JBU Honors Program T-Shirt Design
I designed two T-shirt designs for a local farmer's market, created for the purpose of screenprinting with no more than three colors.
Multimedia Illustration Series
PERSONAL PROJECT FOR SCHOOL ASSIGNMENT
As a lover of all things Studio Ghibli, this was a highly therapeutic and enjoyable project for me to tackle. I completed this assignment for my Illustration I class my senior year, accomplishing it over the duration of the entire semester. I completed nine illustrations in total, each with dimensions of 8.5"x11.5".
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The goal of this project was to stretch my skills in conceptualizing and illustrating, since our professor required a completely unique piece for each assignment. He allowed us to choose an art print of our liking, whether it be a movie poster, an illustration by our favorite artist, or really anything that featured multiple subjects and wasn't too simplistic. Inspired by that print - which we were instructed to order physically - we created nine illustrations over the course of nine weeks, one per week, each illustration focusing on a different aspect of the original print.
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We were encouraged to experiment with different mediums, different styles, different sources of inspiration, etc., in order to push the boundaries of our skills as illustrators and the ideas we could visualize. We were allowed to complete up to three digital illustrations, as our professor wanted us to focus on handmade pieces and exploring different mediums. If any two illustrations looked too similar, he would start to dock us. Additionally, we were encouraged to zoom in on details of the original print and reimagine the subjects in a new style, or to zoom out of the story told in the original print and reimagine the setting in a new light, and so on and so forth.
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By the time I got to the final illustration, I was drained of ideas, but I really liked everything that came out of this project. I learned a lot of new mediums and gained confidence in my conceptualization skills.
For the second illustration, I chose to recreate the original print using the same pose, subjects, and a similar art style, while reimagining the characters and setting as a Harry Potter theme. I really enjoyed the concept of this piece, especially when it came to deciding which House Kiki would be and how to portray the seagulls as dementors, but I did not enjoy the execution or end result of this piece. I began by inking the lineart, then layering on watercolor for the background, then filling in the smaller portions of the lineart with Prismacolor marker, then layering colored pencil on top for some shading and highlights, and finally adding the smallest, brightest details in gouache. I was immensely proud of the lineart, but I think I struggled when it came to coloring everything and maintaining a consistent style throughout. The end result feels dark and busy to me, but I really like how I portrayed Kiki, her expression, her clothes, and Gigi holding her wand.
This week's piece is similar to the previous illustration I intended to do and ruined with spilled water. Instead of trying to redo it traditionally like before, I chose to do my fourth illustration digitally, which gave me much more peace of mind. I made this illustration with Photoshop and a Wacom tablet. I began with a default Photoshop brush and went into the brush settings to adjust the pressure width, the texture, and the hue and saturation jitter to get a much more organic feel. I began with a sketch based on a reference photo of a girl with a similar expression to Kiki's from the original poster, then surrounded her with seagull feathers and filled her in with short colorful brush strokes. I also took advantage of Photoshop's filters to place all the focus on Kiki's face by blurring the feathers and even the edges of her head, and I had a lot of fun playing around with lighting. This one ended up being one of my favorites.
Since I did this sixth piece in the throes of Halloween season, I decided to orient it around something appropriately spooky. I wanted to put more focus on the buildings below Kiki as featured in the original poster, while still placing her and Gigi high in the sky. I was recently inspired by one of my friends doing a series of tarot card illustrations for inktober, and I did a little research into tarot. I found the description of the "Strength" card to fit Kiki's character, especially since it traditionally features a woman with a lion on it. I put a lot of detail into the buildings and the stylized moon behind Kiki since I really wanted her surroundings to stand out, and I featured the seagulls in a small way by lining the border with feathers. I used Faber-Castell pens, Prismacolor markers, and, surprisingly, gold eyeshadow to get the fine shimmery effect in the details. I worry that this piece may not be as closely connected to the original poster as recommended, and I had some issues with the smudginess of the ink due to the alcohol in the markers, which blurred a lot of the details and caused loss of clarity. However, this was still really fun, and I'm very happy with it!
For my first illustration, I made the interaction between the cat and the seagulls the focus of this piece. I used a Faber-Castell brush pen, a grey Prismacolor brush marker, some white Conte, and watercolor to achieve this style. I envisioned this illustration without color from the beginning, since I realized that seagulls naturally don't have much color, and the cat was completely black. I wanted the focus to be on the movement of the seagulls surrounding the cat, and I wanted to put a lot of effort into a dynamic perspective. I felt like color might distract from the story between the cat and the seagulls. The hardest part of this illustration was making sure the swirls spiraling out from the cat looked natural, intentional, and not too overpowering. My favorite part of this piece is the details in the cat - his expression, his fur, and his posture - since I feel like I captured an irritated cat's vibe.
This third illustration was a struggle for me in an unfortunate way... I had started a completely different illustration and was on my way to finishing it when I spilled water over the entire thing. After crying for a while I came up with this, which ended up being immensely better than the first piece, at least in my opinion. I made this illustration with only gouache and Prismacolor pencils, since I wanted to try to create a piece with much fewer mediums than I have previously for my assignments in this class. I went for a very clean, minimally shaded style that worked with a simpler, bolder color palette. I pulled in the same idea from the original poster - a girl with her cat in a bag on a vehicle of some sort flying over some houses, circled by birds, but I think I might not have stuck as close to the original content and vibe of the poster, which is the one thing I would try to improve in this illustration. Otherwise, I was really really happy I could pull of this piece with the mediums and style I chose!
I wanted to do a piece based on the idea that the "cat is out of the bag," and ended up rolling with an almost horror movie poster feel for my fifth illustration, which seemed appropriate for the end of October. I liked the idea of keeping it clean and simple and poignant, so I wanted to do it black and white with a twist. I began with soaking the paper in ink to get a deep but organic background. I painted the artwork with opaque white gouache - I started with the pen nibs, but they tore up the paper, so I used a brush instead. I cleaned up all the edges with sharpie and used white conte for some shading. I remembered a suggestion from my first illustration, which was also black and white, the suggestion being to include a pop of color. I incorporated bright red gouache for details and red conte for the subtle shading in the background. I really liked how this turned out, especially because it looked like it was going south for a bit there. My professor pointed out that a a movie poster design might benefit more from portrait dimensions rather than landscape, but I guess I envisioned this one as more of a billboard.
I thought it would be fun to try to render my seventh illustration somewhat from the perspective of the seagulls depicted in the original poster. The original poster features a fairly wide scene with a lot of perspective depth - depicting not only Kiki and Gigi but the whole town and water below her - so I wanted the challenge of really zooming in on a tiny detail in the original poster, and rendering everything from that viewpoint. I decided to redraw Kiki on her broom as a reflection in a seagull's eye, which I think was a clever concept, but once I stepped back from the illustration, it may not have turned out as clearly as I wanted. Although I used several reference images, the end result looked more like a reptile eye surrounded by scales rather than feathers - oh well! If I had made the feathers larger and less consistent it probably would have been clearer. I think the reflection itself turned out really well. I used the small size of the Faber-Castell pens and watercolor to create this piece, since I wanted something a bit closer to realism than what I've done before, and the watercolor allowed me to easily layer colors which was important for the reflection. I finished it with white gouache for the highlights.
I attempted something conceptual for this eight illustration by reimagining my poster as an RPG-style illustration (RPG = role-playing video game). While I currently do not nor have I ever participated much in video games, I really like the simplistic pixellated design and aesthetic of many of the games I see when they trend on social media. With this illustration, I thought specifically of Animal Crossing, Undertale, and other big-name charming and nostalgic games that rely on more of an 8-bit or simplistic style. Because of the style I wanted to achieve, I used Illustrator for this project, which was also intentional due to travelling for Thanksgiving. I began by creating a 0.01" x 0.01" square in the bottom corner of my artboard, which I duplicated vertically to create a column, which I subsequently duplicated horizontally to evenly fill my entire artboard with small squares of the same color. I then (tediously) selected sections of my "pixels" to group into colors that formed the larger shapes which made up the illustration. It was tedious beyond words, but I really liked the effect! Once the illustration had come together, I toyed a bit with the layer effects to get the right lighting and color palette I liked, but other than that, the process itself was pretty straightforward, just slow.
For my ninth and final piece, I attempted to demonstrate moderate mastery of a specific medium that I have been wanting to practice for years, and finally got several opportunities to do so in this class: gouache. I challenged myself by making this piece entirely out of gouache, unlike a lot of the mixed media projects I had previously done with it. I was also inspired by several of a classmate's pieces that further or continue the story of the original poster, so I centered this illustration around the concept of Kiki and Gigi falling from their broom. I attempted to portray both story and emotion through the subjects and the perspective. I had a lot of fun trying to push a colorful palette and working (tediously) in several layers, incorporating as much detail and texture as I could with only one medium. I also challenged myself by avoiding the color black, which I depend on a lot to for outlining and making things stand out. This illustration gave me a pulled muscle in my shoulder and neck, but I really like how it turned out!!
