Inktober

I started Inktober this month, the challenge is to draw every day during the month of October. It seems really fitting seeing as I just started my Illustrative Instagram account and need to put work out there! I've added my Instagram to both my website and blog which can be found along the menu; otherwise my account is @sophiekingillustrations. Feel free to give me a follow if you'd like, I'll be posting daily during October! 

 My drawings with range from style and time taken, some will be quick doodles while others will be longer projects. I hope I can do them daily, I don't see why not..

Here's a couple I've done so far.
 

Once Upon A Time In Lari

Upon my recent travels to Tuscany, Italy, I visited a small town called Lari. Lari is known for its circle center that circles round a medieval castle. You can make your way to the top and venture inside to look around. It's in quite impressive condition and being a fan of the medieval period I enjoyed the visit. Inside the tourist shop were these two books that I straight away wanted to buy because of the colours and illustrations. The artist is Tommaso Levente Tani.

 They are fun interactive picture books that appeal to multiple ages. The reason I wanted these so much is because it's an aim of mine to produce a picture book similar to these that have historical information. The set of two consists of one history book explaining the history of Lari and how the castle and town grew over the years. The other book is a fold out activity booklet which has small puzzles and games to do.

 I also got drawn to these books because of the focus on Heraldry they both have, even down to designing and meanings. I previously did a project on Heraldry and find the topic extremely interesting.

 The pages are beautiful and colourful, the translation from Italy is a little bit poor and some of the sentences don't quite make sense but it's still a lovely book to add to my collection. The illustrations are vector based with quite a simplistic style, the characters have a "copy and paste" feel but it works really well. I think these are lovely little books with lots of information displayed in a very attractive way!

Summer Card Project

I got notified of this event on DeviantArt called the Summer Card Project. It involves creating a card or two with the theme of summer but also a get well/ thinking of you card. The purpose of the cards are to be sent off to hospitals and given to those who are ill or injured from young to old. Summer is my favourite season and I enjoy creating cards so I thought it would be a nice idea to join in.

I wanted to create a card that wasn't purely summer themed (i.e not a bucket or beach) so I decided to pick a sunflower for the element of one card and a bumble bee for the other.

The Bee card is just coloured card stacked up with a hole through two players to reveal the white. I did this with a circle cutter. I then hand drew the bee and coloured with Pro Markers. I used foam stickers to make the bee "float" and did a speech bubble pun related to the bee. The idea is not to say "Get Well Soon" but provide a message that's uplifting. I drew the dotted line and the final card I was pretty pleased with!

The next card I designed involved using watercolours and just doing blog shapes which would then be drawn over with a black fine liner. The "blobs" of paint just suggest the shape of the object with the fine liner defining the shape. The idea isn't supposed to be perfect in-the-line picture but more childish and still looks good. I also have plans to reproduce this card theme and sell them on my Etsy shop!

I'm very happy with both cards and I included my website for whomever receives my card, hopefully they let me know as I'd be excited to find out who receives it! If you want to find out more about the SCP the link is below. It closes on the 31st July so it may be too late for countries outside the US but it happens at Christmas time too so you could participate then as well!

http://madizzlee.deviantart.com/journal/Summer-Card-Project-617277123

Final Year Show

The final year show has come and gone! I submitted 3 A2 screen prints along with a landscape book of Renaissance Architecture. After a year of trial and error I finally nailed the technique for large screen prints and I'm really happy with how the finals came out. 

For the show I also created some free to take zine books with a little bit of information about the buildings themselves. I had work on sale in the shop including one of the buildings as well as some prints of the HMS Victory I did previously.

The landscape concertina book, made up of the same prints as the larger scale versions. Handmade the covers and bound myself. I learned so much about Renaissance architecture over the year and it really inspired me. I enjoy historical subjects so much and probably enjoying researching more than producing actual artwork! 

I presented my prints as a sort of "planning wall", perhaps how an architectures study may look. Pinned up prints and plans to build a bigger picture. Although I didn't manage to sell any prints at the show I shall be selling them on my Etsy page. I also have been contacted since with an offer to sell my work on a website but I'm not particularly interested as they were only willing to offer me 20% of the selling price. Now I just have to produce more personal work and get out into the world with my 2:1 degree!

Smite Tweet

So I've been doing more doodles and drawings of Gods from the video game Smite and yesterday I saw that they'd actually tweeted it on their Twitter! They don't really tweet fan art so it was quite surprising to see my work. Especially as it isn't even the greatest fan art around of Smite! Still it's quite an achievement for me and they even linked in my DeviantArt which is really nice of them!

Watercolour painting #2

I did another painting with water colour after really enjoying my last one. I did another character from the video game I play and tried my best to really work on the skin colours and shading. Nox is the the Goddess of the Night in Greek mythology. Although I believe in actual mythology it's spelt Nyx. She's believed to have such exceptional power and beauty that she was even feared by Zeus himself. She's a mother to many other Greek
deities such as Hypnos (Sleep) and Thanatos (Death), with Erebus (Darkness).

I posted the image onto the Reddit site for Smite and it was very well received. The community are actually very encouraging and really enjoy fan art. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Smite/comments/4jqnzm/nox_watercolour_painting/ 

I also posted the image on DeviantArt and it's probably my most favourited image so far. I used water colours, acrylic white fine liner, white Indian ink and a gold metallic paint. I will produce many more of the characters as I find their costume and character designs to be really beautiful.

Watercolour painting

Haven't done any water colouring in just over two years, got even some new range of colours and decided to try them out. Previously I had 8 colours whereas now I have a palette of 24! No white though for some reason, so that's done in acrylic watered down as well as an acrylic white pen.  It's quite different style from how I usually draw but I feel like I'm testing my boundaries a bit and building my portfolio of work!

The painting is of a character named Nu Wa from the video game Smite. Nu Wa is the god of humankind in Chinese mythology and I have quite an interest for historical myths and legends so I think it still fits into my work! It was just nice to paint something different and take a break from so much digital work.