In order:
I'm going to post about my "Off-Hours" illustration series,
A new animation, "Far from the Reef",
A short comic strip series, "Leaf and Wall",
And before I begin talking about Off Hours, I just want to announce that I made a website. It went up like two months ago, but I hadn't really told anyone about it until now. I didn't have enough content to justify its existence except for it making me feel good about myself. But with my new series going up, I feel like it's enough to put it out there and advertise it a little just so people know it's there.
Anyway, here it is: http://sanbles.com/
It's pretty bare bones, but that's the way I like things. Also, it was one of the free templates Squarespace had. I'm bad with html and css, so templates were my go-to. Anyway, that's it for telling you people what's up. Thanks for reading the most boring part!
Over.
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Cue music...
It started with this drawing:
This image came to my mind one day and I couldn't put it away. It was just too hilarious to not try drawing. So I pulled out Photoshop and got to work on it.
In about three to four hours, I got it done. This made me realize I was a pretty darn good artist. The drawing is not great, granted, but for the crappy artist I think I am, it was okay. So this just started off my series. I had not planned to go any further with more illustrations, but I couldn't stop after seeing what I could do. All of these awesome images were coming to my mind and I had to draw them.
I came up with a simple system to how I would go about creating these pieces. I would come up with a random character, a random setting, and a random prop. If they didn't go well together in my head, I'd just change one of the things and repeat until I thought I had something that would look good.
The character, setting, and prop wasn't completely random. I just thought of things that I hadn't recently seen. Sometimes this was brides and hell or astronauts and bouncy castles. But the point was, I was just trying to be as creative and different as possible with the situations, using a style that i felt comfortable with.
I wasn't purposefully trying to come up with a series at first. This was just something I had fun doing and could learn with. With every new illustration, I tried changing the colors, the composition, and even the feeling sometimes. It made me feel more comfortable coming up with random ideas and turning them into something meaningful. So in a way, my storytelling skills were improving just because of this random process of putting things together in my head and figuring out how they related to each other.
Also, the need to build my portfolio with some serious illustrations was a pretty big motivating factor. Although I want to be a story artist, so I don't know how this would've helped me land jobs in that field... Still pretty fun though.
In the end, I decided to stop because it was feeling too much like a job. A system was set to keep creating new things, so I think I could've kept on going if I wanted to (probably. My idea pool was also drying up). But you can tell that I was getting tired of it by some of the last few.
This was all done on Photoshop, from start to finish. As I finished them, I posted them to my Instagram (@Sanbles). You can see the rest there or on my website. But yeah, I was glad to have done this because I was able to use everything I learned from art school in my personal work. I'm proud of this. I still think I suck though. Constant improvement equals constant self-doubt I guess.
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Thanks again for reading (or going through) all of this. It sure means something to me. I think I rushed through this post, so if anyone has any questions feel free to ask away in the comments. I'll try to post my animation by this weekend. If not, maybe I'll never post it. You shouldn't trust any promises I make.
Over and out.
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