Watercolor Birds: New Year Card-inal

This is the last Watercolor Bird for 2016. May 2017 be filled with birds and birdsong for you all!

A Baggy Craft

So there were a few things I wanted to accomplish during this break. I did get to follow a very extensive Adobe Illustrator on-line course. It was so comprehensive, organized, and clear, it's amazing it's free. I was hoping to actually do my own original work in Ai as practice, but it's hard for me to get stuff like that done when my other half takes times off work and stays home. For the same reason, I also didn't get to do much of watercolor rodents. I know, excuses, excuses. But I can do things like this:

The bag on the right was given to me by my sister many years ago. I literally worn it completely out. The zipper in the back pocket broke, it has holes in it, and the strap is all frayed. So I made a new one, using materials left over from the Raju Hat I made in my first quarter. By the way, I actually designed the pattern on the fabric, through Spoonflower.com.
The bag is not as nice as the original, but I think it's fairly sturdy. We'll see if it'll last as long as the first one did. And of course, all the buttons are now proudly displayed on the new bag's flap.

Illustration Friday: Rock

Why not The Rock?

Second Quarter Recap

The second quarter came and went. It really was fast! It wasn't quite as hectic as the first one. I had time to sleep and eat - even go to the gym - this time. And I even had time to work on most of the #3yroldscribbles! but it did get busy toward the end. That's when you realize all the things you need to complete (which you couldn't work on before even if you wanted to) and they have to be perfect.
So in addition to my Smartphonography class, which I mentioned in a previous post, I had four other classes. Oh, and by the way, I bound my Look Book using a Japanese 4-hole binding method. SeaLemon's tutorial was very helpful:

For Typography two, besides the cupcake poster, we also had to represent Jorge Luis Borges' story The Library of Babel in two ways: on-the-grid (in the form of a book) and off-the-grid (whichever way we wanted. So here is my book:

 

 I decided to make it an accordion book, because it is a story about the universe as an endless but finite library.

For the off-the-grid project, I made a hexagonal Jack-in-the-box (hexagons are a big thing in the story):

I made the closure out of Das around paper fasteners

The whole story is printed on the bellows. It's hard to see, but there are some highlights on the sides of the inside of the box

To make this box I used GryphonArt's wonderful tutorials.

Next is Design Thinking, the class where we were required to come up with a problem related to commuting and to find a solution for it. This video, made by one of my teammates, Nakita, will explain everything:

Here's a photo of our products:

Kyle, Peggy, and Chewey

For Motion Media, we delivered two videos. One is a logo animation:

The other one will have to wait, because I need to figure out copyrights-related issues regarding the music I used for it, as well as I would like to work a bit more on the transitions for it.

Finally, for Ideas First, I will only show you my favorite poster (we had to make a bunch of them!). This one was supposed to advertise an imaginary youth camp under Trump administration (think Hitler Youth):

Well, now I'm on a break, and these are my goals for the next couple of weeks:

1. Upload my cousin's children's book onto Amazon
2. Improve my Adobe Illustrator skills
3. Learn some Adobe After Effects so I can make better animations
4. Finish up the fireplace at school (more about that later)
5. Watercolor rodents

Scribbles of a 3-Year Old

I know I've written about it before, but I've never actually posted any of my #3yroldscribbles. Not sure why. Maybe because the art is not entirely mine?
Anyway, I decided to post them all together (well, at least the ones I've completed, which are #65-92, except 70, which I only now realized that I missed!) in the form of a gif animation.

This is a very fun weekly challenge on Twitter. @3yroldscribble posts a scribble of her 3-year old son and illustrators and anyone who's so inclined, finish it up to create something. It is also very cool to see how different people see different things in the scribbles.

How To Draw and Paint an Angry Bird

As I mentioned before, I had to photograph 3 to 7 instructional photos as one of my assignments for a class called Smartphonography, where you learn how to take photos with your iPhone. Which, let me tell you, was quite a challenge, especially since I don't really own an iPhone, or any smartphone for that matter.

Anyway, here's  the final product:

And here are the steps:

1) Gather materials, including a reference photo

2) Draw shapes with a pencil

3) Use a pen to emphasize important areas

4) After testing your paint, start applying it in thin layers

5) Keep layering to add depth and color

6) Re-emphasize important areas with a pen

And I know this is not a photography blog, but here are some other photos I took for this class that I'm sort of proud of:

Illustration Friday: Spiral

It's #NationalCupcakeDay apparently. So what's more appropriate for Illustration Friday's prompt than a nice frosting on a chocolate cupcake?

And if you wish to make a single cupcake for today, why not try this one?

Speaking of cupcakes, here's a poster I made for my Typography 2 class, made out of type:

Watercolor Birds Revisited: Vermilion Flycatcher

Just in case you were wondering about the lack of posts in the past 2-3 months, it is not because I was on a desert island with no Wi-Fi. The end of the second quarter is upon us and we're all very busy preparing all of our deliverables for our classes. But I'm glad this quarter wasn't quite as intense as the last one, because I did get to do some non-school related illustration activities, mostly in the form of #3yroldscirbble mixed up together with #colour_collective. Perhaps during break I'll take the time to assemble the best of them into a video or something.

One of my deliverables is a series of smartphone photos explaining how to take on a particular task. Some chose to show how to cook a certain dish. I decided to show how to draw and paint a Vermilion Flycatcher. I won't show all the photos here, because I still need to edit them a little bit, but here is the final one:

I used pencil, pen, and watercolors, and then at the end went over the branch with some more pencil to give it a bit more depth.