swan maiden + tiger

For my illustration final, I'm doing a series of watercolors of scenes from the Swan Maiden fairy tale.  This is part one of three.  I've been really inspired by Golden Age illustrators for the past few weeks, since our class took a trip to the Brandywine Museum and I discovered artists like Franklin Booth and Kay Nielsen.

 This was an assignment from a little bit ago, we had to do a piece based around a letter, and I chose "T".  James Gurney also came to my school and gave a talk which I got to see around the same time as I was starting this, and hearing him talk about his process was really inspiring.  The amount of research he puts into his pieces is crazy, and it made me want to start doing more planning for me pieces instead of just jumping right in.

Here are two quick photocopies of the linework I had so I could get more of and idea of how I wanted to the light and colors to work.

life drawing

today in class we worked from the models using ink with a bamboo pen and sumi brush.  I've used ink this way once or twice before, but always with a regular watercolor brush.  I hadn't realized that a sumi brush had such a steep learning curve aka feels like you're painting with a wet noodle.  I started to get the hang of it by the time we got to these twenty-ish minute poses though.

this drawing was done as this weeks homework assignment, a full body self portrait.  I have a bad habit of working really loose until I need to make a "finished" piece, and then I lose it all, which unfortunately happened here.

republicans

one of our assignments was to do a piece related to the occupy movements, in the style of a specific artist.  I ignored the assignment a little bit and used it as an excuse to draw caricatures of republican pundits and nominees.  style inspired by john cuneo.

I started off with this painting of glenn beck, and I was happy with the likeness, but it was too flat and I knew I could push it further.

in this painting I pushed it way more, but along the way I got carried away with the drawing and the colors and lost the likeness.

this painting ended up being my final for glenn.  I still lost some of the likeness but overall I was the happiest with this one.

after taking on glenn, I moved onto michele bachman, who I had drawn a little bit earlier in the semester for a different assignment.  I had a harder time pushing her face.  I usually have more trouble caricaturing women because I have a harder time keeping myself from going on autopilot and just drawing a pretty portrait.


next up:  rush limbaugh.  I don't think I have to worry about making him too pretty.