Finally- some ILLUSTRATIONS!!

These are some illustrations I did in my last semester of school at BYU-Idaho- Advanced Illustration, instructor Dan Burr, Winter 2008.

These are actually in order of when I did them. You can see my journey to find my style. It peaks at the self portrait. That day I got applause from my teacher and classmates :) It was nice. They knew I was struggling and couldn't figure out what medium and technique I was most comfortable with- and everyone was just really pleased with the outcome of that self portrait. I could say a lot about the whole thing. I'll spare you... for now. So... here's my journey: (and I'm still trying to figure it out!)

A practice piece for the next picture (obviously). I really like it! I think the following piece lost personality because I just got too controlled and detailed. Oh, the concept is "you are what you eat".

I think this is good, but... meh. This is acrylic with Prismacolor colored pencils and outline in pen. I was so lost on what medium I wanted that I practically used them all!

And here she is. I actually did a full on rendering of myself from a picture... and it was just so overworked and didn't "say" anything, it was just gray and white... so after all that work I just transfered some of it over on watercolor paper, did some sketching on it, and just tried to apply some beautiful colors. In part, this "works" so well because of the photo it's based on. As you'll see, I never quite successfully translated this technique to my future work... as much as I meant to :(

See how controlled? I just turned into a watercolorist, and it wasn't my intention. This is for the concept "The Happiest Man (or Woman) Alive."

I think this is actually really cute, except that I screwed it up with some colored fine-tip Sharpies. Losing control of my technique again...

haha. This was a big hit with the class. I got mad props on my buoy (boo-ey). And I deserved it!! :) I looked at tons of pictures of buoys and had to invent one of my own. Anyways, here our concept was "global warming".

I like this one. It wasn't totally what I was going for, but I like it for being less controlled. It's not as much like a coloring book, where i just fill the inside of my lines with color, like the "Happiest Woman Alive" one.

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These are all illustrations from my "media experimentation" class- instructor Wade Huntsman, Winter 2007. Descriptions are under each picture.

This is a sand-off technique- just acrylic on board and you sand where you want, and add more paint where you want it more defined or detailed.

This was actually just a practice piece for my first time using gouache (pronounced "gwash" as in "i need to [g]wash my car") paint. The technique we did was you do an ink drawing, pile on a lot of paint that you want for your base colors, then you rinse it off (taping the edges really good). Then you add paint where you need it more bright or defined- it's similar to the sand off technique above- where you combine subtractive and additive.

This is an acrylic "photo rendering". I remember how hopeless i felt about it as I was starting- but I think it came out pretty well!

This is "oil lift-off". I don't really want to explain it. I don't think I really did it right. It's an awesome technique though, that I hope to use in the future. I'm glad I remembered that just now :)

This is a crazy technique using acrylic, gloss or matte medium, and wet sand paper. As you paint and it dries, you dip your sand paper in water and sand through different layers of paint to have under-layers emerge- it's pretty cool! A lot of work though. The lips were definitely where I put in the most work, and also the chin and jaw I think, because I was having a hard time getting them right!