Lately, I’ve been working on the new unit banner for RUS412K. The style is supposed to be very smooth and painterly, so I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to blend everything out while keeping the colors vibrant. This isn’t a style I normally work in because I really enjoy very expressive brush strokes, so it’s a bit challenging! I’ve been loosely using the following image as a reference. I’m trying to keep it as accurate as possible, since that’s very important to Dr. Rice.

 

 

I’ve also been busy assigning illustrations and providing feedback and meeting with other STAs to talk about illustration work flow… So far everyone has been understanding very well and have begun working on their first illustrations, which is very exciting!

I also started doing some sketches for a new Russian illustration.

Scene description: Polina and Oleg are next to the window in one of their rooms. The windowsill is covered with various plants (4-5 plants total). Polina is holding a ruler, as if to measure them, and Oleg is holding a plant guide book (Определитель растений).

I’m just trying to figure out what plants would look nice on the windowsill. I could probably recycle a background from a previous illustration since it’s supposed to take place in one of their rooms.

I also started working on a new self portrait for the STA blog since I got a swanky new hair cut this summer!

This past week I have been really busy doing things for the RUS412K project! I did some character creation training for Tate and was tasked with creating a Garbage Man. It was my first time, and I have to admit: I was very confused! I ended up making a lot of edits on the wrong symbol. (Whoops!) Here’s how my Garbage Man turned out!

I also briefly attempted to do something for the This Is Democracy podcast, but I didn’t have time to finish it. I just sketched out something very quickly and tried to block in some colors… Here’s my process!

First, I did some rough thumbnail sketches of what the composition could possibly look like… I just made some squares and sketched inside them on a separate art board.

I then roughly sketched out one thumbnail I was relatively happy about. However, I ended up scrapping it because I wasn’t really feeling the style.

I tried to make something similar but in a completely different style. Now it feels very fun! A lot more cartoony and still kind of anime inspired.

I thought it’d look nice if I put “DEMOCRACY” in a ribbon…

I knew I didn’t really have the time to work on this assignment, but I started blocking in some color anyway because I thought it’d be a fun break from RUS412K work, haha.

Here’s my process for that and how I organize my layers for lineless artwork in Photoshop!

 

And here is what I managed to get done before my shift ended last Tuesday.

Now moving back to Russian… I finished an edit:

I also made another very long post on Basecamp updating everyone on the illustration team about the project after having a short meeting with Heather :^)

For the RUS412K banner, I found a reference image with Suloni and Heather, and I just wrote up some notes before leaving yesterday!

 

Nations of Immigrants Initial Mockups

I’ve been mainly working on making UI mockups for the Nation of Immigrants website project.

After our first meeting with Stacy about the project, Jac and I made some rough thumbnail sketches.

We were given really rough sketches (as seen below).

 

 

From there, we roughly thumbnailed some ideas on a whiteboard together!

 

 

From there, we started making mockups.

Here are some iterations for a potential homepage. It’s very clean and minimalistic.

 

 

Here’s the one we settled on for now! There are no visual elements… It’s a very text heavy site.

 

 

I worked on making the Lesson Plan and Timeline page. These are very quick mockups, and hopefully after we develop ideas further, we can expand on these ideas, find a clear direction the clients will be happy with, work on branding, and polish + refine more.

 

 

I’ve been working with Jac on this, and she worked on the item page, which I made a couple iterations of today.

 

STA Orientation!

Today was the STA Orientation. We just went through the basics, played a Photoshop icebreaker, read through the handbook, and did various assignments. I created a new Basecamp avatar:

I actually pulled the image from my portfolio site’s about page and roughly added some color in Photoshop.

It was really nice meeting all the new STAs and getting to know more about them! I’m excited to work with them on the Russian project :’)

I also drew some small illustrations for a Powerpoint presentation we had to make. We were to illustrate some points from the STA Handbook.

 

 

To sum it all up: we’re almost done with RUS407!! Just one more illustration left and some generic figures to color in >:)