Art-School Owls

This piece is contribution to a project happening at my university. Long story short, a few of my illustration classmates and I are illustrating different locations from our school for a book/booklet that will be printed for 1st year students this fall. Without revealing the exact location, I'll just say it's a place where certain students meet up to discuss various issues.

As usual, my process was to start with some thumbnail sketches (which I'm too lazy to scan, and they're hardly that fascinating).

Then the rough version looked like this:

Then, after refining the rough sketch, I did my line work, which I scanned in, should I screw up later when I'm painting.

And the final piece:

 And there we have it -- some artsy art-school owls chatting and what not.

Original is painted on 9x12 Bristol Smooth paper
I used a mix of micron pens, watercolours, waterproof inks, and touches of gouache.

Treeology

This is a project from a couple of weeks back for my Children's Book Illustration class. Our assignment was to create 5 illustrations that would be for an encyclopedic or educational type of book.

I approached this project by illustrating 5 different famous fictional trees. I think it would be really neat if there was a book that categorized and described various fictional trees=)

Truffula Trees - Dr. Seuss - The Lorax

Hexxus' Baobab Tree - FernGully (animation)

Silver Apple Tree - C.S. Lewis - The Chronicles of Narnia

Grandmother Willow - Disney - Pocahontas

White Tree of Gondor - J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Materials:
`Bristol Smooth Paper
`Prismacolor pens
`Micron pens
`Koh-i-Noor waterproof colour inks

Size:
9x12 inches

Happy Saturday!

Hedgehog Tales

Happy December, first of all!


For the last little while I've been working on some digital illustrations=)
You might remember these little hedgehogs from my older posts
-- http://mariyaolshevskaexpressions.blogspot.com/2011/05/hedgehog-cactus.html
-- http://mariyaolshevskaexpressions.blogspot.com/2011/05/hedgehog-pine-cone.html

Anyhow, for my final Digital Illustration class project I decided to turn them into digital pieces and add some more hedgehogs into the series to create a mini story.

I think the story can be read in any order, but this one is the one I had in mind when I created the works. The gist of is that in the future world of extinction two little hedgehogs go on journeys to see if there are any others of their kind. Along the way they encounter a variety of other objects and animals....

See for yourselves:

Hedgehog + Pine cone

Hedgehog + Cactus

Hedgehog + Sea Urhcin

Hedgehog + Porcupine

Hedgehog + Hedgehog

And in case you're wondering about process, here's how it all went down.

1. Made a sketch:

2. Inked the sketch using the "pen" tool in Adobe Illustrator:

3. Painted the general colours using the" live paint bucket" tool in Illustrator:

4. Placed the image into Photoshop, where I added subtle gradients to each section, painted the background, and started to add a little texture to the grass with some grass brushes:

5. Applied various natural textures to the hedgehog, pine cone, grass, and overall image. I also adjusted the levels of the picture and ta-da!

*I also like this more papery version of the two hedgehogs together:

Credits:

Wrinkled Paper Sheet --- "Paper Sheet 002" by reflected-stock
Grass Brushes -- "The Ultimate Grass Brush Set" by charfade
Grass -- "Grass Stock" by Rai-Stock
Marble -- "Marble Texture" by hitorokiwa
and other paper texture --> "Parchment Paper"

Soak up That Sun!

So, now for some illustrations, (nearly) fresh from my Editorial Illustration summer class.

For this assignment we were to create a black and white illustration that would accompany an OP-Ed article from the New York Times. I found this article: "The Sun is the Best Optometrist" to be quite interesting, so that's the one I worked on.

Here's the process:

rough sketch

line work

 

 

Info:

Strathmore Bristol Smooth paper
8.4 x 7.5 inches
black ink + Rapidograph line work