As I wrote in my previous post, I have just completed a summer class in illustration through the SMFA. It is the seventh of eight classes I need to complete my Illustration Certificate! One more to go! I wanted to share the work I did for this course. When I took Introduction to Illustration we had a new assignment every week, each one based on an actual job that a working illustrator might get. The Intermediate Illustration course I took this summer was structured in a similar way but spending more time on fewer projects. We critiqued our work every class and were expected to make edits and present considered and finished work. It was challenging and also similar to how a real illustration job would go.
We kicked off the class with a New Yorker cover-- a magazine with a long history of illustrated cover artwork. If you get your work on a New Yorker cover, you're kind of a big deal. Often the covers are clever comments on current events, but not always! Sometimes they are just nods to New York City as a place and a culture, or nods to something seasonal. I'm not particularly well versed in politics so I decided that my cover would be a love letter to Summer in Upstate, New York. I painted Enfield Falls near Ithaca. This is a real place where you should definitely go swimming if you are ever in the area. I had fun with the green and red color palette.
The following assignment was an illustration for a short story, such as you might find in Harper's Bazaar. When you illustrate stories for children's books, you usually want to show the characters in fully realized detail, but when you illustrate for adult audiences, they usually want something less detailed that allows the reader to imagine details for themselves. Generally characters' images are only suggested or fragmented in stories for adults.
We read a story called "Old Mrs. J" by Yoko Ogawa, which is a rather eerie story about the landlady of an apartment building whose garden starts mysteriously to produce hand-shaped carrots. I don't want to spoil the ending, but there are other strange, unsettling things that go on and a very creepy twist. I did a couple sketches of hand carrots for class.
My class's feedback was basically that I needed to make it creepier. "So creepy that you scare yourself" was the exact advice. We explored ink as a medium and I decided it would be ideal for this assignment.
I felt that my piece could be creepier still, so I looked at images from that old book, "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" whose illustrations (by Stephen Gammell) are done in ink and absolutely terrifying. They are too scary for my blog, so you should google them. But do it during the day, when it's light out, maybe with a friend so you're not alone.
Much creepier this time around!
Our next assignment was a celebrity portrait. Illustrations like this are often used for published interviews with anyone from politicians to pop stars. My instructor, when giving us this assignment, recommended that we use sparkles. I couldn't entirely tell to what degree he was kidding but he said something along the lines of, "It's not a mandate-- I'm not saying use glittler......... but use glitter." So I knew I needed to do a portrait of someone who would make sense covered in glitter.
Ke$ha seemed to me to be the obvious choice.
So here she is in all her sparkly glory, in a gold bathtub, drinking a beer with a wolf in sparkly sunglasses. I feel like that is something she would do, right? Plus, wolves feature prominently in the video for her song "Die Young."
As an in-class exercise we looked at hand lettered fonts and text and logos and album covers that include interesting hand lettering. Typography is something I used to find incredibly boring, but lately I've been really into it! We did some experimenting with text. I was drinking lemon iced tea so I wrote "lemon."
Then I wrote, "Lime" in Spanish to go with it. For being an in class exercise, I'm rather pleased with them.
We put all of our text practice to good use for our final assignment, which was product labels. I have a secret love of hot sauce labels-- they usually involve quite frankly really cool art with skulls and fire and death, devils, scantily clad cartoon chili peppers... I believe hot sauce is the grocery store product with the most interesting variety of labels. I may start a collection of interesting hot sauce labels. I will look like a weirdo taking photos in the grocery store but I don't even care!
I designed a blues dancing inspired hot sauce logo using stills from youtube videos. Some dancer friends and I agreed that a blues dancing hot sauce would have to be flavored with aged peppers, molasses, and a splash of Kentucky bourbon.
My class liked the concept but gave me some ideas for editing the background colors and the text. I agreed with what they had to say and did some alternate text sketches, this time using smoke as an inspiration for the lettering.
... And then put it all together with a new and improved background! I am very pleased with the results! Now if anyone ever follows that recipe and invents this hot sauce, I have your logo!
