Make Art That Sells March Challenge!

For the past couple weeks I have been working on the March assignment for MATS. My piece is submitted to the class gallery and as promised, I'm sharing what I've been working on these past two weeks. Our challenge was to do illustrations of jello/jello molds (or an interpretation of that) and create a bolt fabric piece with them.
In the beginning of the assignment I was uncertain of what direction to go in. I enjoyed looking at all the vintage jello ads--and vintage dishware but then I looked at some animation books which led me to drawing jello characters! I feel that the characters came out awesome but that more attention could have been put into the repeat and possibly put on a product in the final presentation. I had a lot of fun drawing and painting the characters but will revisit the pattern in April--I'm still pretty new to doing repeating patterns. :-)
I think the characters look great as a standalone illustration and they look very cute side by side. Our next assignment starts in May. Can't wait to see what it will be!

MATS-More Sketches!

We got our main assignment for March this week from MATS. We are to design a piece of bolt fabric! I did not know what bolt fabric was until I looked it up. For those who are not familiar, it is bulk fabric you buy from craft/fabric stores and it is used for a wide array of projects. Bolt fabric comes in many different designs, lots of really fun designs especially. We were given a website to check out Purl Soho, a yarn and fabric shop located in SoHo, New York City (which I will be visiting soon). :-)

Luckily, while working on this project, I am also reading a great book from Pattern People called Pattern Design & Beyond, which gives all sorts of info on the textile industry, including terminology used in the industry, print/pattern categories, popular types of prints and standards, and also official names of repeat prints you commonly see on clothing, etc. Repeat After Me is another great book they offer.

Anyway, here are some more sketches I did to prepare for our main assignment. I spend a lot of time concepting (still concepting in fact). I am getting started on the color portion at the end of this week
and will be posting the art for that soon.

My favorite page of sketches

We are encouraged to try hand drawn type. It can help your piece go from good to great!

Make Art That Sells Assignment Bootcamp~March Mini!

This week we got the March mini assignment from MATS. The theme....Jello! We were given a few reference photos to get a feel for the color, texture and lighting/transparency of jello.

I got started by drawing a few jello shapes but then got inspired from animation concept art books, especially the movement/gesture shown in character concept art.

Since jello is very wiggly and wobbly I went on to creating 'dancing' jello characters. I definitely want to incorporate the fruit somehow, possibly as a background element. 

I am looking forward to finding out what the main assignment is on Monday to see how I can change/adapt/improve these sketches to the final.

Post for MATS March main assignment coming soon!