What interests me most in art is illustration, whether it is narratives or concept art. My goal is to become a concept artist in the video game industry. However, I also have other interests—I think I would also like doing illustrations for books (largely children's books), or perhaps even get into animation. What I do know is that I want to draw for a living, and I really like the idea of getting paid for what I love doing. Since about the age of twelve I have wanted to work in the video game industry as a concept artist. In fact, video games were there whole reason I started drawing and indeed still play a large role in inspiring me to draw and create. Overall, I prefer to draw people the most, as I find them most interesting (whether drawing them from observation or just making up a character). However, I understand the importance of being able to illustrate anything (as concept artists have to do) and try to work on this as best I can.

Current WIP, line work for physical manifestation of Yin (Yang later).  

  Recent digital work (2013).

Older watercolor paintings (2011?).

Journal Entry 3: Digital Fine Art vs Digital Concept Art

Digital Fine Artists

Qian Li

Li's digital work is very fluid, and very much reminds me of watercolor paintings, expect they are done digitally and printed on canvas.

Mechelle Schloss

Schloss's digital work looks very much like her more traditional media based work. Her piece titled Legends of Mermaids is a mix of photography and digital media, and she worked it in the same way as she would oil paint.

Giovanni Auriemma

Aruiemma's digital work seems to be inspired by the old Italian painting masters. The lighting in his pieces is very soft, and he mixes figures with interesting architectural structures.

Dunking Bird Productions

The two artists who run this company (JD Jarvis and Myriam Lozada), work digitally just as they would traditionally in other media. Their works range from being very abstract to just slightly abstracted, and all use color very vividly.

Cindy Jerrell

Jerrell's Vintage Pet Portraits are an interesting mix of photography and use of digital editing to create a humorous image of pets dressed in vintage clothing.

Digital Concept Artists

Yuumei

This artist's work is very much like digital painting--not so much digital manipulation, but more painting and using the computer as the tool with which to do so. Much of the work has a very anime style, but is mixed with a color style/palette that is more like that of a fine artist.

Tavet Gillson

Tavet's concept work for characters has a very fun and playful look, and looks as though they are purposefully drawn out of proportion. The color used is very flat and simple, which goes well with the way in which the characters are drawn.

Bobby Pontillas

Bobby Pontillas is a character designer for Disney, and as such, the work that he does is done in Disney's style. Certain aspects of each character are exaggerated in some way, and the way he colors them is different--he uses outlines, but some are black while others match the inner color.

Kael Ngu

Kael Ngu works digitally in a way that is very painterly--no outlines are used, and while the forms are seemingly simple, it is the use of realistic lighting effects that brings the works together.

Brennan Massicotte

Massicotte uses an interesting mix of realistic and illustrative styles in each piece. This is seen more readily in his landscape pieces, where the landscape is significantly more realistic than the other more illustrated parts (people).

Difference between digital fine art and digital concept art

Fine artists are artists that make art to make either some kind of statement or for aesthetic purposes. Concept artists, on the other hand, make art that attempts to convey an idea to the viewer that is not real--be it person, landscape, or anything in that landscape. Concept artists are artists that are trying to create a world or story or person that does not exist but may be influenced by real life. This can be seen when comparing Giovanni Auriemma's work to Yuumei's work.

While Auriemma's work seems to be more based on combining the style of old Italian painting masters and Italian architecture to make some commentary about Italy (or it could just be for aesthetics), Yuumei's work is all about creating narratives with original characters in a very stylistic way. Her use of color and lighting is very much like that of a trained fine artist (like that of one who is focused on aesthetics) but she uses it to help give form to her goal of creating interesting and emotionally investing characters and worlds.

Journal Entry 2: Thinking process/strategy for Project 1

After I had decided that I wanted to construct my digital collage out of food, I started seeing all the food in my fridge/kitchen as how it could be used in a landscape pieces.

At first I had planned on doing a city scape, and to have the cereal boxes and cheese sticks be buildings. However, as I began to create the sky and clouds for my piece, it occurred to me that it would also be interesting to make more of a farm/outdoor landscape.

Before putting some of the images into Photoshop, I edited them first in Camera Raw. I did this for the marshmallow clouds (to make them whiter) and for the strawberry mountains (to make their colors more saturated).

Journal Entry 1: Collage artists

http://www.changethethought.com/tag/collage/page/4/

This site has a lot of interesting collage and mixed media artists. The artists whose work I felt the most drawn to were Eiko Ojala, James Dawe, Dan Baldwin, Alejandro Chavetta, and Lou Beach.

What I like about Eiko Ojala's work is the simplicity and the cleanness of his work. There aren't any hard, drawn on lines, but instead the line width is implied by the use of shadows of the cut outs. I also enjoy the contrast between the details of the eyes and the simplicity of the rest of the images.

In the works done by James Dawe, I like the way in which he doesn't try and blend the collaged pieces together, but instead makes them different colors to make them even more noticeable as a collage piece.

Dan Baldwin's piece is interesting because he does not have any defined fore, mid, or backgrounds. It is more like some parts are just in front of others, and the flatness of this works well with the style that he works in.

The piece by Alejandro Chavetta is interesting because the artist left a lot of negative space in the piece, and also uses color combined with greyscale that makes for a pleasing contrast.

I like the pieces on this site by Lou Beach because of his use of constructing a form out of things that are not actually part of that form, but the overall effect makes it seem as though it belongs there.