Inktober Challenge

Happy Wednesday!

So, it's that time of year again - Inktober. If you've never heard of it: "every October, artists all over the world take on the Inktober drawing challenge by doing one ink drawing a day the entire month."

I decided to give it a try because I love inking! It's always one of my favourite parts of completing an illustration. My personal objective is to encourage myself to sketch more random things for fun outside work, without getting OCD about details. And I've given myself a theme: tokens and characters from my favourite films. So far, I've been keeping up, sharing my little ink drawings on my Instagram and Twitter pages each day. I've been drawing pretty small on some scrap watercolour paper and here's what I have so far:

Fawkes from "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" | 3.5 x 2.65" | micron pens

The Leaf of Lorien brooch from "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy | 2.75 x 2.75" | bamboo pen +microns

The Key to Hamunaptra from "The Mummy" | 2.75 x 2.375" | micron pens

The element stones from "The Fifth Element" | 2.125 x 2.5" | micron pens

A scene from "The Third and the Seventh" | 3 x 4.5" | ink wash

The subway butterfly from "You've Got Mail" | 2 x 2.45

The Mayan dagger/map from "The Fountain" | 2.5 x 3" | microns, marker + gouache

Elsa's sovereign's orb from "Frozen" | 2 x 2" | pencil + microns

Are you also doing the Inktober challenge? Share a link to where you post your drawings!

Have a great week!

The Art of Yuki-Onna - Meet the Artists

Happy Tuesday and welcome back!

Today I'm sharing some quick photos of The Art of Yuki Onna, which I started to write about last week. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then click ------> here, and read last week's blog post. :)

Well, here's the book! It's  7 x 9 inches in size, with a soft cover and about 50 pages of content. Let's have a peek inside and find out about the artists involved!
Ladies first:

Karla Monterrosa

Karla Monterrosa was born and raised in tropical San Salvador, El Salvador and spent some years in sunny southern Spain. Despite loving sunlight and sandals, She currently lives in damp, dreary Vancouver, BC. When she's not drawing or watching cartoons, she enjoys biking, traveling, comic book conventions, drawing at coffee shops with friends, and daydreaming about movie directors.
She graduated with a BFA in animation from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and is currently working in TV animation.

ka.montz@gmail.com
www.karlamonterrosa.com

Laura Nisbet

Laura Nisbet is a visual development artist and animator from Ottawa, Ontario. She has a great passion for character and creature creation, from conceptualization, to life through movement. When not actively putting pencil to page or feverishly collecting reference material, she can typically be spotted outside traipsing through nature and poking at things. At the end of the day, Laura loves as good story and wants to help build them for a living.

lnisbet.art@gmail.com
http://lauranisbetart.com

 Mariya Olshevska (yours truly)

Mariya Olshevska is a freelance illustrator from Vancouver, Canada. She has flair and passion for creating intricate, whimsical works that are rich in detail and colour. Always curious to explore new topics and techniques, she aspires to leave her audience delighted and enchanted.

www.mariyaolshevska.com
mariya@mariyaolshevska.com  

And now the gents: 

Seth Rutledge (the mastermind behind all of this)

Seth Rutledge is a visual development artist, illustrator, photographer and coffee snob living in Vancouver, British Columbia. Before he discoveredart, he received a CSCI/Math degree from UNC-Charlotte, and has lived and worked all over the United States and Canada. He has run marathons, taught English in Japan, been CTO for a pharma marketing company and done fashion photography in NYC. Seth has two albums he wrote and played keyboards on, and he plays the theramin whenever he gets the chance. Seth spends so much time in coffee shops drawing that he is mentioned in online reviews. He would love a career painting elves and goblins and their homes.

http://sethrutledge.com
seth@sethrutledge.com

Sinan Demirer

Sinan Demirer is a visual development artist and illustrator from Istanbul, Turkey. He always had a passion for creating characters, building worlds and telling stories. So much that he came all the way to Canada to do some more of those in college. He can usually be found sketching in coffee shops or obsessing over movies, games and TV shows that he likes. Sinan would love to help design movies, games and TV shows for other people to obsess over for a living.

www.sinandemirer.com
msinandemirer@gmail.com

Travaldo Farrington

 Travaldo Farrington is a 3D Generalist from sunny Nassau, Bahamas. Prior to arriving in Vancouver, he had spent time in the Bahamas studying classical painting and sculpture. Following that time he has been an assistant at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas and at the Popop Art Gallery, the only international artist residence in the Bahamas. Shortly after, he was awarded the chance to study animation in Canada by the Bahamian Government. Travaldo has an immense passion for classical sculpture and that passion pushes him to bring excitement and an eye for detail in his character models. When he's not absorbed on his next model, you can typically find him teaching others how to play videogames or making jokes with friends over dinner. Travaldo would love a lifelong career creating worlds and people to inhabit them.

travaldo@gmail.com
http://travaldo.4ormat.com/

And, special thanks goes out to Amy Wang for designing our book!

Hope you enjoyed this week's sneak peek!

The First Look at The Art of Yuki-Onna

Happy Tuesday everyone! Hope you are all enjoying springtime. I am very happy to see blooming trees and singing birds decorate the neighborhood. I've got the hummingbird feeder up on the balcony and the hummingbirds are visiting frequently. =)

However, if you're missing winter - it just so happens that I've got some winter-themed illustrations to share with you. (Finally!) If you've been following along this blog, you might remember my sneak peek posts about a secretive, collaborative I've been working on. Well now the time has finally come to reveal more about it and to post a full image from my contribution. I present to you the first look at The Art of Yuki Onna.

"Family Stroll" - "And 0-Yuki bore Minokichi ten children, boys and girls, handsome children all of them, and very fair of skin." --- From the Japanese folktale of Yuki Onna.

(The original piece is approximately 8 x 17 inches, completed with micron pens, waterproof coloured inks and gouache on bristol-smooth paper.)

The Art of Yuki Onna is a collaborative, yet independent, artistic exploration of a Japanese folktale about a mysterious snow spirit - Yuki Onna. Various interpretations of the story from each participating artist have been curated into a humble book which will be available for purchase in the months to come.

The image above is one of my contributions to the project, which also ended up being the cover image for the book. It was a really fun illustration to complete because I was able to draw inspiration from a culture that's very different from mine, but which has an artistic aesthetic that is very appealing to me.


Also I got to put patterns on almost all the characters, so it was an instant win because of that, if nothing else.

Here are a few close ups:

 

And a work-in-progress image. Unfortunately I don't have many process images, as the painting was too big to scan at home, and I had to "outsource" a scanner which wasn't at all close by.

Was still working out the dreaded feet of some of the characters.

Here are some character "warm ups" however - an important part of the "behind the scenes" work, before I started working on the painting. This step helped me to contemplate the personalities of the characters which would then guide narrative of the illustration.

Alright, that's it for today. Secrets are best revealed little by little, after all.
So, come back next week to see photos of The Art of Yuki Onna book and read about each of the artists involved!

*All images in this post are ©Mariya Olshevska.

The Barber of Pie-ville

Hi!

It's a shame I haven't been able to post anything in a while, but that's because I've been super busy with work. However, expect to see more frequent updates from me in the future.

So, here's the most recent piece that I've finished. (Well, actually I (always) think I could fiddle with it some more, but I'll step back for it for now) This work was for a sort of poster competition for an opera production called "The Barber of Barkerville", which is an adaptation of Rossini's "Barber of Seville". Haha, so no, not "The Barber of Pie-ville". That was just one of my silly jokes. But, pies do play quite a role in the story!

 

Finished piece

After making several roughs, I was drawn to this concept:

concept sketch

When I was refining the sketch, I separately drew out the two figures.

Rosie, with a note for Al

Al, in his disguise

After, I tweeked the sketch by reworking the pies, adding the town, and some mountain/hills. I scanned all the drawings, then scaled and added the figures into the composition. I printed the re-worked concept at size I as going to be inking and painting in.

pencils

Using a make-shift light table I re-penciled the image on to a sheet of Bristol Smooth paper, and then inked it with micron pens.

inks

Then it was time to paint...

a progress picture

And here's how the coloring ended up, but I wasn't done yet. I felt the green was too strong so I decided to calm the shades of green down in Photoshop.

Adjustments in Photoshop

Finally, I added a subtle paper texture as well. I decided to keep the sky light and simple so that it wouldn't compete with the title of the production. I didn't win the contest, but what can you do right?

close up

Size: 11x17"
Media: Waterproof inks + watercolour + gouache + microns

That's it for now!

Sophisticated Play Time

I've often said that I'd like to illustrate children's books and recently I've sort of had a trial go at creating art for a whole children's story. This was for one of my illustration classes. However, we didn't create dozens of finished pieces, rather we went through the stages of character development, story-boarding, making a dummy book, and only producing about 2 finished illustrations (or one spread). Lot's of work, I'll tell you and I'm not going to share all of my process because that's just too many pages to deal with. I'll just post process stages for my two finished illustrations. (Or as always, I hope they're finished.)

First, there were the character sketches, which {this post} was all about actually.

Then, it was time to storyboard. And here's the snippet from it of the two illustrations I coloured:

After my story-board was approved, came the time to make the dummy book, which is a rough mock up of what the compositions the illustrator is imagining for the story. The pictures are often loose but understandable sketches.

As you can see, not that different from my little thumbnail, but I've made sure to leave space for text and rendered the characters in more detail.

And here's the line-work stage for page four (left page). I was in too much of a blunder to spend time scanning the line-work for page 5.

And then the finished pieces: And look - I actually painted a background. A light one, but I haven't done any backgrounds in my latest works so in case anyone thought I forgot how to -- I didn't!

Tea party time!

I made sure to leave plenty of room for text

Hopefully I didn't do a terrible job=)

Media: Microns, watercolors, colored inks + gouache

Arnve's Exile - Comic Project

Here are my completed 8 pages of comic story for my latest project. The story isn't over (in my mind) and I may continue drawing pages in my spare time, when inspiration strikes.
I call it "Arnve's Exile" - Arnve being the name I've given the main character.

"With the coming of the tide

And with the endless violet night,

Somebody new is brought ashore

To test the lands of time once more"

"Having the vines blocking way back

She must by some means keep on track,

The dark and deadly chasm overcome

And not to fear and dread succumb."

Info:
Written and Illustrated by Mariya Olshevska
"Original" pages are 8.5 x 11 inches
Bristol/water color paper
Koh-i-Noor color inks
0.05 + 0.1 micron pens and tracing paper for the inks

My basic process was: small thumbnails (mini roughs) ---> tight pencils ---> inked 11x17 pages ---> lettering and panel layout in Illustrator ---> printing on watercolor paper and painting with waterproof colored inks. The painting took between 12-16 hours I think.

Anyway - there are quite a number of things I know could/should be changed and the project looks quite different from what I originally envisioned it to be...but oh well. Next time will be better!


Thanks for reading! :)

Lost & Found Comic

So, for my Illustration Comics class I'm working on an 8 page comic. The story of the comic isn't limited to 8 pages, but we have to have 8 finished pages by the end of this semester - penciled, inked, coloured, and with text (if applicable).

The following are 4 of my inked pages so far. The pencil lines for the gutters will be replaced with digital gutters later, and I plan to adjust my panels according to today's critique=)
I won't post the story here, anyone reading will just have to wait in suspense and see how it evolves=)

Materials: 0.05 + 0.1 micron pens and tracing paper
Size: 11 x 17 inches


Happy Monday!