, which was designing guns for the characters in this universe, but that will be for another post. Enjoy the concept sketches for this illustration below.

Finals from last semester

Here are some finals i finished from last semester. One was supposed to be a surrealist painting, inspired by Fuseli's "The Nightmare" (go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nightmare to find out more). The woman on the bed is not the best she could be, had I reference of any sort for her It would have porbably looked a lot better. I don't think I managed my time very well for this particular piece, I should have at least used some sort of reference for her. But, this was one of my favorite paintings I've done. It took me many sketches to get to it, perhaps I will post those sketches some other time. For this one I did a rudimentary underpainting using oils and liquin; the under-painting was of the basic shapes of the characters and objects. It was finished with a thicker application of oils, but I have too keep in mind that perharps liquin should NOT be used under thicker coatings of oil, it might cause cracking in the future

The other painting was supposed to focus on the play of light and shadow. This particular piece took a long time, as I had to take my own pictures of my references. I did a grisaille for it (a finished b&w under-painting) to help with my values since it tend to lose them when I paint. The second painting pretty much took all semester from conception to completion. Again, I used oils and 3 mediums to complete, two ofwhich were created in class using bought supplies.

newest animation ever

yeah

 

Another dan vasquez smash hit! My digital painting class's project. The background definitely needs more work, but this piece is done. I shall touch it no more

 

 

 

These were some of the distortion projects I did for one of my classes last semester. I really do love distorting the faces of models and fellow students. Ah, but the last one, with the crystals, was my independent project for the same class. It was pretty free in terms of subject and media, but it was based on J.G. Ballard's "The Crystal World", a novel about a jungle in deep Africa slowly crystallizing, turning any object, thing, person, or plant into a beautiful display of jeweled facets and lattices.

 

This is the actually Dune desert scene finished. i realize now that I poseted the older version. I like the contrast better in this one, you can really feel the jagged, harshness of the Arrakis landscape.

Which brings me over to the next image, which is the actual project I had to hand in. It was a four-page brochure based arounda theme. My theme was drawing concepts for Frank Herbert's Dune, a great sci-fi novel (I love it, but it can be pretty cheesey at times). I decided to do two illustrations, with two concept sketches. sadly, the latter illustration, while a scene from the story, lacks in style or completion the first illustration has. But it was a defintely fun project, glad i went with it.

 

 

This was one of my favorite projects from last semester. I see some small errors now, but i was incredibly proud of what i used in this project. I had a basic illustration in Photoshop, imported it, the used the pen tool, gradient mesh, layer opacity, the works. Really loved the end result