A Relevant Update

There have been some changes for me since I last posted. 

Most notably: I am gainfully employed in my field. 

Yeah you heard that right!  I have a job! In art things! 

I'm working for an upscale grocery store making hand drawn and hand painted signs and displays that go all over the store. I work with a small but cool team and while everyone else in the store has to wear dress-codey clothes and take breaks at approved times, we pretty much DO WHAT WE WANT and hang out and paint and chat and listen to music in our cool little loft. It is pretty freaking groovy. 

Not to mention I will be getting a paycheck again. Which is a bit of a relief. 

On the downside, rather than at the branch of the store that I could almost hit with a rock from my apartment, I'm driving all the way across town, but maybe that's because they don't want me throwing rocks if I get angry at them. 

But I've already made some signs, and I'll probably post photos of them soon, as long as the bossman says it's okay.

I'm also currently working on a second really cool project: a good friend of mine has taken over ownership of a bookstore and is partnering with a (somewhat well-known!) author friend of hers, and they are renaming and rebranding. And I'm their designer. 

I have already put together a bunch of roughs for their new sign and my friend likes them a lot and has sent them off to her business partner and his manager to get feedback. Hopefully they like them as well. I will probably wait until stuff is final before posting any of that though. But once I do, I'll even post a photo of the sign in real life which will be super exciting. 

And now, because I've told you about a bunch of things but refused to share any pictures, here are a couple quick photo studies I did last night to get some anatomy and pose practice in. Umbrellas are the bane of my existence. 

Just a little doodle for fall

I haven't had the time to work on any personal art since I got home, so tonight I threw together a little doodle for autumn. Nothing spectacular. Somewhat cute. 

Nothing New But Melting

So, I DID get my two vector pieces done. 

They aren't...exemplary. But they hopefully show that I can, at least, use a vector program. 

 

Like...there are some problems and stuff that I normally would have fixed while working on them in Photoshop, but I wans't quite comfortable enough with my vector stuff to go heavily off book. I redid the background in the first one and that alone was a little slice of hell. I got all kinds of angles wrong lemme tell you. 

So now that I'm free of that, you ask, what have I been up to? Surely I have a giant stack of projects that has been simmering away, waiting for my attention! 

How right you are. 

I have personal work. 

I have freelance projects. 

I have little one-shots and some epic journies that I'm itching to touch. 

I also have...I guess the traditional term is 'Indian Summer'? I'm pretty sure that's derogatory, and I apologize. But basically, after a blissful week of cool, crisp, autumn, western PA has had about four days of stiflingly humid weather in the 80s and 90s. And sitting in a pool of my own sweat is one of the few things that can keep me from art. I need to get a job that pays money and then a better air conditioner. Holy geeze. 

Ideally, a better apartment. 

But at LEAST a better air conditioner. 

So, there's stuff. It's on the way. 

It is supposed to be cooling off tomorrow. 

Ugh it better. 

And now, I think I'm off to bed. Not only has the weather disrupted my art, it has disrupted my sleeping habits, so even though I slept late and slept long last night, the heat exhausted me and I don't think I'm going to last much longer tonight. 

COME ON AUTUMN! I NEED YOU!

Super Quick Post

Just got those sketches scanned today -- have been spending hours on Illustrator lately which, while an excellent program, leaves me occasionally cranky when I just want to rough in my lines and instead have to determine just where I want them and then judge the correct angle of curve for my vector lines...it's just a very different way to create and somewhat counter-intuitive at times. 

I'll...probably post the couple things I'm doing...they aren't show stoppers...they are more just to show I can work in Illustrator, I suppose. They aren't as close to the style of the company's art work as they could be...but that is...hopefully okay. I keep saying 'they'. I have one of them 99% done. I'm deciding tonight which of two sketches I want to super rush to make into the second which I have yet to start. 

Anyway, here are a few sketches from trips across the country: 

Some ratspeakers inspired by Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. (The sketch cut off at the bottom was a very bad doodle done during a severe anxiety attack as an attempt to get myself out of my head. It was slightly successful but the stupid anxiety kept me from being able to go to my mind palace.) 

Inspired, respectively, by paper lanterns in a friend's apartment and watching Shaun of the Dead there.

These are pretty light. Can you see them? I was drawing foxes on a train in New Mexico. 

Funny story: shortly thereafter I came across a similar page of foxes I drew a few years ago. These foxes are...better. I have improved at showing movement and mass and figuring out the lines that are necessary. 

There and Back Again

Wow. So it was a hectic couple weeks. (I apologize if any of this is scattered...my train of thought is less than linear tonight.) 

Um yeah, I flew out to California for the Bay Area Sherlock Convention and Sherlock Tea Party, an adventure which, in the specific, ranged from failure to fiasco (through NO fault of the convention -- it was a combination of exhaustion and bad luck on the part of me and my best friend) but I got to meet a couple artists I REALLY admire and buy more fan art that I need frames for. So that was cool. 

The rest of the trip was hugging people I miss, drinking in a swimming pool and watching a girl I've been friends with since third grade become a mom, then hopping over to New Mexico to see my OWN mom, then got home this week and have been trying since then to sort the scattered parts of my life that I dropped when I took off on vacation. 

Because I still have no job and stuff. 

So, along with the normal boring stuff I have on my plate, like dealing with government bureaucracy, I needed to finish this month's Let's Draw Sherlock entry, in which we were to put the characters in to a favorite movie or tv scene. 

I haven't been posting process pictures because, well, I did a lot of the layout and flat colors all in one night (in the hotel after BASC) and then...most of what I did was reworking Sherlock's face again and again on my various flights before finally deciding that the first version was best after all even if it isn't exactly what I wanted. 

So last night I finally got my post-vacation act together and got it finished (and did one load of laundry! Go me! ...okay, that was really just because I was all out of clean PJs, save the warm cozy pair that would KILL me in this weather.) last night: 

There are a lot of things I'm not totally satisfied with, but this one was fighting me. And it honestly came out better than I was expecting at the halfway point. I like how John's jacket turned out. (If you weren't sure or aware, this is a mimic of a scene from The Fifth Element. She KNOWS it's a Multipass, Sherlock!)

Anyway, I needed to get THIS done because I have GOT to start working on some very specific portfolio pieces for a particular employment position that I probably won't get but...certainly won't if I don't try. They will be made in Illustrator. *sigh* *groan* *whine* *complain* 

(I don't dislike Illustrator. I just like pixel art more than vector art, and MORE importantly, I'm woefully out of practice in Illustrator. Which is ONE of the reasons I'm DOING a few AI pieces. But my process usually includes a good deal of preliminary foot stomping and 'i don't wanna's.)

Anyway, I have a few more new things -- just sketches -- from my trip, but they are yet to be scanned. Although, at least a couple might be used for the vector projects. So there's that. But once I get them scanned, I'll most likely post them here. Just a few dribs and drabs, you know. 

Until next time. Stay classy. Or get classy. Or at least stop sleeping in the bathtub.