(Pre and post shading) Pen & Ink drawing for a made-up children's book illustration

2 sketches & the final for editorial "cartoon" project

After graduating from india ink + brushes, our next assignment was to create an editorial "cartoon" using india ink + brushes + gouache (I would call it an"editorial illustration" rather than a cartoon since the latter description makes me think of the funnies in the New Yorker or one-picture+one-liner strips like The Far Side). The editorial illustration is based on an amazing article from the Boston Globe about a middle-aged man who got laid off as an emergency dispatcher for sleeping on the job as evidence of his poor work ethic stacked up and as it became clear he had also probably set fire to another man's porch (in a drunken rage over the theft of his gold chain worth thousands of dollars)... As if that wasn't enough good material to work with, we also had to add a random element into the composition based on our answer to a question - what do you want to draw right this instant? - asked suddenly in the middle of the class. My answer to that was "Absinthe Label" (of course - hah!), which ended up being pretty easy to weave into the image.













Actually, the addition of the absinthe label/green fairy bit really pushed me to come up with a complicated dreamy design which I'm very happy with. It took me a lengthy 8 - 10 hours (and a lot of snippets of tracing paper as you can see from the sketches) to come up with the final composition but it was definitely worth it.













The other advantage to the dreamy composition vs the "altercation" idea below is that the details of each person's face are kept ambiguous. I don't recall the prof coming outright and saying it but as we went through the crit I remember thinking that for an assignment like this where the features of the figures are not clearly defined but the story is based on reality, it helps to leave those details up to imagination. Ambiguity is key since whatever you come up with might be totally inaccurate.

2 sketches & the final for the stark black & white "fluid motion" project

Oh YEAAAHH!

For this assignment, we were instructed to create a stark black and white image featuring at least one animal or human in motion. In my quest for the perfect manifestation of "less is more" I stumbled upon many rocks better left unturned (or better investigated via other mediums besides pure india ink painted as black as possible with brushes), but was pleased at being encouraged to go with themes involving exciting things such as squids vs. zeppelins.

















In an extra challenge to myself, I tried my best to make this image as figure-ground-y as possible & NOT violent. The true distillation of all these ideas ended up being the Rock Star, although the tentacled menace was a close runner up (I also figured it would be more fun to add washes for the ocean water or sky in the cephalopod vs airship scene).