Illustration Inspiration

I find most of the art I like through social media, generally on my facebook feed from my artsy friends' posts and pages that I have liked. Today as I was scrolling though my feed I saw a woman named Irene Gallo posting a link to an article featuring tons of paintings of horses because it's apparently the year of the Horse now. 
Anyways, one of the paintings was an illustration by Ivan Bilibin for a book of russian fairy tales.

I'm attracted to these illustrations because of their flatness in comparison to other more realistic drawings. I'm also a big fan of the outlines of all the shapes and within each shape is one color, kind of like a Paint-By-Numbers.

And as for this last one, how could anyone not love a drawing with a woman using a skull as a torch and mushrooms popping up everywhere. 

As I was perusing my Facebook newsfeed I saw a link to a blog site called mymodernmet.com which apparently hosts a colllection of art based blogs. I originally went to it following a link for photos that showed a Batman figurine posed in everyday places but also found a woman who does amazing illustrations in colored pencil.

The artists name is Jennifer Healy and her work predominantly features women in fantastical situations. I really love her artwork because of her insane blending skills and the fact that her main subject matter is women. I myself really love drawing women because there's just so much easy beauty to the female form and because it's easy to show a range of emotions with the female features and figure.

 I'm attracted to this one because of the dewy skin tone of the woman, and the use of the page by the hanging knotted braid.

I really adore how this one shows her emerging from somewhere and the diagonal strip on her lip.

I love anything that incorporates bones into a composition. 

Twists on framed portraits are also a love of mine.

The Incredibility of Watercolor

God.
Water colors are incredible.

You take pure paper and add color to it while letting the original paper shine through instead of covering it. And you literally have to since that paper is the lightest tint that you'll have and I think that's the hard part. In most other mediums it's relatively easy to back track and cover up a mistake or to add white.

As if not being able to cover up mistakes isn't hard enough, water colors are alive, the paint moves and I think that's what fascinates me. It's so mesmerizing to trail a loaded brush over a page and watch the color trail and bleed out of its own accord. It's downright hypnotic to watch the pigment swirl around when you dip the brush in a trail of water.

My favorite part of the attached photo is the hat because it lets so much of the original white of the paper shine through while still making the hat 3D. I also really love the soft tones that were used whick convinces the onlooker that this hat is the softest thing in the world.

There's a great blog that I follow called Muddy Colors and it primarily posts how to articles and elaborations on the contributors' works, which I find to be really usefull.

I didn't come into my illustration major knowing all the ins-and-outs of the professional world that I'd one day be jumping into, nor did I really think about how hard it may be to deal with clients or being creatively stumped. Muddy Colors has articles on all of these topics and it's both intimidating me and making me more knowledgeable about the world that I'll be working in.

One of the posts that I've read more recently is one about taking the time to make reference photos. I normally just try to imagine what the person I'm trying to draw looks like and how the light would work but I see the value in actually getting a reference photo, that way one can see how the light and proportions would really work in a real world.

Paper Light Project

Currently, I'm giving myself a headache searching for interesting origami folds on the internet. All I seem to be able to come up with is the basic boxes, flowers and birds instead of how to's to make interesting designs. However I am finding lots of professional paper artists' work which is definitely inspiring albeit frustrating because there's no way I could recreate them without directions. Literally just thinking about it gives me a headache.

I'm considering making a traditional circular lantern and in the center panel cutting out a design to make a story. For some reason I'm drawn to having the image of a reindeer running since the paper's white but I feel like I should explore play with shadows more than simply cutting out a design.

Woop woop woop. (Because I can. And it's the sound of the universe [check out the link]. And I can't think of a clever title.)

So, I was perusing tumblr looking for things to inspire the creativity that I'm a willing slave to when these pictures caught my eye.

My immediate reaction to these photos was to try to figure out why the photographer would set up the people and reflections this way, or in other words, what was the story they were trying to tell.

Personally, I think that these photos are supposed to be a representation of the idea that one's environment shapes who they are. The obvious outline of the people shows that the person is the subject, but that the viewer can see the city inside of them shows that the photographer is trying to show that the city is also within the person.

I think it's also interesting that they are looking out at the city, especially since they're above it. The words that come to mind are, birds eye view, a redtailed hawk, and surveyor.

Carl Sagan- A Glorious Dawn

For this third project, and the one I'm most excited for so far, we're supposed to pick a word from the word list to use as the one we'll work on for the rest of the project. From the list there are a couple I really like and I don't think I can pick one  just yet. So I've made myself narrow it down to 3: capture, connect and migration.

We're also supposed to look up the definitions and I'm pretty sure that's just so we understand the word and its denotations before we start taking up our own ideas on its meaning.

So, as according to the webster online dictionary these are the definitions:

Capture: the act of taking and holding someone as a prisoner or of being taken as a prisoner
               the act of getting control of something.
               the act of putting information in a form that a computer can use or read
Connect: to join two or more things together
               to join with or become joined to something else
               to think of something or someone as being related to or involved with another person, thing,                  event, or idea
Migration: to move from one country or place to live or work in another
                  to move from one area to another at different times of the year.