STA Work Blog

I have been busy doing illustrations for RUS407. Here is my process for U8_7. The scene is basically Polina and Oleg seated on the stairs in front of their country home, happily blowing bubbles while wearing flower crowns with tulips.

As usual, my process starts with an extremely rough sketch (rough to the point where it almost looks goofy?).

Quickly drew out the house to make things a bit clearer for myself.

After cleaning things up, I started doing line art and color.

Here’s what it initially looked like before a few iterations!

There were some issues with this:

1. I forgot that I was supposed to be drawing tulips in the flower crown.
2. The bubbles are too opaque, they should look more… well… bubbly and kind of iridescent!
3. More issues to come!

I went back in and drew in tulips and make the bubbles actually look like bubbles.

Almost at the finish line! However, there are a few more issues (like I said before: More issues to come!)

The background is looking a bit barren? It’s kinda sad. They’re wearing flower crowns and blowing bubbles on a nice sunny/spring-y(?!) day, but there are no flowers in sight.

I added some plants (courteously stolen from U1_1 from RUS406), and drew in some birch trees behind the house.

Much better!

I’m also getting a little ahead of myself, but I went ahead and started doing a quick mockup for U11_5 in Adobe Illustrator. It’s supposed to be a website selling flowers and similar things.

Photo IDs

Got some good work in today! Nothing particularly interesting that can be shown with pictures, but I made a comprehensive list of all the objects/simple animations that will need to be created for RUS407 prior to animating specific scenes. The list describes the symbols, notes on drawing them, which slides they’ll be used for, reference images and whether or not the specific symbol is “quick and easy”. I also discussed with Samantha some of the reorg specifics that Dr. Rice is considering for the RUS 406 and 407 classes, and I think we may have worked out a solution that will prevent us from having to rerecord entire presentations.

I am working on updating the RUS 407 PowerPoint banners. Originally, the banners had birds, but I need to change them to squirrels. And I need to keep the same style of that seen on old Russian wooden carvings.

My first iteration of the squirrel banner:

I added acorns and leaves, and smoothed out the branches. In Photoshop, I added the bevel and emboss effect to the branches and squirrels in order to achieve the wood effect.

I applied the wood as a clipping mask on top of the branches and squirrels to bring in texture. I also added drop shadow so that the squirrels looked more like carvings in wood.

Today one of the things I worked on was one of my new Oleg illustration assignments! The rough sketch is below, along with my previous Oleg illustration assignment with alterations based on Kathy’s notes. I also got just about all of the reference images ready for the RUS407 animations!