Illustration Academy Pt. 1

I'm behind on tying up a lot of loose ends and I do apologize. I need to get books to a lot of people that requested them, I need to get the web site up and finished and put the finished story there, I need to do the next edition of the book with better alignment and hopefully utterly void of typos and bad grammar, and I need to bring people up to date via the blog. For right now the best I can do is to touch on the latter.


I'm about to finish my third week of the The Illustration Academy here at Ringling, and it has already been an intense and profound experience. You can see some photos of our class over at George Pratt's fantastic art blog. I'll try to post the finished assignments up as I do them from here on out, but here are the first two for now.

The first assignment is a "slice of life" picture focused on Sarasota assigned by the illustration legend Mark English. The constraints are that we are only allowed to use two colors per shape, it must be a square, it should be somewhat positive and there is no rendering what so ever allowed. The idea is that basic design, value and color become the top priorities over any kind of polish and fluff.

For my piece I decided to focus on two guys that I had seen many times driving through an area of Sarasota known as "New Town" that sit and sell watermelons out of the back of a truck on the weekends. I had actually bought a watermelon from them once before and had plenty of inspiration to draw from. For the final piece I opted to shoot reference of a couple friends of mine (dressing one up in overalls and stuffing a pillow down the front) and to imitate the situation I had devised in my little thumbnail sketch from memory.
The final was acrylic on illustration board, and the painting technique I used was a little homage to the great illustrator J.C. Leyendecker


The second assignment, given to us by one of my early heroes Jon Foster, was to create an illustration portrait based on a literary character of our choice, with a strong focus on a particular emotion, rather than any high conceptual ideas.

For mine I chose to portray the character Jurgis Rudkus from the book "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair. I wanted to make it feel extremely gritty and oppressive for my emotional focus. The final was acrylic and oil paint on illustration board.







More to come soon.