Another nudge to animate

This is a collage of my cat, Tyco. He's cool, and he likes to drive his truck around.

Thanks to a great friend's suggestion, this is now his theme song:

 

I love it. Love it, I say! This might be my final push to start learning animation. Stay tuned....

Illustrating the Ogre of Rashomon

For an upcoming critique with Mark Mitchell and Jeff Crosby, I created a few illustrations for the Japanese folktale, The Ogre of Rashomon. I wanted a very graphic, in-your-face look for this. A couple of my ideas...

Transferring my collage onto wood

The collage I'd made for this month's MATS Bootcamp really lent itself to a burnt wood look, so I bought a few rounds of wood and a wood-burning tool at my local art store.

Though I really loved sketching with the wood burner, I just couldn't get an even burn for large flat areas. So I found this great Photoshop tutorial, made some additional tweaks, and submitted this final piece:

Creating my own scene for MATS Bootcamp

In Lilla Rogers' MATS Bootcamp course, our main assignment this month is to paint a picturesque scene on a round wooden surface.

I started my mini assignment by sketching scenic plates that Lilla had provided (you can see one of them here). I then moved on to create my own scene, using collage. But I decided to eliminate the texture and work toward more of a cinematic, dark effect.

This was my final layout. Now to transfer it on wood....

She's not afraid of the wolf

In fact, she kind of likes him. Work-in-progress...

Your feedback needed — Adding an audience to my guitar player

I'm finishing up my portfolio for the #NYSCBWI Conference this weekend, and I've been working on adding an audience to my guitar player collage. I'm not sure which girl to go with, and I'd love some feedback? Comments are welcome, or you can email me at kendrasred (at) gmail.com. Thank you!

More sketching for MATS Bootcamp

On Monday, we began our second assignment for Lilla Rogers online class, MATS Bootcamp. As I've mentioned in earlier posts, Lilla always starts with a "mini." The minis help us warm up, draw, paint and enjoy ourselves before we're given our actual assignment.

This month's mini is the scenic plate. She showed us several cool plates from her own collection, all with different kinds of scenes painted on them. Yesterday, I chose a plate with a pastoral landscape to sketch from, as well as one with a charming lord and lady courtship setting.

(I had some difficulty keeping my paper and pencil away from my new, extremely-playful-and-cuddly kitty, as you can see in the picture below.)