The Great Book Seminar Saga Part The Last: Storytime with Viktor

The Great Book Seminar Saga

Part The Last

... in which Viktor has some wine, and we conclude...

Well kids, it's that time. Time to wrap up the Book Seminar saga. It has been quite some time since I last posted on the seminar, in part due to finals madness and likewise because I didn't want to ruin the surprise of the final product. But it's done. I know... crazy. I can scarcely believe it myself... I'm still shaking my head in disbelief. Disbelief that my first semester of art school is nearly over... disbelief that we had our last class with Viktor (sniff)... and disbelief that I actually finished the project. It was looking doubtful there for a while.

But let me share!

The project actually came together last week. I ended up rendering some images that Viktor wasn't initially crazy about, but which came out pretty well. I also ended up (with some advice from our resident type-design guru... thanks Erin!) designing the book layout and not just printing out the spreads but binding them (thank you interwebs).

And without further ado, the book!

During the whole process, my studio wall exploded... there are literally five or six layers of sketches and scrap paper and test paintings...

Binding... I had never actually bound a book by myself before, so I googled some help from the trusty interwebs.

Book!

Endpapers:

First spread:

Interior spreads with new art:

My favorite spread (old art):

And second favorite spread:

The End!

And finally I brought it to class. For our last class with Viktor, a bunch of us thought it would be spiffy to bring a few bottles of wine. When we got to class, we all hung our final work up on the wall, and class turned into a bit of a wine and art, almost art-opening sort of affair. Twas lovely. And after popping the bottles, shmoozing, and walking around and looking at all of the amazing art everyone had hung, we settled down for our final critique.

Storytime with Viktor:

Viktor was quite complimentary.

"... excellent..."

Which brings us to the saga's conclusion. So ends the book seminar, so ends class with Viktor, and so ends (nearly) the semester. But don't think that the crazy art whatnot end here. Oh no. The seminar project was only practice for our big second semester book project (essentially a mini- thesis). I daresay we're in for a whole new adventure... so stay tuned for further artness, a few more posts about winding up the semester, and all new art next term!

The Great Book Seminar Saga Part VI: What Now?

The Great Book Seminar Saga

Part VI: What Now?

...in which Lisa grosses everyone out before Thanksgiving...

Happy nearly Thanksgiving everyone! Best wishes for gatherings of family and friends and pumpkin pie!

Week eleven brought with it a couple of new paintings, a whole bunch of new sketches, and a wicked looking crawfish, and yet, no concrete work for week thirteen. (Wait, Lisa, didn't you skip week twelve? No, my mathematically-minded readers. Alas, alack, no Thursday Viktor class this week due to the tofurkey holiday.)

But no work? How can that be? you ask. How can you bring in four new sketches and not have any work to do for two weeks?

I shall explain, but first, the new finished work:

Final render of the porch scene. Double page spread.

Text-less double spread. The riverbank.

I have a little bit of tweaking to do on the riverbank scene. I may darken things up a bit. But for now, I'm happy with how it's working.

And now on to the sketches... I brought four new sketches to class:

The comments on the sketches were on target. The first is a bit too out-West-home-on-the-range for Bulgaria. The second, maybe too quiet. The scale in the third makes the crawfish look the same size as the boy... (Yegads! Crawfishzilla!) And the fourth? Not Viktor's cup of tea. Viktor suggested I look back in the story for my next sketches.

"How about the dugout scene?"

"You mean the one with the revolutionaries and the dead goat?"

Perfect picture book material, no?

Don't get me wrong... from my posts, you may get the impression that I don't like Viktor. Not true. I have been frustrated in this class, but the frustration is mostly self-directed. It has been a long haul figuring out new ways of working and trying to fit the project to my style and aesthetic. That being said, my work has evolved considerably since September, and Viktor has been a great help. He has an excellent eye, and his critiques are almost always fairly dead-on. However, there are moments when Viktor's aesthetic and my own don't necessarily overlap so well.

As to the sketches, I had hoped that I would have a few approved sketches to paint from during these two weeks, but instead, I had to take them back to the drawing board... Admittedly, I was a little frustrated leaving class last Thursday, so I put all of this class work aside. Sometimes it is just best to walk away... because when I finally returned to the sketches, I may have come up with a couple of new compositions that work even better than these originals!

But I shall leave you in suspense... you'll have to be patient. New sketches (and perhaps even a few finishes) next week!

I will, however, leave you with two presents.

The first... Prsenting Viktor (center), in yet another black t-shirt:


And:

Ewwww...

And thus ends Part VI and both week 11 and 12. Will Lisa draw more gigantic-creepy-crawly-roaches-of-the-river? Will she ink a sketch that (GASP!) hasn't been approved? And does Viktor own a t-shirt that isn't black? What will Part VII bring?

Find out! Next week!

The Great Book Seminar Saga Part V: Process

The Great Book Seminar Saga
Part V: Process

...in which Lisa divulges secrets...

And we're back.

Week ten was super productive, and I brought three new paintings and sketches for four new spreads to Viktor's class. It was amazing to see everyone's progress this week. Though everyone had a ton of beautiful things on the wall, it was a admittedly a harsh crit this week for all of us. I have quite a bit of tweaking to do on nearly everything I brought in. That being said, I do feel pretty good about the work.

AND I may have even received ... gasp! ... a compliment from Viktor on one of the paintings.


Sweet!

I still have a bunch of tweaking to do on painting number two, so I'm going to wait to post it. In the meantime, I thought I'd post the in-process work for the third painting.

The lighting is slightly wonky because they're photos rather than scans. Regardless, it gives you an idea of how I've been putting these images together.

This is the sketch I brought to class two weeks ago, and the major comment was simplify, simplify, simplify. Why clutter up the background and foreground? So I took everyone's advice, scanned it into photoshop, erased all of the superfluous pencil lines, shrank Grandpa and the boy down, stretched the tree, and printed my pencil sketch super lightly onto a piece of watercolor paper.

Once I had my sketch printed, I hauled out my brown ink and dip-pen, and inked the sketch. When the line-work was done, I set it aside to dry so as not to smudge any of the nice clean outlines.

Step two is laying in a brown wash using the same ink as the lines. I started with the tree because it is the largest shape in the image and was probably going to remain just an ink wash with no other color laid over it.

This is the painting all inked. When I was done with the wash and once the wash was dry, I went back in with my pen in a couple of places to darken the shadows and reinforce some of the lines. And you guessed it, another round of waiting for the whole thing to dry.


Once the ink wash was completely dry, I began dropping in spots of color in places. A little green in the leaves, the grass, and grandpa's sweater. Blue on the boy's jeans and a little ocher and raw umber on his shirt. And finally a little of the reddish umber color to warm up some of the browns

Ta da! All done!

And thus ends Part V and week 10. What will Part VI bring? What insanity ensues during week 11? Will there be more art to show? Will Viktor wear another black t-shirt to class? The suspense is killing me...

The Great Book Seminar Saga Part IV: Week Nine

The Great Book Seminar Saga
Part IV: Week Nine

... in which Lisa may have done something halfway decent and Viktor is okay with ugly students...

So week nine.

Pat and Gant were entirely right when they suggested I work in pen. This week I traded in my lovely little micron, however, for a shmancy dip pen and swapped my black ink for a fantastic nut brown. I wanted to see if it might give my line work a bit more warmth and character.

And then I dove right in.

I picked out a couple of the sketches and compositions that I'd already rendered four or five times and attempted to render them this way. I decided not to do too much shading with the ink lines themselves, but dropped in a brown wash of the same ink, painting in deeper values for the shadows. (Alas alack, I don't have in-process images for these particular pieces, but the next Book Seminar Saga post will have the whole deal - from sketches to the final render...)

Wonder of wonders, I was actually vaguely - dare I say - happy wiht the way the line and wash looked. And because I was being all experimenty, I didn't stop there, but began dropping in some simple spots of color right over the washes. Ooooh... aaahhh... line AND color! Exciting things!

As I hinted in the last part of the saga, I was somewhat pleased with the results. Amazingly enough it all seemed to work together, so I rendered a couple of my other small spot illustrations and subsequently settle don this of a way of working for this particular project.

For serious style WOAH!

So presenting, week nine:

This was the first image I rendered this way. Lots of line, brown wash, light color. It's not quite done yet. I still want to go in and add some blue to the water.Don't worry, I promise I'll show you aaaaaall the pretty pictures when they're finished. ;)

Another you may recognize. I'm not totally convinced by this one.
I may render it again... or play with the sketch further. And last but most definitely not least... I actually think this is the strongest image thus far.
The lines work and the spot of red and blue sit well in the image. Probably the only one that is actually "done" thus far.

So week nine. I arrived at class with these three and a fourth image painted as well as two reworked sketches (that I intend to paint this week) and two new sketches for the project. As you well know, each week, I've come to class with something pretty different. At our crit this past Thursday, Viktor turned to my work with a, "So what do we have this week?" Viktor has been somewhat, hmm, not exasperated exactly, but perhaps less than enthused by my inability to settle on a way of working. This having-a-way-of-working business is a very big deal... as I said, for serious style woah.

Anywho, I got some good feedback on the images and have quite a bit of work ahead of me for week ten, and according to Viktor, pleeeenty of time to do it in. Before we left on Thursday, Viktor looked around the room and said, "You all are looking lovely. Clearly, you're all getting your beauty sleep. So now this is week nine, and we have six weeks left in the semester. You do the math. Figure out how many images you have and how many you need to make. You have six weeks. Figure it out. What I recommend is sleeping less, get less beauty sleep. I can deal with an ugly class if you bring me more work. Six weeks with no sleep, you can do. Two months, and you start to get sick, but six weeks? It's doable. Sleep less, work more. See you next week."

Thank you Viktor.

Well look at that, you're all caught up on my book project. Now that we're all updated with the seminar saga, I will post some of the other things I've been up to, but of course keeping you abreast of all Viktor drama with periodic updates. So my dear readers, stay tuned, who knows what Part V, our next installment, will bring?

The Great Book Seminar Saga Part III: Final Renders

The Great Book Seminar Saga Part III:

Final Renders

...in which art school leads to nervous break downs and sketches of a mouse in a cowboy hat...


So admittedly, Viktor was completely right. My first sketches were extremely literal, pulling images directly from the story. I really tried to push my character and images further, making images that complement the text rather than simply mirroring it.

I came up with a couple of new sketches that I was super happy with.
Grandpa and grandson go for a walk.

But lets talk about the final renderings for a sec...

So I came to art school to learn, to further develop my eye and hand and truth be told to figure out HOW I work. Most of my cohort came in with a good sense of their preferred materials and methods of working. I'm not 100% convinced by anything that I've used and how I've been using it up to this point. In a nutshell, I've been trying to figure out what my style is.

Woo art school induced breakdowns!

I've spent hours just sitting at my drawing table playing with my paints and pens and even more time just staring at a blank sheet of paper asking myself, "How do I work? What's my style?"

This was my second attempt at coloring. I was actually so frustrated with the first, I tossed it. The first one was a really heavy use of gouache that just got gloppy and thick and completely overworked. This one, I printed my original sketch out on bristol paper and then used my gouache almost like watercolor, trying to just drop in some light washes.

In this revision, I scanned the painted version into the computer, and printed it on bristol. The bristol paper sucks up the computer ink, so it's impossible to get accurate color. That being said, I actually liked the duller color, so I stuck with the printout and then experimented with working some line over my washes with pen.

The experimenting was good, but it has also been a super duper hard thing to do... constantly trying new things, questioning, second guessing, questioning all over again, and then trying something else. Don't get me wrong, SVA is incredible, and I love what I'm doing, but this is the hardest thing that I have ever done.

Anywho, back to the finals... so these first attempts looked okay, but I wasn't satisfied. They were just okay. They lacked the sort of spontaneity and life in my sketchbook and journals drawings. I have spent the last few weeks trying to capture that same sort of line quality. You'd think it'd happen naturally, but for whatever reason, I have some weird mental block about this project. I started trying to figure out why. I thought that maybe it was the subject matter... again, Viktor's something-for-everyone story wasn't exactly my cup of tea. But the story I'm telling is a sweet one. Perhaps it was lack of identification with the protagonist... not much experience with small Bulgarian boys growing up in the mid 80s.

So I tried a bunch of other stuff... the first grandpa and boy sketch (see part I) underwent another two or three revisions:

This is the third or fourth sketch.

And then I realized that the sketch was looking busy. The strongest part of the image was the moment between the grandfather and grandson, so I pulled out the background in yet another sketch and then tried inking it just in pen, thinking maybe I'd do a black and white book. (Had a great conversation with a couple of my classmates - thanks Gant and Pat! - and was encouraged to go back to pen work. They were right. The lines were working much better.)

I kept working with pen and tried coloring in photoshop:

I did a character reference page for my protagonist trying again to imagine who he is and give him more life and character. When he gets older, he actually leaves Bulgaria to go to college in the states, so I added a cowboy hat just as one additional character detail.

And then I had an idea... the main character's nickname is sinko, which means "little mouse"... I thought, if I can't make this feel like me, what about a story about a little mouse? So I tried changing my characters into mice. Hence the mouse in the cowboy hat.
Viktor reeeeeeally didn't like this idea...

But it was after this particular critique - week eight - that I had a lightbulb moment. I've been working for Viktor... trying to please him rather than myself. That realization was actually incredibly freeing, and today I think I may have drawn something that is actually decent... or at the very least that I like.

End Part III

But stay tuned, stay tuned dear readers for what comes next:

The Great Book Seminar Saga Part IV!

... in which Lisa may have done something halfway decent and Viktor is okay with ugly students...

The Great Book Seminar Saga Part II: The Picture Book

The Great Book Seminar Saga

Part II: The Picture Book

...in which Viktor lights a fire, and Lisa gets the heebie jeebies...

So you may be wondering how I pulled a picture book out of a story about war, death, and communist. There happens to be a brief but nostalgic flashback to the protagonist's childhood with his grandfather. SCORE! I essentially proposed to focus an entire semester (or at least the remaining 9 weeks of it) of work on perhaps half a page of text in which the protagonist visits his grandparents and goes crawfish hunting with his grandfather.

During class when I pasted all of this up on the wall for our weekly critique, Viktor gave me good feedback and then told me that I could conceivably begin the finals of the sketches and be done with the project IF I just wanted to do a simple fairytale-ish story... OR I could push them and make it into a SUPERB book. As he said to me, "I want to light a fire under your desk."

So I took all of it back to the drawing board... literally.

This is some of what I had from sketches round one:

Really rough opening page... the boy arriving at his grandparent's country home

Double page spread with text: Grandma and Grandpa and the boy on the porch watching the sun go down.

Double page spread with text: Grandpa and the boy heading out for some crawfish hunting.

Double page spread with text: arriving at the river.

I wrestled with the images for a week... how to push them? How to change things around and make it more dynamic?

One of the biggest problems with the originals (and a single night of work will do this) was the similarity in camera angle and setting. Not to mention Viktor wanted me to use reference to make it feel more real. "Too fairy tale-ish or story book fantasy land," was definitely a part of his comment. So I redid a bunch of the outdoor scenes with reference of Bulgarian villages... and I also started really thinking about my main character. Who is the little boy? What's he like?

Single page image: heading out for some crawfish hunting.

And speaking of crawfish... I had a vague idea of what a crawfish looked like. (My fourth grade class raised crawfish as our big science project... I think mine died a few weeks in...) In any case, I had a vague idea: lobster-ish, though smaller and grayer, and most definitely ugly. Anywho, I started googling crawfish for some reference for the scenes down by the river. Have you ever really looked at a picture of a crawfish? I mean, sat and stared at it? They are some seriously ugly little dudes. We're talking no-joke, giant-going-to-eat-your-face-off-underwater-bug ugly.

Shudder...

Despite my horror at the nasty wee beasties, the reference was good, and my sketches just got better. As did the camera angles. I also started playing with using smaller spot illustrations on the right side of the spread and small vignettes to surround the text on the left. They're still pretty rough, but they give me a good idea of where things are going.

Week six, I brought the new sketches back to class. Viktor's response: keep pushing it. So more sketches... not to mention he wanted to see examples of how the final illustrations would be rendered.

Back to the drawing board....

End Part II

Stay tuned for The Great Book Seminar Saga Part III: Final Renders or Style... huh?

...in which art school leads to nervous break downs and sketches of a mouse in a cowboy hat...

The Great Book Seminar Saga: Part I

The Great Book Seminar Saga

Part I: The Wall

...in which Lisa's studio wall is completely hidden under an inch of paper and Viktor sends a package...

Another day, another bucket of crumpled paper and another handful of passable sketches added to the wall of my li'l studio. The wall next to my drawing table is a veritable jumble of papers. To the untrained eye, it might seem as though my sketchbook ate something that didn't agree with it and was sick all over the wall. Actually, that's not so far off. The wall is covered with layer upon layer of taped-up thumbnail drawings, first sketches, second sketches, color tests, inked versions, failed scratch board illustrations, and (crossing fingers) what might actually be finals for a picture book project.


The Wall is devoted entirely to one class (cue dramatic music and thunder crashes), my Book Seminar. So the project... in August, Viktor (the prof) sent us a short story ("Buying Lenin" by Miroslav Penkov) that the entire semester's work would be based upon. Our initial assignment was to propose a sequential project based on the story - a picture book, comic, graphic novel, illustrated story sort of thing, or anything else that lends itself to a series of related images likes posters or thematically tied pieces.

I struggled with the assignment. To give you an idea, Viktor arrived in class the first day and said, "It's a great story. It has something for everyone - war, death, Bulgaria, loss, communism..."

Hmm...

Yeeeah... great picture book themes, right? Totally fits my work and aesthetic.

Anywho, I came up with an idea that would allow me to do something more interesting to me while still remaining vaguely tied to the story. It was about leaving home and missing home and loss and absence...


Long story short, it crashed and burned. I spent five weeks pulling out my hair and churning out pictures that didn't feel like me. Viktor even nixed the one thing I really liked about one of the images... the goat.
It's not that I hated aaaaall of the pictures...

but honestly it all felt just meh.

Not okay.

So week five, I scrapped the whole thing, pulled an all nighter, and by class the next day had sketches and layout for a thirty-two page picture book.

End Part I

Stay tuned for The Great Book Seminar Saga, Part II : The Picture Book

...in which Viktor lights a fire, and Lisa gets the heebie jeebies...