Putting my green colored pencils through the ringer again, for another piece inspired by my local park.
I later learned that the flower I'd photographed as my reference for this drawing is bindweed, an apparently frustrating weed, and yet I find it beautiful just the same.
11 x 14, colored pencil on paper.
I've been painting and drawing with ink a lot lately. I've been using a few different methods and materials - dip pen, brush, and a few different waterbrushes that I've filled with acrylic ink. Most of the red/teal you see here is from those waterbrushes- I'm finding I really like the color combination.
All three of these paintings are for sale and will be coming with me to SPX this fall, so if anything catches your eye, shoot me an email (nugent . liz @ gmail . com) or drop by table L11A!
One last piece, a few doodles cobbled together digitally, is available as a print!
Happy summer, everyone! I cannot get over how green it is, everywhere! Every neighborhood, roadside, and park around here just seems to be bursting with foliage and life.
This drawing above is my attempt to capture what it feels like right now, to walk outside and be completely engulfed in a wall of green. I based it loosely on a photo I took while walking in the nearby park - I loved the play of light and dark and how it made such interesting shapes.
It's another big colored pencil piece- my most complex by far. I thought I'd work on it on and off for about a week or so, turns out it was more like three! I really enjoyed the process, though. The "sketch" was nothing more than a light V to delineate the white area, from there I drew in shapes as I colored them, working mostly from bottom to top and front to back.
Here are a few of my in-progress shots:
This should keep me busy for a while! #tw
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Hilariously I've spent a week thinking I was "almost done" 😝 #tw #wip
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And the full piece in all her splendor:
Verdant
Colored Pencil on Paper
18 x 24 inches
I love when things get announced and I finally get to show you what the heck I've been doing!
Last summer, I got to check off another dream project - working on a game/app! An educational kids app, no less. I got to make art for this massive phonics app & game collection called Phonics Museum.
I illustrated fourteen different games, with various multiple states, and created a host of other assets for various animations and other parts of the app. Whoah!
It was such a wonderful and new challenge. I worked with a much bigger team than I'm used to (uh, typically it's just me and maybe an art director), including other artists, which was neat. I had to try to match and take inspiration from existing assets, and also of course organize my work in a way that other teams could actually use my files. It was also really different trying to account for various different states within a game. Each set of illustrations had to have several different variations based on what was happening in the game - not something I'd ever done before, but something I really enjoyed figuring out! (I learned to love layer comps.)
Here's a little example of what I mean- this game is one of several that involve connecting pieces to create a sort of Rube Goldberg track or machine. I also had to make lots of different track pieces - that was a total logic puzzle for me at times as well!
Another cool challenge that comes with any freelance gig is having to draw things that you wouldn't think to draw otherwise. That came up a lot on this project, but one of the best examples I can think of was the ship game. I had to draw three different ships, each in various states of disrepair. I was baffled as to how I would do it, but once I started I actually really enjoyed it!
In most of these images, you can see another parameter I was working with - I needed to create background assets that could be moved around or turned on or off to make some variety in the background, so it doesn't get boring. I really enjoyed flicking the layers on and off and seeing how different I could get things with just a few assets! There's a good example of that in some of the screens from this game, in which players explore a pyramid. I had to make assets (including doorways) that could be rearranged to produce different rooms:
Of course, probably the absolute coolest part of all of this is getting to see the stuff in action in a working game! My drawings move and do things!! You can see a few things in action in the trailer for the app, below. (I was collaborating with some other folks of course, so it's not all my art. My fellow MIAD Alum Jillian Stiles did a few games, and some other folks worked on a lot of the other assets.)
[video width="640" height="360" mp4="http://www.liznugentdraws.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Phonics-Museum.mp4"][/video]
So wild! There's more screenshots and such over on the Phonics Museum website.
Big thanks to my art director, Sean Hennessey, over at MajorMega! He always knew exactly what to tweak to make the pieces that last little bit better.
Alongside my illustration work, I also teach kids art classes a couple times a week. It's a great complement to freelance life - gets me out of the house and talking to humans, gives me a community to be a part of, and best of all, I get to spend time with my wonderful, inspiring students!
I've been wanting to make a few drawings as exercises in capturing all the rich little details that make my students seem like the real human beings that they are. I had particular fun trying to create outfits for them that felt real- their clothing choices are always crazy awesome.
Hopefully I'll get to do more of these soon!
Below, you can see a slideshow of the various steps it took to make this piece. Thumbnail to tight sketch to flats to finish! (I confess, there was A LOT of struggling between the thumbnail and the tight sketch.. but I didn't save any of that to show.)
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This is a mini collection of some of those paintings. I definitely want to make more - I feel like it's going somewhere, but I don't know where yet. It's all definitely something new to me, which is really fun and energizing.
New promo postcard illustration! Still have to draw/design the back, then I'll be ordering a big stack of these to send around.
I have a part-time job as a children's art teacher. One of the things I do at that job is create sample images for our various assignments. So basically I do a drawing that fits the prompt, aiming for roughly the level of detail/complexity my students can handle, and color it with the same materials they use. It's SUPER fun and I kinda can't believe I get paid to do it every week!
Anyway, the original drawing for this came about from one of those samples. I didn't change the composition much,(Although I changed how I drew the bear - my students kept thinking it was a hedgehog or a beaver or a hamster.. oops!) but I wanted to go with a less expected color palette than what I used initially. I fussed with it a lot and even did a host of color studies, assisted by the color tools in the Adobe Capture App. I was really trying to make the green work! But ultimately, I just had to kill it. Wasn't working for me. Modified primary palette it is!
I made a comic!
I love making comics, but I only ever make them when I have a flash-of-inspiration style idea, one that comes all at once. That's pretty rare for me. I haven't figured out a process that lets me get through "working out" an idea that's not fully formed with comics, like I have with other kinds of art. I have so much respect for those who can do that!
Anyway. Take a look.
I've also revamped & reposted my Comics page with other comics work!
Art is the best job.
I mean, it's always great. But sometimes, you get an opportunity that's just so ridiculously cool, it's hard to believe it's part of your actual job! That's what this project felt like.
The Furrow, a very cool animation studio in Kentucky, invited me to be part of their collaborative animation demo reel. They got a whole bunch of amazing illustrators to contribute pieces that were then animated by the team at The Furrow, and combined into this awesome video. How cool is that?
They took my piece and completely brought it to life- along with a host of other awesome art from other artists! Definitely go check it out.
So cool.
Behind my parents' house in Wisconsin is a huge empty grassy space we just called "the field." My siblings and I spent a ton of our childhood wandering around in "the fields," full of tall grass and shrubs and locusts and moths and turtles and one time, an abandoned washing machine. Later, the city added (beautiful!) drainage ponds to the fields, which brought geese, ducks, and a great blue heron. It was really a sacred, special place to me.
Now I live in Virginia, and I'm learning to feel like it's home. It's different and sometimes weird - especially in winter. I'm not used to winter that's not blanketed in snow, and for a while I found it hard to see the beauty in a whole lot of drab, brown, naked trees.
However. I now live near this incredible, wonderful, breathtaking park along the Potomac. And in that park, there's a pond - an achingly familiar pond with geese and ducks and yes, a great blue heron. And it has tall tall grass, and little shrubs, and all kinds of little miracle plants that have taken on such lovely shapes.
So, this drawing turned into a tribute to those two spaces, and to finding beauty even in winter. The colors are still beautiful, really - it's just a different palette. The dead & dormant plants have a really different, delicate quality.
This piece is 18"x24", colored pencil on paper - and not (yet) photographed very well, because photographing art is hard! I'm learning.
Below is an in-progress shot & some of the photos I took in the park when I was gathering reference.
Happy Valentine's Day!
I had so much fun doing my silly Fantasy Valentines last year for the Sunshine Syndicate - I knew I had to do a part two this year!
I wanted to switch it up and go with some new tropes, so this year I did Silly Sci-Fi Valentines. Truth be told I'm more into science fiction than I am into fantasy, yet these were so much harder to come up with! I think it's in part because sci fi spans such a huge range of settings and subgenres, plus I didn't want to reference specific characters or settings. Ultimately, it was a great challenge- and it was a lot of fun to draw characters again.
Feel free to print 'em out and give 'em to your nerdy Valentines!
Puttering around with more plants and landscapes! Although there's still fall inspiration all around me, I thought it would be good to try something different. I thought back to an afternoon I spent wandering around Caroll Creek in Frederick, Maryland - they've filled the waterway with all these beautiful and alien-looking aquatic plants.
I found that without a specific photo as reference, I went in a more stylized/whimsical direction. It was fun, but very different from my last piece, which was really about capturing a specific scene and moment.
Another in my landscape vignette series. This one is inspired by a particularly foggy morning on the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was so foggy, when we stopped at overlooks we couldn't see the ground at all! It was like a dream.
Here's a photo I took that morning and used as reference/inspiration:
Also, as usual, brushes and textures from Alex Dukal & Kyle T Webster!
It's been a very busy few months (spent 5 months on a colossal illustration gig, got married, you know) but things have finally settled down for a bit. I'm so happy to be turning my head back towards personal work for a little while- I've been itching to get back to those little landscape vignettes I'd been doing!
Part of the recent busy-ness was heading off on a honeymoon with my new husband. We drove through the Blue Ridge Mountains, on Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was beyond beautiful and incredibly inspiring! The above illustration is just the first of what I'm sure will be many drawings that come from that experience.
I put a few photos from our travels on my instagram, but the one below in particular shows what I was drawing from for this little vignette. I believe that pop of red is coming from a shrub called sumac (like the spice!), which we saw blazing fiery red all along Skyline Drive.
More beautiful times on Skyline Drive today 🏔️
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A little drawing of the Space Weaver / Bossa Nostra crew as a tribute to one of my favorite-ever games in terms of art direction, Broken Age! The whole game is one giant "oh man I wish I was this genius" fest for me.
I made this as a submission to the Gallery Nucleus Broken Age Tribute Show, which I found out about 3 days before the deadline! I didn't get in, but I'm still glad I went for it- the Doublefine game studio has been a core influence on my art since I encountered Psychonauts back in high school, so it was really fun to spend some time paying homage to the great art in their games. I look forward to seeing all the great art in the show!
I have remained very much in Nature Mode the past few weeks. I'm finding so much joy in being outside that I'm spending all my personal art time paying tribute to it. It helped that I took a road trip through the Blue Ridge Mountains right at the peak of spring - absolutely stunning! Here is a collection of the art I've been making lately, both digital and from my sketchbook: (Prints available)
We've all had it- you're knee deep in an illustration, deadline's coming up, and it is just not working. It's too late to scrap the whole thing, but you dread going into the studio. The piece just doesn't feel right.
What do you do?
At this point, I've hit this wall enough times that I've developed a bit of a routine to deal with it. I'd like to share my steps for troubleshooting an illustration that just isn't quite right. They're presented roughly in the order that I use them, but that's definitely dictated by my working method and artistic priorities. It could be completely different for you!
I'm a nut for color- working with color to find interesting combinations is my favorite part of any illustration. If I don't like a piece, odds are I'm not into the colors. If I feel stuck, I'll grab the hue slider and pull it around until something clicks. I might do it on one or two elements, or (temporarily!!) flatten the image and play with the whole thing. Eventually something will spark and give me a new thing to try.
Because I really love color, I often neglect the importance of value - that is, light/dark - in my illustrations. If the space feels confusing or the hierarchy of elements isn't right, values are often the culprit. I check this by adding a black layer to the top of my document and setting its blending mode to "color," effectively making my image black and white. Then I can see where I need more value contrast and go in to lighten or darken certain elements. I do this with the filter still on, then turn that layer off and adjust anything that might have gotten blown out or turned a weird color.
If the composition seems a little off, and particularly if a character isn't reading quite right, I flip the canvas horizontally. Be careful - don't do this unless you are READY to see all your mistakes! It will reveal many more things to fix than you want to see! This is where I'll realize a character is leaning or has a lopsided face, and I rotate/tweak/adjust as needed.
If a composition is still reading as dull to me, I take a look at scale. I'll take elements and make them waaaay bigger, or waaay smaller - MUCH more than makes sense to me. Sometimes I pull back a bit from that, other times I realize that exaggeration is exactly where I need it.
This is where the Circle of Trust comes in. I have a very close group of artist friends who I know can help me out of artistic jams when I need it. I'll show them and see what they think the thorny spot may be. Sometimes they think the issue is what I think it is - and sometimes they point out something else completely that ends up being the key. I've had friends completely save illustrations for me with suggestions I absolutely never would have thought up! Sometimes, the conversation sparks a third idea that completely turns the piece around, too. You can never underestimate the value of another trusted set of eyes.
When I'm really and truly stuck, I need to just take a break for a while. If possible I'll set it down for a day or two. Otherwise, a long walk, cooking some lunch, hanging out with my dog- anything to get out of my studio and thinking about something else for a while. Often, I come back with a fresh perspective on what to tweak.
It's hard to love a work in progress! There's a period in nearly every piece where I start to wonder if I'm any good at illustration at all, and the only way through is to just keep going. We all experience this! It'll look better when it's done, I promise. It'll be fine. You got this.
If none of the above have worked.. odds are I know what the problem is, and have been in denial. There's probably an element in the illustration that just isn't drawn well. The anatomy is bad, or the expression is bland, or I didn't do enough research, or I didn't give it enough personality, or any number of things. Sooner or later, I just have to look up some reference, dig in, and redraw the damn thing. And yes- it DOES usually take me 7 steps to hit this point! Even when I've seen it sitting there all along.
I can say that without fail, after I've executed all these steps, I've always wound up with an illustration that I'm satisfied with. I'm not going to pretend I've absolutely adored everything that's ever left my desk, but I've never submitted something that I legitimately thought was a bad solution. The last thing to keep in mind is that when art is your job, you aren't going to be in love with everything you do. Clients will ask for things you don't agree with, the subject matter may not tickle you, or you might just have a bad day. It doesn't have to be The Best Thing You've Made Ever to be The Best You Can Do This Time.
And seriously. It'll be fine.
Note: Shoutout to the weekly #kidlitart chat for being the inspiration for this blog post. This originated as a series of tweets I shared during our "art triumphs/techniques" chat. Also, big thanks to Rubin Pingk for encouraging me to collect them together into a blog post!
A lot of the personal practice of an illustrator involves playing around in a sketchbook, unsure of where it will lead. You plant your little seeds, and you have no idea which ones will grow.
Then, sometimes, you get to harvest! That's what this illustration feels like for me, it's a harvesting of a bunch of little ideas that have been germinating in my sketchbooks. It's impossible to trace back all of the roots, but here are a few:
First of all- until pretty recently I was not at all a fan of colored pencils. I found them tedious, I thought the soft, grainy texture made most drawings look amateurish or like schoolwork, and I resented not being able to have any color I wanted. However, as I've been trying to incorporate more color into my sketchbook, I've found colored pencils to be a really good way to do that. They require no prep, I enjoy how easy it is to craft an interested limited color palette, and I discovered I LOVED the textures I can create with firm pressure and rough, scribbly lines. This lead to a few of my favorite sketchbook spreads:
Next, subject matter. Would you believe I used to hate drawing backgrounds? That's really evolved over the past few years, too. I've had to draw plants and forests for various projects, and I've discovered that creating environments is now incredibly relaxing- meditative, even. I've built up a sort of lexicon of plant shapes (which I'm always trying to add to) and I get to pull from it whenever I get to draw something like this.
For our latest Sunshine Syndicate assignment, we're working on patterns themed around "green" with a certain color scheme. I really wanted to do something nature-inspired, because at the time I was starving for some springtime! I grabbed colored pencils because they're an easy way to iterate with certain colors, and I started doodling in my sketchbook. I liked the way the sketchy drawn trees looked next to the more filled in ones, and I thought I'd try filling a whole page with them.
Not only did I really like the results, I realized I had a lot of fun plotting the page out as I worked, figuring out where it needed an extra element or a different color. It was just.. fun! And relaxing. So, I wanted to do more. I also have a big empty wall in my kitchen, so I thought.. why not go big?
And that's when I grabbed the big 18"x24" pad of paper, basically untouched since college. And also when I laid down on the rug and started coloring like a little kiddo!
Now, this process of pulling from things discovered in the sketchbook is happening all the time. This is just an example where that growth is fairly easy to see. Hopefully it inspires you to dig into your sketchbook with some new materials- you never know what will come next!
Happy Valentines Day!
The Sunshine Syndicate did a fun Valentines printable project, and I knew I had to do some silly printable (and nerdy) Valentines! I love puns, plus I've been eyeing my buddy Marisa's adorable annual pop-culture Valentines for years. It was great to give it a try myself!
Another really fun challenge for this was that we all used the same color palette. Rachel Place picked the colors, and they are so outside my typical wheelhouse, yet I totally fell in love with the combo as I was working and finding how to make it my own. Great learning experience!
So feel free to print these puppies out and give them to your Valentines!
It's really nice once in a while to get to do something totally out of your norm. Stretch out those art-brain-muscles in a new direction!
This is - of all things - an album cover commissioned by DJ (and twitter-friend) Bill Boulden. He ran a super interesting Kickstarter for his new album, Music To Die Alone In Space To. The album is being re-recorded for each backer, and they have a number of customization options, including album art.
As soon as I got the brief - a tiny, unimportant astronaut, drifting in space near a nebula - I knew I wanted to use a different process than my usual. I've now drawn space for two different picture books and I definitely didn't want to repeat myself.
I knew from previous experiments with my inks and watercolors that I could probably get a good spacey base, and I thought that would differentiate the piece not only from my previous versions of space, but also from the 6 other covers Bill already had. So I spent an afternoon listening to his music and messing about at my drafting table:
And here's the end result, scanned but undoctored:
While I was happy with how that turned out overall, I can definitely say there was some "this looks COMPLETELY different from how it was wet" frustration. I spent some time pushing the values by painting over areas in photoshop and using a few other sundry tricks. Eventually I got to something like this:
Ok, but not super spacey. No stars. I had originally planned to mask them off after my first light wash (you can see a few there), but I forgot to do them before pouring out my inks for the other washes, and I didn't want the ink to dry while I messed around with masking fluid trying to make it work. (Masking fluid and I don't get along very well yet..)
I tried playing with and making a few brushes in photoshop, but nothing really seemed right. What I was really trying to emulate was the paint-spatter effect from using a stiff brush... so finally I figured I'd just go do that. But, I needed to be able to manipulate those stars as well, so rather than spatter white onto my painting, I spattered ink onto some tracing paper laid over the painting:
And with some minor manipulation, that got me the spacey feel I was looking for.
Then, I had to add the astronaut. This is where I had a mini identity crisis. The original art description was for a tiny astronaut in the center of the image. I drew a few astronauts on paper (hoping to keep the traditional materials vibe throughout the piece) and comped them in, but it just wasn't doing it for me.
The compositions all felt weirdly unbalanced due to nebula I'd drawn in the upper right. The astronauts felt too cute, but when I tried to draw them more realistically they just felt stiff and not me. And all of them seemed way too similar to the cool album art Bill already had. I tried a few other things - all failures - and wound up just letting it sit for a few days. That was something I learned to do in art school - we all had a few pieces finished at the last minute with WEIRD decisions end up on the crit wall, not nearly as good as they could have been. Always try to finish your art a few days before it's due, so you can sit on a bit and make changes if you need to!
After thinking about this for a few days, I decided I should try to tackle the visual issues by thinking about the composition, rather than the rendering of the astronaut. If your composition is solid, the rest will follow. So how could I communicate that the astronaut is unimportant without making it tiny? Well, so I'd have to make it big - and probably cropped. I realized if I cropped it in a really strange, awkward way, that would probably help it feel like an unimportant element. I drew a few thumbnails (something I should have done in the first place!!!), got an astronaut I liked, and sketched it in.
After flatting (with white- I was originally going to go with a typical very bright/white astronaut) I thought I was on the right track but I didn't really know how to color it. I messed around with a more stylized, flat version of the coloring, but there was a weird stylistic contrast. I kept thinking to myself, "ok, but how would I solve this problem?" Finally, I hit on adjusting the contrast of the whole piece by making the astronaut lit from behind and hence very black- almost disappearing into space. And I'd achieve that with a more painterly approach to the light, something that used to pretty much define my work. It was fun to go back to that way of thinking, and I'm really proud of how it turned out:
To sum up a blog post that's gotten much, much longer than I intended.. my takeaway from this is that it's really good to tackle something unexpected from time to time. I'm also really interested to keep trying to bridge that gap between traditional and digital work. I find I get quite bored of my artwork when I use the same workflow for too long - so hopefully this route will help introduce more experimentation and play into that process.
And go check out Music To Die Alone In Space To!
