It's been a super busy week. I have been overwhelmed by the amount I am learning about Illustration from Jake and Will. I am also super excited about some new stuff happening with my favorite podcasters Chris Oatley and Lora Innes. It's looking like I may be able to do some coursework through the Oatley Academy in the future which would be SO FANTASTIC!
As for artwork, I have been squeezing in work on the class and on my book this week. I have a better understanding of how much prep work I need to be doing on the characters and background and I am so ready to get that work done! I also just learned that the SVS will begin doing the Third Thursdays Contests again. I love those! I can't wait to turn in my first entry, I have improved so much since last summer! So I do have some sketches to share and then I have to get back to work... here are some sketches of a Froggie I am preparing for my Children's book that I aim to finish with this summer. I began work on it at the end of last summer and I have put lots of time and effort into it, with lots more to come! After the froggies, you will see some ideas for little woodland houses I'm toying with for the book too... I just came up with them today, so they are rough ideas. (Second house sketch to be added later, Couldn't fit it all into one scan... To be added later) Thanks for reading! More art soon... MM
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Hi Everyone, I am super excited to share about a new class I am taking online about Children's Illustration!! Yay! I have been patiently waiting for several months to do this and it's finally time. I didn't get to take the class live (which would have been a time crunch for me anyway) so I waited until the live class was over and got the downloadable class... this includes course videos, book, and assignments. I just began work on my first assignment, a character design project involving a young female astronaut. Here are my first sketches. I will be sharing more as the class continues. When I finish the class I will be working on editing and reworking a children's book that I have done extensive work on already. I have been holding it in reserve until after getting all these great tips and info.
Oh, I almost forgot to share more about the class... It is through the SVS team... taught by the awesome Children's book Illustrator Will Terry and epic comic artist Jake Parker (who draws for Rocket Racoon! I love it!) Gotta go do more drawing, More news about this to come! Dear Friends,
Meet the Mice! I have been working a lot on a personal project that I haven't been sharing much about. This is just a little glimpse at what I am doing. More news soon. (I actually shared a lot more but a glitch happened and poofed away all my well thought out musings... Now they are gone and I haven't time to think them out again right now!) MM Hey everyone! I can't believe I have only blogged twice this year. I have been making a lot of artwork but much of it has been for a couple of secret projects so I kept waiting to get finished with the entire project before blogging about it, therefore I have been not posting anything at all. But no more! I am back as of today. My first thing to share is the above original character My Little Pony/Guardians of the Galaxy fan art. My 'Groot Pony'.
I also have a good drawing of Mr. Groot himself but I will save it for next time. He hasn't been fully painted yet. I finally joined Deviant Art recently and this was my gift to the community. There are about a thousand MLP fan art groups on there. In fact the whole DA community is a monster, it's really really huge. Astronomical. I haven't quite figured out how to jump in yet. I'm also toying with Instagram since one of my mentors seems to have a good thing going on there. I have lots of stuff I'm getting prepared these days, I hope to share more in the next few weeks. I'll try to post once a week at least. More coming soon... MM Hello all! Once again I see that I am getting lots of visitors from Pinterest. Thanks for your interest. Here is what I worked on a bit this week. My main dilemma with style it seems is to reconcile my heavy line art with a more painterly look required for children's books. I just struggle with how much of the lines to keep and how much to disturb and take out of the spotlight, so to speak. I have tried a method that makes the lines go away completely and just has the painted edges, but it tends to take away some of the essence I like about the drawing in the first place when it is born in my sketchbook.
I'm also still having fun with textures and overlays as you can see here. This is one of three pup drawings I plan to do as practice. I just spent a couple of weeks being really stuck, artwise. Truthfully I am still having a lot of trouble moving forward but I guess the answer to those seasons is to just draw anyway, so I did. The three pups aren't much but they are something to practice painting on. When I get stuck with drawing I guess painting makes me feel better. Here are some cool time lapse drawing videos from Creaturebox that I really liked - See Videos. I envy them the fact that they can play with hard ink lines ( I love ink) but of course if you are in comics, that is fine. If only I felt that I could make great children's books with hard ink lines... comic style. I am sure others have tried and maybe some have even succeeded, but the art that really stands out to me isn't really styled that way. I look forward to a day when I can put out time lapse videos of myself working and have them be as totally awesome as the Creature box stuff. Thanks for reading, MM
Above is the second sketch from last week that I worked up as a digital painting. I am toying with the idea of making my outlines smaller. I am enjoying experimenting with more texture in the painting process. I have had a good week this week as far as getting to think about my creative projects a bit more and also getting some encouragement for continuing on.
Tonight I watched two short videos called 'The Long Game' by Adam Westbrook, that were very encouraging to me. I have been feeling a lot of fear and regret lately about my age and the amount of years that I have not been working hard toward a real goal with my skills. This 2 part video really alleviated some of those feelings... It's all about how the greatest achievers in history normally went most of their lives without much success. My favorite part was a quote that Westbrook displayed in the video that a man named Robert Greene had written all about these dry times of these great men and women who spent years working without great progress, he called them 'The Difficult Years'- "A largely self-directed apprenticeship that lasts some five to ten years and receives little attention because it does not contain stories of great achievement or discovery" When I read this quote, I was very excited. A "Self-directed Apprenticeship" Is there such a thing? If there is, then I am in one. Ha. My mission over the last year or two which began in a fit of ambition and creativity and has become more focused and intentional over time can be described as nothing else! In fact this blog is a sort of record of this apprenticeship. This is my progress report. Thanks for reading! MM I chose the seahorse to be the first of the latest sketches to be painted because of it's simplicity. I love doing hugely detailed drawings like the recent dragon but it seems for painting (and for children's illustrations) simpler is better. The focus is on the form and the definition of character. I like how the texture came out, sort of a soft plastic shiny look. This image is on behalf of my little Buddy Bear who is four years old and who has spent most of those four years keeping track of his bed partner Mister the Seahorse. A formerly light-up, musical toy that is now tattered and in need of batteries. I don't know for sure why this one ended up with glasses but I thought it was super cute. By the way, I am working on painting the dragon I mentioned but it is taking a considerable time investment. I've had to break it up into smaller chunks of work so maybe sometime I will have it ready to post. Thanks for reading, MM
I went to our city's Art Crawl this week and met quite a few people. I like to hand out my card and ask them to check out my work on the site. After handing out my card at two River Markets and two Art Crawls I am convinced... nobody keeps the card and checks out the site. I never get extra traffic that same week. I believe most of my traffic comes from the pins on Pinterest. If you are joining me from Pinterest, thanks for checking out the site! I was telling someone at the Art Crawl that I never thought I would try to do children's books. I have always wanted to avoid it actually. The reason is that all my life people have been approaching me with their dreams of publishing children's books. I know that most will never be able to be published. I know that it is a serious long shot to even try. This is one of those cases, however where my mind tells me it doesn't make sense to try it but I can't avoid it, I have to admit that this is what I am most cut out to be. I love creativity, I love imagination, my style seems to suit the Children's market, and I can't help being driven to getting published. Over the last couple of years I have been discovering many more resources to help me and the culture of the publishing world is changing so much that an outsider with no connections can manage to do well if they just develop skill and hit the right place at the right time. I am hoping to squeeze in a few more sketching sessions in the next week so hopefully more drawings will be posted soon. Thanks for reading, MM This weekend I did something new. I sketched live at a local seasonal marketplace. I had a small booth with a few canvases to sell and I thought I would also sit and draw. I decided to do a dragon since I know they can easily be made very detailed. I haven't done a dragon like this in many years. Before I had done half the work on it I had someone offer to buy it right there and then, I really wanted to finish it however so I said they could contact me later for the finished piece. Maybe I should have sold it, but I continued working on it and had many more people come up and comment.
I guess I don't look like someone who does dragon art because I had one couple basically accuse me of joking when I said I had done it after I walked away for a bit and returned to find them looking at the sketch. I had others say they will contact me about doing some custom work, one lady wanted a similar design for a tattoo. I had so much fun talking to people and kids while enjoying the fresh air, river view and a live praise band. I think I would like to do this again sometime. Next time I would probably like a better setup, maybe bring more work to display. I have been meaning for a while to get some of my digital paintings printed up for a hand's on portfolio. After giving out business cards both this weekend and two weeks ago at the river market, I have found that nobody, not one person EVER comes and checks out the site. I had the same results from giving out many business cards at a recent art crawl in town. My best stuff is only visible online, this presents a problem. Now I will say that I have been getting many hits on the website, but they seem to be coming from Pinterest or some other source, they don't come on the days following a personal meet and greet with me handing out the cards with the web address. After this experience I am considering making a real stab at doing live caricatures. I know it will take some practice and some real effort to develop an eye for such things, but I might could do it. I think it might make for some fun money making at local festivals. I just don't know, going into it may be just asking for a headache. I went on Reddit and found many people with experience saying that they often offend the customers with their exaggerations and even get yelled at sometimes. Maybe I will stick to just drawing what I like. I have an idea of maybe doing the local Celtic festival next year with more dragon drawings. I found out this year that it is a very large event held at our local park. I may be posting a nice digital color version of the dragon soon. Working on it now. Saturday was the first time I had a chance to draw anything for fun in over a month. It has been very busy around here. Thanks for reading, MM |
MistyThanks for stopping by. I'm a published illustrator working on getting better every day. My goal for my work is for it to be charming, bright and endearing. I share my ongoing work progress online because I welcome all the encouragement and feedback I can get as I try to improve my skills. I currently have a children's book project that I am nearing the end of. Archives
February 2017
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