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.

If you're interested in commissioning me, click here to be taken to my Contact page to send me an email or message me from my social media links above, I'd be happy to answer any questions :)

My Experience with Make Art That Sells

Hello again!!

For the Americans that read this, today is Independence Day, so Happy 4th of July to you!! For the Canadians, Canada Day just passed and I hope you had a good one! Yay Canada!!

As promised I'd like to tell you about my experience last November when I enrolled in the (last) live course for MATS A. First let me tell you a little about Make Art That Sells. No, I am not an affiliate and I do not get any reimbursement for my opinions, so you can relax knowing that what is written here is completely my own thoughts.

So, MATS is an online set of courses that are designed to help those that aspire to make money from their art through product licensing. Lilla Rogers (an artist in her own right and art agent) designs and runs each course and in the live programs offers weekly reviews of select student works. Each course runs about 4-5 weeks, with a new project each week so they are pretty intense! Lilla starts you out with a mini exercise to help get your juices flowing and then you have about 4 days to finish the assignment if you want your piece in the pool to be selected for her live review. For the review, she generally selects pieces that will best help her offer tips/advice for the whole group. There are also self-paced courses for those that would prefer to take their time - there's no live review in the self-paced courses.

As of this post there are 5 courses available on the MATS site, including her annual Global Talent Search where she selects one artist for her agency to represent. MATS A is a portfolio building course and covers 5 topics: bolt fabric, home decor, children's books, wall art, and gift. If you'd like to visit the site, click here. The cost for the courses is fairly steep at £259 or $344 US, but you get a LOT of information including insider tips on how to break into the industry and interviews with leading experts.

I came upon this course through one of my Facebook groups for Illustrators and thought it sounded like exactly the push I needed to grow my skills and understanding for what it takes to be a professional Illustrator. I have to say that I was not disappointed. The energy level is very high for 5 weeks straight, and if you work slowly there is no break for you to catch your breath. By the time the course was done I was exhausted! Here's what I created for each assignment:

Bolt Fabric:

My design for Bolt Fabric. The topic was Vintage Pyrex and pasta.

The bolt fabric assignment was my first ever exposure to the creative world of textile design. I have to admit that even with Lilla's instruction I was completely clueless!! We were to design a fabric with vintage pyrex casserole dishes and pasta (using a dark background if possible), as well as a minimum of 2 co-ordinates. For fun I decided to use gouache for this piece. I drew and painted each element then scanned them into my software and cut out to arrange the final design in Photoshop.

Home Decor:

My design for Home Decor. The topic was Staffordshire Pottery on a plate/dish.

This second assignment was not my favourite. We were to create a design in the style of Staffordshire pottery. I don't know if you've seen any of the Staffordshire figures, but they are not the most appealing characters, even if they do have interesting political stories behind them (google it for interest if you've never heard of it before, it's worth the read). This time I did stick to watercolour, and again I mostly worked on each element traditionally, then scanned, cut out and arranged the design in Photoshop which I then put on a plate mockup with a mask and background added.

Children's Books:

My design for Children's Books. The topic was a cover for the story The White Cat.

The Children's Book assignment was the one I was looking forward to the most. The story is about a princess that is turned into a beautiful white cat. She's visited by a young prince looking to prove to his father that he can be king. The cat helps him to solve each of the King's ridiculous quests through fantastic and magical gifts (the nuts are important for each gift). You can find the story easily on Google to read, it's a very old tale. Again, I worked in watercolour (you can see some of the paper texture), though for the cat's veil I did introduce some coloured pencil for a lacy effect. Then I scanned and arranged in Photoshop.

Wall Art:

My design for Wall Art. The topic was an abstract flower using the colours green and yellow with some lettering.

My least favourite topic was Wall Art. I have never done an abstract painting before, and we were to incorporate geometric shapes and stick to the colour palette. I actually had to design this out before I even tried painting it. I cut out squares and rectangles out of card stock, overly simplified the flowers, and added lots of texture with brush strokes and bubble wrap. The entire piece is 24x24 inches on canvas using acrylic paint. Talk about stepping out of my comfort zone! I have never done anything like it before. I actually really like how it turned out and I love the colours and textures :)

Gift:

My design for Gift. The topic was to create a zippered pouch with hyper lush art, using your own collections.

I had a hard time with this assignment because I don't actually have many collections, so I reached out to the internet for inspiration. I was mostly thinking about vintage because Lilla suggests it in almost everything she talks about, so I looked for a vintage colour palette and then searched for images of antique keys and vintage buttons. I came back to gouache for this one, but again drew and painted each element which was then scanned and arranged in Photoshop. The final image was masked over a mockup of a zippered pouch and the background elements were created by me as well.

There were quite a few times during this course that I felt intimidated, worthless, and talentless, but Lilla is very encouraging and so is the Facebook group of live people taking the course with you that you can get suggestions from for each piece. In my group there were a lot of people with way more experience than me, both as illustrators and working with software, many of whom had been trying to break into the market for awhile and it showed. 

I got a lot out of this course. When it was over my brain felt like it had been squeezed like a sponge and when it finally settled down I knew I would never think the same way again. I learned so much about so many things that I can't even describe it. I think you can see a definite progression of improvement in my work as the weeks went by as well. 

I think that I'm going to stop here because this post is getting very long. There's so much more that I could say so if you have any questions please feel free to drop me a line or two and I'd be happy to answer them :)

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!

Line work practice...

Hello again!

I hope that your week was wonderful and relaxing, or maybe you were particularly productive, or perhaps you switched it up and just kicked back for once. My week wasn't particularly productive. The weather here was unseasonably warm and it made working more challenging than usual. However, I do have a few things to share with you :)

I've always been envious of artists that can draw simplistically. I don't know why it doesn't come more easily for me but it doesn't, so I jumped at the chance to learn from Lisa Congdon through CreativeBug.com. She's an amazing textile designer and artist and she does fabulous line art. She also has several books if you're interested in looking her up on Amazon or your local library. I first heard of her in my MATS A class. Anyway, this week I spent a lot of time learning and practicing and here are my results:

I "borrowed" a blue sheet of construction paper from my girls
craft bin for this one so I could practice with my white gel pen.

I'm still very nervous doing line art and I'm not altogether sure how to use it effectively, but I see a lot of designers and artists use it as part of a larger picture or with hand lettering. I'm going to try to practice with it more because it is very relaxing and very beautiful.

I did also find some time to work in a bit of brush calligraphy as well. I do really enjoy practicing these. I think I might try to incorporate some line drawing with these as well, just as soon as I figure out how :)

Thought I'd try combining what I learned from
Lisa Congdon with some brush calligraphy and colour :)

That's all from me for this week. I hope your week turns out exactly as you hope it will. Until next time,

Mandy

June is starting off very well!

Hello! If you've made it to this blog from my previous blog Art by Amanda Wiklund, welcome! If you're new to my work and have no idea what's going on or what to expect, welcome! I'm happy you could make and I hope you will enjoy reading about my work and my journey as an Illustrator :)

It's been quite awhile since I wrote anything and I have had a very busy 18 months. In September of 2014 I started a certificate in Graphic Design which I have only just finished this past December. I also enrolled in MATS A (Make Art That Sells) with Lilla Rogers, which completely changed how I work and how I think about my art. I was so inspired by MATS A that I signed up for MATS B as well.

I have also discovered some amazing Illustrators like Holly Exley from the UK and Frannerd. Unbeknownst to either of them, they have been teaching me a lot about what it is to be an Illustrator and how to go about doing it!

I have not been keeping idle amongst all this learning either. I have been working on my style and trying to loosen it up a little. I'm also learning how to do brush calligraphy. Dawn Nicole has an awesome site that shows most of what you need to know and she has a monthly lettering/doodle challenge on her Facebook page that I've been enjoying.

This past week I've been making wreaths :) Oh these were so much fun to do!! I've been wanting to start painting loose flowers and more doodle-y shapes for quite awhile now and this little project helped me to get started with it. Here's the result:

I pinned the tutorials I learned these from, so if you're interested in seeing them just let me know and I will update the post to include them.

And the biggest news yet is that my art was featured in the 11th issue of an online art magazine called MAEZA!! I am so excited about it. Click here to read it for yourself (note that you will need flash to view it and it doesn't view well on a mobile)!

Two illustrations were included from my work amongst so many other very talented artists! I am very proud and pleased to have been a part of it. I hope I will be able to do so again :)

I think that's all my big news for now. I am also working on a webpage portfolio of some more of my work with a leaning towards illustration. You can check it out here.

I know this was a long post but I don't expect future posts to be so wordy. Please be sure to check out the links, maybe visit my Facebook page, or even leave a comment below. 

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

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