Catching Up

Hey y'all. 

I have not forgotten about this blog, I have just didn't really have any art to share for a while, but in the past couple of weeks I have made a lot of art. Every week this summer has been different, some days I get home from work and just art until I go to bed, other days I watch TV (which I now have!) and hang out with friends, so I've just been all over the place. I have also been working with a friend making logos and working on branding for a company he's starting, and that's all I say for now. For real, he made me sign an non-disclosure agreement. . .

So, it's been a good summer overall, even though I've been working, I've still had time to do a good handful of fun things and still bust out my sketchbook once in a while. 

So earlier I mentioned I was working on a long-term project: illustrating a young adult book! So this has been quite the challenge, and I don't know if I'll even do as many illustrations as I wanted to. It was harder than I thought too. The plan was to read the book and I went along I would leave sticky notes with ideas and doodles for whatever scene I wanted to illustrate, then once I finished the book I would go on to make all the illustrations. 

But being the person I am, I just read the book for fun, got really into it and totally forgot to take notes on what scenes to illustrate! So I'd have to go back and re-read things, and then make the notes. And other times I would get really into my doodles and overthink them. Instead of just drawing a street and pretending it's a place in California I spent an hour or two stalking stalking the streets of Beverly Hills on Google Maps looking for the perfect intersection. This was completely unnecessary. So it's been slow going. 

I'll tell you a little about the book before the pictures so that maybe they make sense. They are completely out of order because I was excited to draw some scenes and characters more than others. The book is "Love in the Time of Global Warming" by Francesca Lia Block, the title of course being a reference to "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I thought it was really clever! Because you know, back in the day lack of sanitation killed humans, and now one of our biggest problems is dealing with global warming. (Though there are still people out there who don't have sanitation and clean drinking water, and that sucks and makes me very sad. . .but that's not why we're here, is it?). 

So the book is sort of a typical post apocalypse story, a few survivors become unlikely friends as they drive around in a car fueled by used vegetable oil, raiding convenience stores for scraps of canned food. But it's also sci-fi because there's some mad scientist creating genetic mutants. And it is also a sort of re-telling of The Odyssey by Homer, you know, the one where the dude takes forever to get home because he's a show off and keeps getting in trouble with gods and witches and cyclopes? So there are giants and witches and mermaids (kinda), as well as characters finding stuff out about themselves, finding out what's important in life, and of course, falling in love. It was a very fun book to read, and illustrating it has been fun too. 


So these are some of the complete drawings I have as well as some not-so-finished products. 

 This is the main character, Penn, waking up in her what's left of her house alone, 56 days after the earthquake/tsunami/flood that destroyed everything. 

This is the "Lotus Hotel" where a bunch of teenagers found refuge after the disaster. 

This is Hex, the love interest with a neck tattoo, squeezing some flower juice into a cup. 

In this scene some creeps break into Penn's house, and she's just sitting on a mattress in the basement holding some scissors in a feeble attempt at defending herself. I couldn't get the perspective right, so I cut out some people shapes from paper and taped them in the right place on a bookshelf, took some pictures and used those to help me draw. Gotta get creative like that sometimes. 

This is Tara, a sort of reincarnation of the Buddhist goddess by the same name. 

And this was my first attempt at a gouache painting! I know it's not great, but hey, gotta start somewhere.

I very impulsively bought gouache last week. I have never used it before, but after watching some videos of people using it, I decided it was a medium worth trying. I have really liked it so far. It's like watercolor, but better! Watercolor is the devil of art supplies, it's incredibly difficult to control, once it's on the paper there's no going back, and it just does whatever it wants, doesn't matter what you want, watercolor will overpower you! Gauche (pronounced goo-ash) is more opaque, and it's re workable, and not runny. So here are some things I've been doing with it.

I'm actually pretty happy with this little mermaid. We're getting there. 

So I still have a lot of stuff to share, including some of the fun stuff I've make at work, but this post is getting a little too long. I'll be back before the end of next week, bye for now!