I have worked on two RUS 407 illustrations the past two weeks, as well as a LAITS events flyer. All were fun to work on, and the products have been rewarding!

LAITS flyer:

U10_6

U11_4

Here is the initial sketch I did for the scene:

Then I made my first draft…Drawing the scene from “Hedgehog in the Fog” was super fun, even though the video itself was kind of crepy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThmaGMgWRlY. But the lighting and shadows weren’t quite right – it seemed like the light was coming from ~behind~ the TV.

So I had a few adjustments so the glow from the TV wasn’t as dramatic and that the light was shining on Polina and Oleg, as seen by the dim light reflected off their edges, as well as the floor. Here is the final version:

Lately, I have been busy working on illustrating a Russian Firebird for the RUS 407 project. Here’s a breakdown of my process and progress so far.

The first step was breaking the figure down into basic shapes/parts. The firebird is supposed to be rendered in a flat style, so flat blocks of colors.

Using these roughly blocked out shapes as a guide, I began to fill them in. Each part of the bird has its own individual layer. I chose a more orange red, so it doesn’t end up too dark later when on a dark background… The wings are a lighter orange, so they don’t get lost in the rest of the body of the bird. Also, a lighter color will bring the wings more “forward.” I started adding in some patterns as well.

 

I placed what I had done so far on a black circle to emulate the finished product… Just to get a feel for how the colors work on such a dark background. I did some color adjustment and started experimenting more with patterns. The box/border encompassing the bird is supposed to be very floral-y. There are many flowers and intricate details, so I thought the bird should emulate that to some extent. I think having a floral motif in the patterns on the bird will help unify the the illustration when everything has been put together!

 

 

This is what I have so far, and hopefully I can make more progress this coming week!

In the past couple of weeks, I worked on two more animations for Texas Beyond History Kids. One of these was an animation called ‘kids-sandals’ where I had to recreate an animation of the main character–Dr. Dirt–walking across the screen using still images. He would periodically shout certain phrases with various images attached, so I grouped these images together to make it easier to work with in our tool Canvasser. Other than the long animation, ‘kids-sandals’ was a lot of work but didn’t need much creative thinking.

The other animation I worked on was called ‘detectives into the past’, and I worked on this with two other STAS–Nick Lavigne and Rodrigo Villareal. The entire animation was 30 frames long, so we divided the work amongst us. In the end, I did frames 10-21 over the course of two weeks. This animation required me to use a feature of Canvasser I wasn’t familiar with before called ‘Var’. The Var feature of Canvasser was the first time I had to use conditionals within the program.

Texas Beyond History

We’re making more progress on Texas beyond history… I’ve started uploading the actual canvasser interactives to the dev website. This process involves removing the old code for the flash and replacing it with a canvasser div that looks something like:

Eventually all the interactives will be put in place this way.

https://sta.laits.utexas.edu/blog/2017/11/15/22041-2/

For my most recent illustration, I drew Oleg and Polina on a playground in between apartment buildings. It is quite fulfilling to be able to view these images from steps in the illustrating process (from rough reference to final) together!