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