Warm Up Sketch: Watercolor on Watercolor

A quick little watercolor study of a tube of watercolor paint to start my day in the studio.

Illustration Academy: Project #1 (Part 2)

This is the second image I created at the Illustration Academy for the first project (for more details scroll down ever-so-slightly and check out yesterday's post). I probably created 50 different thumbnails for this because I wanted to ditch linear perspective and yet still give the viewer the sense they were above the guy on the stairs. Alas, it was a no go. Turns out you still gotta' use a couple vanishing points sometimes (but god bless Brunelleschi for figuring it all out)

Illustration Academy: Project #1

Some of you might have noticed in my last post that I mentioned I was attending the The Illustration Academy in Kansas City over the month of June. Well my time there has officially ended -- and a great time was had by all! I wanted to post some of the projects that I made while there and this is the first.

The assignment was to capture the spirit of the location BUT using no line work and no rendering. Only interesting shapes, values and hues. (Oh, and get a figure in there to help tell a story) I added an additional wrinkle of trying to communicate depth of space  without using linear perspective;  instead relying primarily on overlapping shapes and the human mind's natural inclination to "understand" certain shapes in certain ways.

Anyway, all this is starting to sound very art-talky but it sure made the project fun!
In this case I didn't stray far from the studio. The building that the Academy is held in is an old brick warehouse and is a wonderfully exhausting five flights up some creaky wooden stairs.