Life, Art, Improvement!!

WARNING- the following post was written at 1 am after LONG day of cleaning and re-arranging furniture.  It is a little ramble-ly.  But what can you do :D please excuse typos and redundancy.  :)


This week has been a little crazy- so I'm a bit behind on the stuff I posted last week.  The posts I had planned are being delayed- so you are getting this instead. 

So this past week I've been thinking a lot about where I came from artistically.  During the semester my life goes out the window- pretty much I go to school, do homework and take care of my kids.  Housework of any type is prioritized by urgency of task- and a lot gets neglected.  Even though this last semester was lighter, I still was busy enough that the apartment is a TOTAL disaster.  I pretty much spend the first 2 weeks following finals trying to make our home liveable. 

flower girl- April 2014

So I have a lot of time for my brain to think rambling thoughts- which is what brought me to my artistic history.  It is AMAZING how far I've come in the past 3 1/2 years.  I've been finding old sketchbooks and I'm just so grateful that the professors I have had were willing to see past the skills I had at the time and encourage my desire to be an illustrator.  It has been kind of a fun experience. 

My 'Throw Back Thursday' isn't from one of those sketchbooks- though that would be fun.  This is actually from a painting that I did almost exactly a year ago.  It is a piece of a larger conceptual illustration that I did for the class.  I'm not really a fan of the whole piece- but I've always kind of loved the girl that I painted.  So I cropped her out and have been using her as an icon of sorts for the past year.  Though there have been things about the painting that have bugged me.  A Lot.  So I finally sat down and repainted her. 

flower girl - April 2015

The original painting was done with water colors on illustration board.  My repaint is more of a paint over; I imported the image into photoshop and made myself some brushes that would match the strokes of the original and repainted it.  I did my best to fix the anatomy problems that were bugging me, also the shading... I did some weird things the first time around. 

I think the most fun part of the repaint was imprinting the style I've been developing onto the piece.  Fuller hair, lots of curls, rounder face... Honestly I hadn't realized how much 'style' I'd kind of stumbled into this past year.

I've never really thought of myself as having a style- actually it was all I could do when I first came into the program to just keep my head above water.  I've been focusing so much on just learning to draw that I couldn't see the ways I was improving.

I have a year and a half left, assuming no crazy disasters arise in my life (which happen far to often then they should!!) I'm looking forward to seeing how much I've grown when I've finally finished my degree!! It'll be amazing!!

~Alicia

Catching up!

Ok- so between graduations and just being sick- I've been a total bum when it comes to art.  (whatever virus I have seems to have migrated to the muscle tissue on my neck and shoulder... yay...)

I'm going to do a more satisfying entry later this week.  This entry right now is mostly for my own purposes.

• First thing: I had a blast doing the A to Z Challenge and intend to make up the days I missed/re-draw some things.  I've already stated this- but re-iterating mostly for my brain and list making purposes.  The deadline I'm setting for myself is May 11th.  At least to get caught up and to do my reflections post.  
• oh yea- and I'm still going to compile all of that into some form of book
•  My monster- Quincy from Howard Lyon's workshop- will be getting a bit more work done on him- at the time I thought I had a much closer deadline then I ended up having.  So I'm going to be working on him and re-posting on May 14th.  Partly because I just want the painting to be more finished.  Partly because he should be doing a post on the Muddy Colors Blog that Friday about the workshop, and I'd like to send him an updated version of it.
• I'm a blog-a-holic and I have recently created a Sketch Blog that I posted 3 times on and then ignored... hey! Life happens!! But my goal is to do 2,000 sketches on that blog between now and the end of the year.  I'm going to start working on that soon.  Specifically this Thursday I'm going to start updating that. 
• Speaking of sketching... let me explain my lovely picture of books.  Last week I bought a ream of 250 sheets of high quality toned card stock and bound it into 5 separate books.  Each with 50 pages.  I've not yet decided if I'm going to draw front and back for each sheet or just front.  It will likely depend on the medium I'm using as well as the purpose for the sketchbook.  I am going to try to fill them all up by the end of the summer.  I need to get into some better sketching habits- since this fall I'll have *at least* 200 sketchbook pages to fill- more than likely I'll have 300-400 to fill.  yay!! I actually am excited.  Sketchbooks have helped me to improve SO much.  I'm still deciding *what* I'll be sketching.  Full figures and portraits for sure... the others I'm still brainstorming.
• I've also got to sit down sometime and figure out comic con... at this *exact* moment there is NO WAY I can go... 'cause of money for a table and stuff.  Plus I need to produce a lot of art to sell.  I'm in an interesting bind right now- I've had enough mini disasters in the last 2 weeks that I've determined that I need to raise AT LEAST $5,000 (this amount includes cost of comic con itself, other art related expenses plus money for replacing the random electronics destroyed(through no fault of our  own!!) in the past few weeks) so yea... that
• also websites... I have 2 that I want to get up and running; the first is obvious- my art website needs... well something on it.. the other I'm not going to point out at the moment.  It's more of a graphic novel that I've been writing/wanting to write for the past several years.  I *really* hope I have time to sit down and hammer out a years worth of script so I can start updating that thing. 

That is all just art life.  I still have a household to run- and a lot of that running in the next several days is going to be cleaning/spring semester recovery based.  

So getting sick at the start of summer- while weirdly relaxing (hey I couldn't do anything so I laid in bed and plaid Majora's Mask 3DS) it really has set me behind some what.  I honestly wanted to get a mothers day piece finished before mothers day so I could toss it in my etsy store.  Well I'll still make one.  It'll just be late.

Anyway- That's it for now

~Alicia