Garnet: Steven Universe

Hello all! I just finished watching the first season of Steven Universe, and I totally get all the hype. It's a great show, so now i have excuse to draw the characters cuz I love their designs. It's also a really progressive show, which I think is important right now to teach kids to be tolerant of everyone and judge people by their character, not what they are.

This Garnet was done all in one go, took me about 4 hours to paint, an hour to sketch. The drawing is about 5 or 6 total paints, all on my usual Stillman and Birn paper. The tricky part was using the carmine, a new paint in my palette but with gouache to smooth things out, it turned out well, I think.

2015-06-24 Sketchbook update

Hello, I went to hang out with my friend Emma yesterday and I made some drawings in my various sketchbooks. Hope you enjoy them!

Everyone, let's love each other. Life is precious, and it's far too short to be spending it seething with hate.

Summer and Autumn

So I've been motivated to paint more and to focus on illustrations instead of just my usual ventures, so I decided to take a leaf from Alphonse Mucha's book. I loved Mucha's work a lot in undergrad, and at a friend's place recently I saw large prints of his Seasons, and I decided to try my hand at it. Here are my Summer and Autumn.

Tools: Watercolor, gouache, and water soluble pencils
Paper: Stillman and Birn Delta sketchbook

M is for Marie

M is for Marie, a character from KCNO. The entire book is available online to read here: KCNO

Marie is not a character who was very popular, in fact for most of the book, people tended to dislike her because she had ideas that ran against the other characters of the comic. I think characters like Marie are ESSENTIAL to storytelling. To create characters the audience can disagree with, that is important to creating a world that feels real. Too often I'll read a comic, or watch a movie, or see a tv show where characters are all in agreement, or it's a character who is so unlikable that you hate them, but either of those can be boring. Like, SUPER boring! Character's should feel like people, not motivations, or cut outs or NPCs in a video game. A good character, whether you agree with them or not, is a character you want to see become better, no matter what they do or who they hurt, and Marie does hurt some people in KCNO. But I find that most people, after they read the book, like Marie a lot because she does become a better person. She's one of the more dynamic characters in the story in that she makes amends for being a jerk and she ends up happy. I don't think I knew what I was doing when I created her, but I think now I understand why a character like her is so important to good drama.

Tools: Pentel pocket brush pen
Paper: Stillman and Birn gamma sketchbook