Artastic

 I love the character of Grogu from The Mandalorian, and was disappointed when I could not find a t-shirt of him that I liked at the local Comicon last September. I decided to make my own t-shirt. The first version was OK, but not great. That was before I had any knowledge of digital painting. I am now about to start my third semester at the Illustration and Concept Art Program at Algonquin College and I can see how far my skills have progressed with this new painting. .

 This project for school was fun. We had to illustrate an article for National Geographic of National Geographic Kids. I decided to do one for the Kids magazine. Instead of using filler I researched the latest discoveries about Neanderthals to create a real article. A long time ago I took an anthropology course, and I have never forgotten learning that Neanderthals had larger brains than Homo Sapiens. I was thinking of the character Eep from The Croods when I decided to give her red hair. Some Neanderthals did have red hair, though it was not the most common color, so far as we know.

 I needed to create three landscape paintings where my Sherlock Hounds character will have his adventures. Completing these paintings involved a lot of learning, because I am still new to digital painting. They were fun to create, especially adding the atmospheric touches. Only the first painting is in colour. I want to add colour to the other paintings when I have the time. I would also like to add more finishing touches.

 The only requirement for our background painting assignment was that it must be a farm. I decided to put mine on an alien planet.  It was a fun challenge to figure out the lighting on a planet that would have a different atmosphere. It is also emerging from an eclipse. The landscape behind the cliffs has already emerged from the eclipse, allowing me to put some nice rim lighting on the background cliffs. I would like to revisit this landscape later and do it with lighting at a different time of day.

  This scene from one level of a side scroller game will be put into a program in a later semester. It will be very fun to see this fully implemented. The Game Premise This game is about the challenges of being an artist.    After roughing out ideas for three different levels, this is the environment that was further developed for this assignment. It is based around the fear and doubt that an artist has to constantly work through and conquer.         The key to conquering those fears is to keep producing art, so that is how the artist overcomes the challenges. She throws paint at blank canvases and creatures.   When she paints an inactive canvas, it is activated, and can then be used to overcome obstacles by riding on it as it moves or to duck under or behind it as she encounters obstacles.              The villain of the game is an art critic, who throws thick black globs of criticism at the artist. The Obstacles The Anxiety Claw Hand The Energy Leech The Inner Critic Troll The Proc

 We were given a choice of books to partially illustrate. Some were children's books and some were books of poetry. My ultimate goal is to illustrate children's books so I I chose one of those. I selected a book titled "Sheep's Farmyard Friends" by Dani Best. In addition to thumbnails for all twenty pages we needed to fully illustrate the front and back cover, as well as two two-page spreads.