Wrestling With The Big Dumb Ox - Josh

I made this t-shirt design for a professor I know and his class. They are celebrating the fact that they read through and discussed St. Thomas Aquinas' entire Summa Theologica! It alone is 3,011 pages in English translation. The professor is Dr. Greg Peters, who teaches in the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University.

Class Theme Park Project

The Spring Semester is over and I just turned in my last project for my Illustration class, taught by James Dowdalls. For this project we needed to create a perspective drawing of our own original theme park. I came up with a few ideas and made the following thumbnails.From there I narrowed my ideas to these two concepts.The class and teacher said that although my American Tall Tale theme park was the best concept, the Folklore/Mythology theme park was the better illustration, so I chose to go with the latter.I took the thumbnail and created two color concepts.The class wanted me to take the second color comp. into my final. Around this time Katie gave birth to our beautiful daughter so I we a little busy and distracted from getting my final piece done in time for the due date. Unfortunately I had to turn in my piece with what I had made so far.The class really liked what I made but I’m not satisfied with it. If I get a chance in the near future, I would like to redo it with a new color palate that will unify the elements better. I would also like to redraw the overall image with a better design and composition.

Class Poster Project

For this project we needed to make a poster for a stage production and the medium was up to us. I chose to create my final piece using Photoshop. Our teacher told us not to worry about text, such as the title, or other poster graphics.
The two plays I chose were The Nutcracker ballet and a new play that is still being created titled The Mercy. The Mercy is a play that I helped to create, in that I have been providing feedback, direction, ideas, and designs. The Mercy is a play about Mitsuo Fuchida, who led the attack on Pearl Harbor (he said "TORA TORA TORA!") and a man named Jacob Deshazer who was in the Dolittle Raids (the USA's first strike against Japan after Pearl Harbor). Jacob's plane was shot down and he was placed in a Japanese prison camp till the end of the war. Fuchida, although a war hero, became a reject of society following the war. Both of these men went through great suffering and both experienced great mercy in different forms. They became a means to help the healing after WWII between Japan and America. Aside from the historical story, the play is ultimately about God's mercy and forgiveness of us and how He empowers us to forgive and show mercy to others.
The first thing we were instructed to do was create a collection of thumbnails.The class and the teacher then chose two (2) of the thumbnails to explore and refine (the thumbnails circled in red).The Nutcracker thumbnail shows the figure of Clara (the main character) standing in the middle. The figure of the Nutcracker is in the center of Clara's figure. The eye and eye patch is of Judge/Godfather Drosselmeier, who is a mysterious character that sort of haunts Clara.In the last thumbnail I included more detail of the characters; however, I chose to go back to the original thumbnail idea and make it more graphic using silhouettes.
The Mercy thumbnail comes from an element in the play. The following text is an excerpt from the script and it takes place just after Matsuo Fuchida leads the attack on Pearl Harbor, which is done as an abstract dream: "samurai surround Fuchida and he extends his hands, in fists. Two samurai clap them within a white, rectangular wooden stock, though whether it is shackles or honor is ambiguous. Fuchida's head drops, and he opens his hands. They are in red gloves, and his splayed fingers make the Rising Sun over the white background (Japanese war flag)." I based my design of this poster from this part in the play, although I thought it would look better with fresh red paint on the hands.

I explored some color variations for the Mercy and the Nutcracker posters. I chose to go with the Mercy poster as my final, but I hope to someday develop the Nutcracker poster.

This is how the final Mercy poster turned out. I think if I had to do it again I would make the red paint thinner, without so many ripples and drips. It kinda looks like ketchup!
After completing the original design, Katie and I discussed how we could include some Japanese characters into a new design. I was able to find the translation of the word "mercy" into Japanese characters and painted a rough version of how it could look.

I think it almost resembles a crucifix. I personally like this design better but I feel it needs more work.
If I can make the "actual" poster someday, I would rather take a photograph of someone's hands being covered in red paint instead of creating an illustration. I would then adjust that photograph accordingly in Photoshop to resemble this design.

My Class Project - Josh

I’ve been taking a Commercial Illustration course in the evenings since the beginning of February. It’s been really helpful to have something like a class to push me and make me work on my drawing skills. The focus of the class is more on the process of illustration then on the final pieces, so we take a lot of time focusing on the development process. In commercial illustration, the client and/or art director want the artist they hire to keep them well informed on the development of the piece. They don’t like surprises, so the artist will send thumbnails, value comprehensives, color roughs and other areas of refinement so the client can give feedback along with their approval or disapproval every step of the way. I’ll show you some examples of these steps from my first class project.
The assignment was a black and white Anthropomorphic Animal illustration done in the style of a children’s book drawing. Anthropomorphic Animal basically means an animal imitating humans appearance and/or behavior (example: Disney’s Robin Hood). Each student drew three words out of three hats. These words were of an animal, what the animal is and an adjective. From these words we had to create our illustrations. I pulled the words Tattooed, Baboon and Queen.
We started by drawing thumbnails of ideas, and these are what I came up with:
From the feedback and criticism of the class and teacher, I choose a combination of the last two as my final.
From there we had to come up with different value comprehensives (AKA lighting and shadow).

After more feedback I choose the last value drawing for my final piece. The final was drawn using black colored pencil on coquille board. This is the first time I’ve drawn on a coquille board, and I rather liked the texture. The piece did not turn out as good as I hoped, but I was really rushed to finish it after being sick for over two weeks. I basically had two days to draw it in time for the due date.

Aside from taking this course for practice reasons, I’m also using it as material for a mentorship with an animator from Disney. I don’t want to share his name without permission, but I can let you know that he directed most of the episodes of one my favorite cartoon series, Animaniacs! I’ve been running all of my work by him for more valuable feedback and criticism.All in all this has been a good experience and I really hope I can grow from it