Week of September 19, 2016 & My Experience with MyMATSPrep (Children's Book Illustration)

Hi again! I can't believe September is almost over already! Summer is done (boo!) and Fall has arrived (yay!). There's a lot about Fall that I enjoy, particularly cuddling up under a warm blanket with a good book and a hot tea :)

Work this past week was a little side-tracked. Lilla Rogers from MakeArtThatSells.com has been promoting her newest class for Children's Book Illustration and this week was offering 5 days of free Matsprep assignments. I think you know me well enough by now to realize that I couldn't possibly turn this down, so I signed up, took a deep breath, tried to let everything go, and let myself go to do my best. I did manage to find some time to work on improving my negative painting skills with a tulip exercise, plus, I followed a design tutorial from Designcuts.com and also created a kids party invitation in Illustrator!

MyMATSPrep:

These assignments are always a challenge and I couldn't wait to dig in! Check it out :)

Day 1: Lilla showed us an old photograph of a young girl she named Minette and asked us to make a character around her. The first page is a study of a style that I would like to adopt, the second is my Minette and who I think she is :)

Day 2: We were asked to look out of our bedroom window and draw what we saw. My bedroom faces the backyard. I think I managed to capture it pretty well :)

Day 3: Because it's a children's book we were asked to redraw our window image but this time flip what we saw, make small things big/big things small, take into account a child's imagination and sense of play.

Day 4: Time to introduce perspective and a sense of distance to the scene.

Day 5: Take our final scene and include little Minette in whatever manner you would expect her to be in it.

I really had a blast making this final image! It was so much fun to put together something that I had thought about for a long time. Because I have two girls, I've often imagined what the yard could look like to a young mind! Plus, I had the chance to draw in a way I've always wanted to, and research and develop a character!


Negative Painting:

I have a passion for negative painting. I love looking at what artist's have created and the complexity of the image is completely different than when you strictly paint in the positive! I've been wanting to practice this style for quite some time now. Several months ago I snagged myself a copy of Roland Roycraft's book "Fill Your Watercolors with Light and Color". I adored looking through the book and was so pleased that it had exercises I could follow, one of which was this beautiful tulips painting:

My negative tulips painting following Roland Roycraft

Children's Party Invitation:

I adore lettering and typography, almost as much as painting, and I never seem to get enough chances to play with them. So when I saw that Designcuts had a tutorial on creating a cute little children's party invitation (with a few freebie graphics!), I knew I had to take the time to try it out! It also gave me the opportunity to flex my Adobe Illustrator muscles. I found a nice card mockup to customize and display it in too :)

My version of Designcuts Children's Party Invitation

So that was my week. It was pretty exhilarating actually! Almost everything I did seemed to be on point, even though none of it was following my intention for the week. I haven't completely figured this week out yet. October is a very busy month at the Wiklund house what with Thanksgiving, Hallowe'en, and a birthday, but I'm sure that's true at your house as well. 

Stay warm, stay safe, hug your family and I hope to talk to you again next week!

Until next time,

Mandy

If you'd like to see more of my work or keep up with me day-to-day you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook. If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave me a message.

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Third week of June

Hello! Welcome to another weekly summary of my work. This week is more graphic design and a little less illustration, but they are all my hard work so I hope you enjoy seeing what I've been up to.

Logo re-design

I had been asked by a small business that makes awesome and quirky kids apparel to help with her logo re-design for her upcoming rebranding event. In the end we came up with multiple images and formats for her to use all over her social media and final products for her brand. Here are a few examples of the finished design.

This is the little boy sheep with her business name. I love the missing tooth!

Here you can see the little girl with the little boy sheep. Aren't they adorable?!

I drew each character in pencil, then scanned them into Illustrator and Photoshop to finish them off. The business name is entirely hand-lettered, scanned and polished in Illustrator as well. You can see some of her products here.


DesignCuts Tutorials

Last week I told you that I had been working on some of the free tutorials that you can find on DesignCuts.com and that I would show you the results this week. Well, here they are. I can't take any credit for the final design or layout of these two pieces as I was following the tutorials, but there are some changes like the fonts and some of the word choices are mine.

A beach festival poster. This was a lot of fun because
you had to adjust the white frame to fit within the paint strokes. This was
done in Photoshop.

Oh this was so much fun. There were so many elements that had to be added,
adjusted, layered on, masks were used, etc. A true stretching of my abilities in Illustrator :)

Teacher Gifts

Like for many children, this is the last week of school for my girls and I thought it might be nice to do up one of the lovely monogramed wreaths I've been doing for each teacher. That's when I doubled my workload because each girl has two teachers for which I am both grateful for (who doesn't think classrooms need more teachers?) and non-plussed about because it meant two more wreaths than I had intended. But I accepted the challenge non-the-less :)

I did run into a few problems like a head cold the likes of which I haven't seen in quite some time that completely took me out of commission for a few days, and my lovely 0.25 mm micron pen tip broke halfway through the project. When I had recovered from my cold I thought I'd see how bad the broken tip would work but it was just awful. I really didn't like the result so I went out and bought myself a new one (yay art supply shopping!!).

These are the finished wreaths. I am going to frame them in an inexpensive frame as well.

Someone mentioned that it would be a good idea to include a business card with these so now I have an excuse to do up my own business cards as well! I also want to write up a little blurb about what these are and what makes them special, as well as the thank you card for all the work they've done over the year. I know my family really appreciates the effort they put in :)

That about covers this week. Next week I'd like to show off some of what I did in November when I took MATS A as that course really changed everything I do and I'd love to talk about it to someone, so why not you?

Until next time :)

Mandy

If you're interested in commissioning me click the Contact Me button up at the top to send an email, I'd be happy to answer any questions!