Layout Design Portfolio

And thus concludes my 18th year of education! These are most of the pages from the Layout Design book that I made in Oliver Sins class. I had a lot of fun in that class, it was a great group of people, and I learned so much! I am no longer intimidated by designing settings and backgrounds, tombow ink markers or tracing paper! Thanks Oliver, and thanks everyone for a fantastic semester!

Layout Update

Im getting really happy with the designs for my palace. My Layout design teacher, Oliver Sin, advised me to make the architecture more exciting, and I think it works much better in this wonky way. I added a lot more flourish to it, too, looking at Art Nouveau designs and architecture from Prague! It definitely has the feel that I want this world to have. :}

I really liked my childrens room when I drew it originally, but I like it so much more now that I did it in a wonky style. Its so much smaller and cuter!

Im really happy with my cable car shop design as well, I think the different versions of wonky style are really fun, and I love using markers for value studies. This whole process was enlightening on so many different levels- like ink markers and tracing paper magic!

Castle Designing

A pretty integral part of my thesis project is Daimon Castle, the last remaining safe haven for the Fae. I've really been getting into brainstorming about the design of the castle, and its getting easier and easier to see it in my head and on paper. Above are a few quick value studies of a street scene, day and night. Bellow are more concepts, and prop ideas. I like the idea of keeping some of the silhouette shapes close to a grove of mushrooms, kind of symbolic through the story.

Whats a Fairy Kingdom look like anyway? Luckily I have some really amazing influences, like Final Fantasy 9, World of Warcraft, Castles of Ireland, Allan Lee, Tangled... so many amazing artists and references to look at, they have helped me understand structures and design so much. Developing architecture and settings has always been somewhat of a challenge for me, but I feel more confident with it every day! I hope to take everything I see and push it further into my own style and fantasy world. I know that when Im actually drawing out the castle in panels there wont be a set recipe for how to do it, but thinking up all the different elements and designs I hope strengthens my idea of the setting when I get to it. So on that note, back to dreaming up more ideas. Taa~

Location, Layout, and Sketch Crawling!

(Ok, so the little gauche painting above was made a week later, but it was at the same location, and I feel it is an extension of my sketch crawling experience! ^^ )

Thursday marked my first even on location drawing, especially using only markers. Our layout class took a field trip outside and drew the opposite side of the street. I really liked it! I love using markers and drawing from life like this wasnt as daunting as I always supposed.

Which gave me much more confidence this past Saturday when I attended my first Sketchcrawl! It was so much fun! Sketch crawl is a really amazing event that happens world wide! The San Francisco division met up in Dolores Park in the Mission here in and wandered around. I stayed in the park, and decided to keep practicing that marker technique! Im really glad I went, and I plan to keep going for sure! It was so great to meet all the other artists who come out to participate, too. :}

So I guess I should update about the Layout class. Here goes-

Im taking a layout design class this semester with Oliver Sin. Im hoping that it will help me develop my backgrounds and settings more clearly. Im learning a lot, even though I still struggle the most with this aspect. I feel like I can see it so clearly in my head but it doesnt quite translate yet to the page. Still working on it, Im sure I'll get it when the semester is over and it clicks haha.

This was the first assignment, I designed a little girls room based around dance and ballet.

Then we learned the valuable many uses of tracing paper!

Our second assignment was to design a store in a cable car, and I chose to do a Fancy Hat and Feather shop! It was an interesting experience using brush pens, creating it all on different layers of tracing paper, and using the photo copier to enlarge and reduce. Its like real life photoshop!

Then we took our cable car and turned it into a cartoony style, or "wonky" as they say. At first you would think its just drawing poorly, but its actually carefully planned chaos! I really enjoyed the design aspect of wonky.

I went through a bunch of thumbnails designing a saloon. I tried to combine a few things from home into one. A gambling hall because well lets face it, its a saloon, and thats pretty much where I grew up! And I wanted to add a dance hall because I absolutely love Stoneys and line dancing! I was getting pretty frustrated with the results, so I just focused on making it more of a bordello, like Moulin Rouge-ish for the warped perspective version.

Heres the work in progress for half of my warped saloon. Im going through cleaning up the lines in pencil, and then I'll scan it and rework a few things in photoshop for the final. I think my favorite part right now are the mermaids. I used the entrance mermaids from the Mirage in Las Vegas as my muses. Even growing up it was just common knowledge that cupping certain bits of their anatomy on the way in was good luck in all of your adventures! ^_~

Visual Development

I took a class called Visual Elements of the Story with the fantastic Nicolas Villarreal, it was all pre production vis dev stuff, and I absolutely loved it!! I had so much fun learning the process of it all, things that felt very inherent in my own process, but were never fully developed! I learned so much, it was a great class. I chose the Princess Bride as my theme, and these are the finished character designs, layouts and paintings!

Academia Updates

Well, it certainly has been long enough since I've updated this blog. Be prepared for a massive image dump, starting where we left off with last years class work. Don't worry, I'll spare you the gory details and really bad drawings.

Fall 2009, First semester having studio classes in San Francisco, second semester overall. I had two online classes the semester before, Spring 2009, but they were general studies.

Drawing from Imagination goodies. Instructor John Heebink.


Some charcoal goodies from Head Drawing (Jung Han Kim) and Chiaroscuro (Cathy Locke).


More Chiaroscuro goods, instructor Cathy Locke.

Heres work from my third semester, Spring 2010. I had two studio classes, and a general study, Genres in Science Fiction and Fantasy, with Tom Marcoux.

Never thought I would be painting in oils, but I did in Portrait Painting with Zhao Ming Wu.



I really enjoyed working with chalk in Sustained Figurative Concepts (yay mermaids!). Instructor Bill Maughan.

Summer semester, 2010. So fast and so intense, but I made it through.

Character Design with Michael Buffington. Lots and lots of drawing, mostly 2 or 3 minutes per pose.




More oil painting in Situation and Environment with Tomutsu Takishima.

This brings us up to speed with the Fall 2010 semester. I'll post work from this semester separately, as well as my favorites from the first year of grad school, my "Gallery" as I would like to call it. ^_^