C is for Lara Croft

I enjoy these games, I am yet to play to the end of any of them (something about having other things in my life besides games...) BUT I love them so much. 
I also love Lara's character design through the years, this most recent one is so much fun! 
So I drew the current character design instead of one of the older ones.

~Alicia

B is for Birds, Angry Birds... Angry BAT Birds

I guess... honestly only a day in and I was already having trouble coming up with characters to draw.  Next year I SWEAR I'm going to plan ahead  some..
So here are a few Angry Birds, mostly because I thought people could relate to them better than my other B ideas. 
They are batman themed because my kids got me to take them to the lego batman movie today.  I have bats on the brain lol.
I think these are just going to be rough sketches... 'cause that is all I seem to have time for.

~Alicia

A is for Aerith (or Aeris) (ff7)

Its time for the a-z blogging challenge again! Hopefully I can finish it this year.  I wasn't sure if I was going to even try to attemp this challenge this year,  but decided that I would attempt it... well we'll see how it goes.

I missed the day for the 'theme reveal' so I'm going to mention it here with my first post.  I'm going to do video game fan art, focusing mostly on characters of course :). 

Aerith seemed an obvious choice for 'A' as she is one of the more iconic characters in video game history.  At least in my opinion.

Today I only had time for lineart, I do plan on painting it later though.

2017: life, goals and stuff

So my last 2 posts on this blog are very very old, the last being a little over a year ago, and the one before that being a rather depressing review of fall 2015 semester. It's been a long crazy year, and honestly I spent most of the last 12 months in bed... if you don't know why Check out this Facebook post

This is one of the few illustrations I've done
in the last 12 months, and it doesn't feel
remotely done, but probably the closets I've
come to finishing anything.

While I didn't draw much, couldn't really lift my head most of the time I felt so awful... I did study a LOT and I mean a LOT of art.

Even after my long December post where I recommitted myself to art/illustration I kind of struggled with that.  Did I really mean it? Could I possibly become good enough? Should I just quit where I was, get my BS and move on with life? Was it worth it?


and probably most importantly...

Do I still have any passion for Illustration?

Basically January 2016 was one big dark depressive funk.  I tried the whole 'Fan Art February' as a pie in the sky ideal that *maybe* drawing fan art would make me happy and excited again.

Then of course I found out I was pregnant.  And as usual I got sicker and sicker and sicker.  To the point where I kind of just got by every day...

Despite the fact that everything in my life pointed to this being bad timing, this was probably the best thing that could happen to me.

I spent a year feeling awful, my strength and energy only just coming back over the last month or so.  I could do very little beyond very basic taking care of my older kids and laundry when it was needed.
And all I wanted to do was sit up and paint and draw.

Turns out there is plenty of desire when my ability to do anything was taken away.

So I studied art.  I watched so many online classes, YouTube videos and read so many articles on how to draw, how to paint, anything.  It kept me from going insane.

strangely enough, as I've been able to find time to do more; I some how improved during that time.  Not as much as I would have if I'd physically held pen to paper, but I'd improved in my drawing skills because I had to stop and think about the process of drawing.

I have a long way to go, and so much more I want to accomplish; but I have a better roadmap then I had before.

this is another from the last year
I like where it is going, but haven't
gotten past an initial sketch...

You see; when I finally found the Illustration program I felt SO far behind everyone else.  And I was; I really really was.  I'd been in and out of so many majors, I'd been told how stupid it was to go into art... So when I stumbled into what was to become the greatest decision of my life, much of my ability had atrophied.  I was suddenly in classes with people who had drawn non stop for all their lives.  I'd drawn non stop up to a point, and then so many other influences pushed me away from drawing, and it became something that I was convinced I was terrible at and that I should never pursue.  So I'd stopped, and I tried to go into things that were more practical.

So I forged mightily ahead, playing catch up in every class, having to repeat classes... feeling dwarfed by my peers, and I was terrified of taking to long of a break from school because I was sure I'd never make it back.

So life forced a break on me.

And I couldn't stop thinking about art.

This is where I find myself today.  I have about 31 days to put together a really good showing of my ability and then I only have 5 short months to prepare for my last year of classes.

SO I have a few goals for this time.

#1- finish things
My greatest weakness hands down is my fear of screwing stuff up.  So I never finish anything.  I'll start a sketch and then post it and be like 'look at my sketch' but I never take it beyond that despite wanting to.
#2- draw every day
I doodle nearly every day; but I'm going to take an hour to just DRAW every day
#3- draw for myself
Even when I'm back in school.  I don't know why I started at some point trying to draw for everyone else, and it's kind of trapped me in this weird place where I negatively critique everything to the point that I achieve nothing.

Some fan art I'm working on, actually I'm redoing
it.  Again, got to this point and kinda stopped...
no good reason, just fear.

They aren't my usual 'draw 10,000 pages' type goals, though those have merit, and I might do something like that (not that extreme this year lol) behind the scenes, but as far as real goals that I
need to place on myself; I'm going with the 3 above.

One last thing before I sign off for the night.

I'm going to be moving this over to a wordpress blog sometime in the next 6 months, and integrating it into a website.  I feel like this is important as blogger is cute, but hard to really make into a professional feeling blog.

I'm also going to put together a schedule for blog/facebook/instagram/website/youtube/etc updates, not sure if I'll post that or keep it to myself.  The only reason to mention it is so you know that I'm going to have more regular content.

~Alicia Hawks

ok.... so what's the deal?

I'm having the WEIRDEST start to this year ever, and I cannot even fully explain why.  What I can say right now is this: life throws curve balls at you sometimes.  I'm not good at hitting curve balls. Well frankly I'm not good a baseball; which is probably why I am not a pro ball player and am instead trying to be an artist.

I feel like I'm getting off topic.

SO I started in January excited as can be to begin a new year.  It wasn't starting the way I'd originally planned, but I also knew that it wouldn't. 

I have one year left of school.  ONE YEAR.  I'm also not in school right now.  I have no idea when I'll be able to go back.  Financial issues and some family stuff all came up nearly on top of each other.  SO me not being in school right now isn't surprising (financial) and now I'm not sure when I'm going back (family).  I've restated it mostly to get it through my thick skull.  I'm hoping to get it all sorted so that I can head back to school this next spring (2017) and start my last 'year' then.  (From where I'm standing now I think I might only be able to take 6-12 credits at a time.  So my last year will probably stretch out to a last year and a half.... hopefully not 2 years though.... I really really want to finish school at some point this decade.)

So now I'm trying to figure out what to do with myself.  I don't feel confident enough to launch my career.  I tried towards the end of 2015 to ask for help from family and friends in getting my career started; mostly I got sarcastic remarks.  I did get a few lovely people who said they'd donate if they could, but money was tight for them as well.  I get this; I really do, and while it would've been convenient to get some funding to start selling art.  I honestly knew it wouldn't work.  It was kind of an embarrassing desperate attempt (I'm prideful; I hate asking for money...). 

Money aside (which I've since figured out ways to get around the reasons I needed some) I ended last semester on a pretty down note.  I'm not going to go into it; I wrote a really long blog post (it's the one right below this post...) So even if everything was perfect I'm not sure if I'd feel the confidence to really start selling art.  So far I've made no attempt to sell art this year. 

Partly because of insecurities.  Partly because I'm really not sure where to start.  I've been given suggestions by wonderful people; but it keeps swinging around to that 'do I have anything worth selling'  I might.  I'm not sure. 

This month I tried to create a challenge for myself and did the #fanartfeb2016 hash tag.  I actually still have every intention of both finishing the 29 drawings and posting them.  (this is a little overly ambitious since there are only 6 days left of the month... and while I have several planned out I have very few even to the rough sketch phase)

So... what's the deal?

beside time management and insecurities.  I actually do have a lot of goals for this year.  I just keep running into 'Unexpecteds'.  I've not been very good at handling them.  This isn't hard to admit; much harder to plan how to react to the next one. 

My plan right now is to finish out this month strong.  Even if I only get 12 sketches up for my #fanartfeb2016 at least I'll have been drawing.

I have plans for this next month.  I'm not going to share them quiet yet.  I've got to plan (and also clean my office; it's been neglected lately).  So I'll check back in a week on March 1st.  

It's a long update; but I felt one was long overdue.  Sorry no cute drawings right now.  I'll do my best to make up for it. 

~Alicia

the despair of the fall of 2015 (don't worry; it ends well)

could not find original artist

For whatever reason it has been really hard for me to write anything on my blog these past months.  (in fact right now I’m fighting the urge to get up and wander around my apartment, make some tea that I’ll inevitably forget about, walk over to my mom’s house to chat with her… etc)  

 Looking at my blog it appears that it has been about 2 months since I wrote anything, and scrolling down my entries have been random at best.  I suppose it isn’t for ‘whatever’ reason but for several reasons…

This reason has been super hard for me in general.  I’ve been sick a lot, been stressed a lot, had to fight with depression a lot, just in general I’ve had a hard time.  Getting through this past semester took a ridiculous amount of energy.  About a month before finals I was totally burned out, on top of that I came down with a cold which has evolved into something much worse.  I thought I was over it but the day after finals it came back in full force.  I cannot describe it well, and besides I don’t want this blog post to be a list of my current symptoms. 

So I ended fall of 2015 completely deflated.  I honestly don’t feel like I can draw worth beans.  Sadly, I’ve not even picked up a pencil since this past Wednesday.  Over and beyond I question whether or not I can have a career in art.  Oh sure, I draw and paint better than the average person.  Well above the average person.  However, as has been brought to my attention repeatedly this term… the average person is not my competition.  People like this are:

Justin Gerad

Anne Stokes

Justin Gerard

Anne Stokes

Claire Keane

Brian Kesinger

Claire Keane

Brian Kesinger

And many many more… these are just the few that I randomly grabbed off of my list of 'artists I admire that work for places I'd like to work for'... THOSE are my competition. 

I still draw like a student.    

You might argue that that is OK as I’m obviously still a student… 

The argument could also be made that I shouldn't compair myself; because I need to focus on me and blah blah blah.  To a point that is true; but art directors will compare me and I need to be aware of who is out there.  

The problem is I only have years’ worth of classes left of school.  

 That really isn’t much.  

So why exactly am I feeling like this?   

It has to do with the particular classes I took this fall.  I initially started the semester with 15 credits.  Head Rendering, Figure Drawing, Advanced Illustration (basically a portfolio class), Children’s book, and Art Theory and Criticism.  I set up this schedule initially because I thought I’d be ok.  My son was starting kindergarten and my daughter is 3.  So I thought for some reason I could go back to school full time.   I realized within the first week that I couldn’t.  So I dropped my Head Rendering class.  Looking back, it was probably the wrong one to drop, but at the time it seemed the best choice.  If I could go back in time, I’d drop the Art Theory class.  It was a really awesome class, but it took a lot of time and outside of padding my art GPA I really didn’t *need* the class (though I loved it).  I don’t know what other class I would’ve dropped; because dropping 2 would’ve been the best thing to do.  I cannot change anything though, so I got through the semester and tried to balance 12 credits, a son in Kindergarten, a daughter who demanded most of my free time plus a slew of health issues.  

Art Theory was like any other bookish class I’ve ever taken, I read books and wrote papers.  Pretty easy overall.  Though stressful; largely because of the amount of work I had for my other 3 classes.  Figure Drawing wasn’t bad overall; I had  180 page sketchbook and assignments about every 3^rd week.  Again; not bad.  The last two though… blarg.

So we’ll talk about Children’s Book first.  As you can imagine from the title we work on illustration related to children’s books… We had 3 large assignments for the class.  The first was to illustrate an entire children’s book (32 pages), the second was to do a color cover and a black and white interior illustration plus a spot illustration.  The first was to do an ebook page that was sliced up and read to be presented to a programmer.  

The ebook wasn’t so bad; but we only had 2 weeks to do it- so it wasn’t as polished as I would’ve liked.  I think if I’d had a week more to work on it I could have brought it to a much better level of finish than I ended up being able to.

many of the issues with this had to do with me fighting with my scanner and with the scanner winning... I didn't correct for the issues very well and then there were a few things I just forgot to fix.  The worst part of this critique was someone telling me how to use crop marks and that there were things that would be cropped out of the picture.  Yea; I did most of that intentionally... but whatever. 

The second assignment wasn’t so bad; I chose Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for my story.  

The bulk of the problems with these lay in line quality.  There are a few issues of composition that need to be addressed... but mostly I have no idea what I'm doing with pen and ink.  Or at least I didn't.  I'm slightly more practiced now.

OH and just to put this out here: my intention in making the queen of hearts black was not in some raciest black people vs white people (as as student in my class practically accused me of) it was because I wanted the Queen of Hearts to be portrayed by an elegant woman.  I'm so sick of her being portrayed as a clownish oaf.  So I looked at tons of pictures of women from all over the globe and was captivated by this woman:

I just thought she was gorgeous.  Still do in fact.  If I were to illustrate the whole book and the sequel I'd peruse many ethnicities for the various characters throughout the book.  Because I think it would be fun to do.  Alice I'd keep Caucasian because of the setting of the real world.

I’ve actually redrawn both the cover and the interior (not the spot, I kinda liked the way it came out) I’ve not had time to ink and paint them though.  Maybe I will and I'll put up the updated versions in the next few weeks.

The project that really made my life difficult and ended up affecting the rest of my semester was the first one: Illustrating a 32 page children’s book.

I made a lot of mistakes with this one.  I mean a LOT.  So many that when I began detailing them out I wrote nearly two pages in word about them… and decided they could easily have their own blog post about them.  So that is forth coming.  Let’s just say- while I came away from that project VERY frustrated, I learned a lot.

My Advanced Illustration class led me to similar frustrations.  Though more condensed.  In that class we had the opportunity to choose our own portfolio project.  The theory being that we’d choose something we were passionate about, or at least cared enough about to make great art.  Then we would make 4 portfolio ready professional pieces.  This isn’t at long as my children’s book analysis; but long enough I think it also deserves its own blog post.  So watch for that this week. (with pictures!!)

The long and short of it is this:  I tackled some really really hard things this semester, and I was beat up by it.  To the point of utter and complete discouragement.  The critiques I got back from my professors were absolutely valid.  Everything was certainly something I needed to work on… but by the end of the semester I’d had so many negative reviews of my pieces that I just did my best on my final projects and went to the critiques stone-faced (which apparently looks like a really mean face) and waited for them to be over.  

Like I said.  I draw like a student.  And I should be WAY past that by now.  

I genuinely had a moment last week of ‘what the hell am I doing with my life, my time and my money?’  For a few hours I just wondered why I was where I was and frankly regretted like crazy my life choices that led me to peruse illustration as a career.  

 I mean I have the aptitude for so many careers; I could be graduated.  I could have a job… well potentially.  If I’d stuck to my very first major of Business Accounting from way back in the day.  (oh I feel old when I think about how many years I’ve spent in and out of college!!)

Then a friend of mines voice popped into my head.  A friend that I adore both as an artist and as an individual.  It was a question she asked me several times this semester.

“Does art make you happy?”

Yes.

It really does.  

Towards the beginning of the semester in my Art Theory class my professor had us write out a 2-page paper that detailed our artistic journey.  He asked us to dive into the core of what made us want to be artists.  Not just the ‘when I was two I wanted to draw and I’ve been drawing ever since’ because let’s be honest; nearly every artist has THAT story.  So I wrote a 2-page narrative.  I cannot for the life of me find it; so I must have typed it up and printed it out without saving. (I found it; so maybe I’ll toss it on here later) I remember while working on it finding it interesting that my whole life was about my drive towards creating art.  

I love art.

I love drawing.

I love painting.

I love creating things.

This is something I truly enjoy; and the fact is that in every journey towards becoming a professional you will have those moments of ‘what the hell am I doing?’.  Those times of growth where it seems that everything is stacked against you and that you are doomed to failure.  You really only get two choices in that situation.  

 Climb up, or fall down.  

Falling down is the easy way out.

as a side note; I never understood why she chose to go down; it was dark and scary, and the place above looked so hopeful... but she went down because she was pointed that direction...

Like I said; I draw better than most people.  (not boasting; I've worked hard to get here)  I could probably get away with doing some sort of appealing work and make enough to pay off my college loans and probably not much else.  

That isn’t my goal though.

I remembered a few days ago what my goal was.

And I’ll still go through a few more bumps and bruises trying to achieve that goal; but I’ll get there.  The only person that can possibly hold me back right now is me.  I have so much support from my husband, my kids, my friends and family, and my professors.  I just need to put in the hours; (and probably a few more tears!) until I get to the level that I want to be at.

So I'll keep drawing.

princess design by me

Oh the insanity!!

So my life has been a giant ball of crazy pretty much since my last blog post.  I'm dealing with a lot of stress right now.  I mean a LOT.  Some of it is good; some of it is bad.  My classes are pretty intense; I'm taking 4 and they are all studio classes; for you non art majors this means that I'm on campus 2 full days a week and have about 30 hours of homework for each class.  I'm surviving though... more or less.

Today I had a rather big panic attack.  It lasted most of the day unfortunately.  I sat down to work on homework and it just crashed on me; basic stuff like:
'how can I pay for this semester?'
'I'm a terrible artist'
'I'm so far behind!'
'I'm never going to make it!'

basically this meme sums it up: just replace 'writer' with 'artist' and story with 'drawing'

It sums up my panic attack pretty well. 

So yea; I couldn't get much done at all.

LUCKILY my ArtSnacks box arrived in the mail.  So I played with that and it made me feel better.  Of course now I'm feeling better and warmed up to draw and it is 11:30pm...

So I'll draw for an hour and then go to bed I guess.  That means Saturday and Sunday will be INSANE homework and client work days.  (oh I didn't mention; a lot of my 'homework' right now is client work as well... that makes it both awesome and totally intimidating)

I made a youtube video of me unboxing the ArtSnacks and then drawing a picture with it.

I don't have my etsy store set up; but if you like the picture and want to purchase the original I'll be selling it framed for $40.  I scanned it so I can make a few prints (if it is popular) and I'm going to be selling those for $15 each (for an 8x10). 

That is pretty much it.  NIGHT!!
~Alicia