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My character design submission for this week's #makeartthatsells #matsicb5 assignment! The text I chose for this class is about a child grieving their grandmother, who taught them to love and care for plants in her garden. I really wanted to focus on the emotions and the richly descriptive, poetic text in this story, so I chose to have us, the reader, be the main character, and keep the visuals a little more abstract as a way to externalize the internal experience of this character. I also thoroughly enjoyed trying out pan pastels and gouache in new ways on bristol board--I can't believe I'd been using watercolor paper this whole time! It was like a completely new medium, and I LOVE it!
I couldn't resist this while working on and playing around with new materials and textures for my #makeartthatsells #matsicb5 Illustrating for Children's Books class assignment! We're working on designing our main character this week, and I'm super excited about it! I'm trying to be brave and break some rules in a good way to best illustrate my text... we'll see how that goes. I keep having to remind myself to go with my gut and enjoy the process instead of only focusing on checking off all the boxes.
"Oh, monsters are scared," said Lettie. "That's why they're monsters." -The Ocean at the End of the Lane #inktober, Day 18. I haven't been keeping up very well with doing inktober every single day, but each time I do, I shake a little rust off, I reach a little deeper, I try something new, and I grow a bit, both creatively, and in my understanding of this story. And I don't mean that I remember things I had forgotten about the plot, or that I'm doing a literary analysis or anything. It's more like I feel it deeper in my bones. Like I've stopped to listen to its echoes, and not just its sound.
In The Ocean at the End of the Lane (my inspiration for this and many other #inktober pieces), the main character is a seven year old boy. When he says this about some porridge and jam, he has just come from seeing a dead body for the first time in his life. It struck me how resilient humans can be, and how sometimes it doesn't take much--just simple little things like swirling porridge and jam around with a spoon--to remind us of the goodness in life, too. I think children are especially good at seeing that.
Our apartment partially flooded this weekend, and my brain needed a bit of a break from pushing some of those heavy emotional themes from The Ocean at the End of the Lane pretty hard, so I've only been able to do a few really quick brush pen sketches for #inktober the last few days! Our apartment is still a mess and we're waiting for carpet to dry and carpet cleaners to come before we can put it all back together, but we only had a few items ruined and it could have been so much worse, so we’re grateful!
#inktober, Day 11. Most of these are inspired by The Ocean at the End of the Lane (by Neil Gaiman), and I really just wanted to dig deep into that story this month, and do another series with some accountability so I could get back into practice. What I didn't really expect was to have so much fun exploring ink! For this one I did my sketch in graphite, per usual, painted with gouache, and used a brush pen and @marabucreativeUSA's ultramarine watercolor ink for an extra watery effect as Lettie Hempstock disappears into the ocean. I'm enjoying the contrast and boldness of ink way more than I expected, and I know I'm not even scratching the surface yet!
"Nobody was watching me. I took a bite of my toast. It was burnt and cold." -The Ocean at the End of the Lane #Inktober, Day 10.
This little bit from The Graveyard Book took a couple of tries, and I'm still not really happy with it yet. But here you go, two different ghoul-gates to take you down to Ghulheim--though I certainly wouldn't recommend it. "One grave in every graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it--waterstained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it, and a feeling, when you reach it, of abandonment... ...If the grave makes you want to be somewhere else, that is the ghoul-gate. There was one in Bod's graveyard. There is one in every graveyard." -The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
"If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn't you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with (and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real." -Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats #inktober, Day 7.
"I remember my own childhood vividly...I knew terrible things, but I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew them. It would scare them." - Maurice Sendak This quote comes just after the dedication in The Ocean at the End of the Lane. It took me two days to finish this one because I was honestly kind of scared of it. If the rawness and real was of it—the kind of realness my brain has been avoiding at all costs. This whole #inktober exercise is a confusing mixture of therapeutic and absolutely terrifying. I think it being the latter is part of what makes the former possible, so here I am. Swipe to see a close up and a bit of process.