Eden 2.0: Development - 52 Boards!

This is a project I worked on for Mr. Tardino's "Illustrative Drawing" class.  The original idea started out for an MMO game, though I would actually like to adapt it for a children's book.

This was the first time I really went after quantity over quality.  Most of the digital scenes in here aren't really well-developed.  I made this project more about finding many different possibilities and variations of stuff before committing to a big render... Ah, if only I had more time...

I also did a lot of the structural drawings for an open-ended assignment in advanced structural class.  (I did plenty of work for each class.  For example, we only needed 20 boards for Illustrative Drawing, but I did 52.)

And finally, it may seem paranoid, but since I have future plans for some of this stuff, I just want to say that all of the below is (c) Kirsten Zirngibl, Dec. 2009.  Not sure if typing that does anything for me, or if anyone besides me thinks any idea here would be worth taking, or if anyone even looks at my blog for that matter, but it's just that I've got detailed descriptions of stuff up here for the world to see and it makes me feel a little vulnerable...  I guess the risk is worth it for self-promotion...

Landscape Painting Stuff

Landscape painting homework-- we had to do two of the same view under different lighting/mood conditions.  I fell in love with this view/composition from the third floor in the Crane Center, but we aren't allowed to paint in that building.  So I brought my laptop and did two underpaintings from life, then printed them out on watercolor paper and painted over.  By using a lot of matte medium, I was able to make it work relatively seamlessly.

This is the night version of the same scene; a modified version as it got darker.

This was done from life from a class window, that building on the left is the faith mission church.  I think it was a little over a session.  It's a pretty small painting, done in a watercolor sketchbook.

Also done from my class window-- this is barely through the underpainting because I had a little less than half a class.  Corner of Grant and High I believe.

Ahhh... yet another underpainting.  This was over at Highbanks park, I believe.  Kind of a long drive from downtown Columbus, which kind of took away from the painting time... :-(  I was planning on two sessions to finish this one, but was unable to make it the second time to take it past this stage.

Part of a series for a self-determined project in my landscape painting class.  This and the two below are an experimental approach to rendering the scenes first in 3D to establish an under-image, printing them out on watercolor paper, and acrylicing over to finalize.

Hopefully I can finish over break.

My least developed one so far.  Not sure what "recognizable element" I should put in this to establish the sense of scale.

This one started off with a glitch in the 3D program's "rainy" atmosphere.  A variation on the 1st scene, where I decided to play with the relationship between positive and negative shapes.

An unfinished digital painting from life down in a woods area at (I believe) highbanks park.  I really should've spent less time getting the branches right and knocked in that foliage to at least make an impression of the woods first.  Ah, live and learn...

Miscellaneous illustration stuff

...to various degrees of finish.

An illustration of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"... without Lucy.  I did this for Professional Practice class.  It was kind of tricky, in that I was trying to show the manufactured quality of the things in the song (cellophane flowers, looking-glass ties,  rocking-horse people, taxis and trains, etc...) without losing the nebulous and flowing quality associated with all things psychedelic.

I ended up (stupidly) pulling the whole thing together in one night, because of a bad lapse in judgement, namely, the original plan to do the entire scene in 3D.  I actually built up the cellophane flowers in these really complicated bits of decimated architectural geometry, but realized the day before that it simply was NOT working out the way I had planned it to.

So I was forced to just pull what I could together in Photoshop.  I don't think it worked out necessarily badly, but I think I could've pushed it a lot further.

I should've known the limits of my tools before diving in...

An illustration where I squeezed a crap-ton (>20) of youtube poop inside jokes into a single panel.  If you know what it's referring to you're probably going to enjoy it a lot more than the average sane viewer.  I had been hoping to render it out photorealistically, but ran out of time.  I may decide to do it over break if I feel like it.

Another WIP, of a "volcano man (god?)" who, in his rage, is spurtint out lava that is simultaneously cementing him in the ground.  I was going to have a nondescript villiage in the foreground.

It was an idea I had towards the end of my freshman year.  I shot reference and started it but ended up petering out, so I decided to resurrect it for an open-ended styles and concepts project.

There are a lot of problems with this, still, one being that of where to take the eye.  The mouth area and lower pool area are kind of competiting.  I had been hoping to make sort of a "visual dialog" between the areas, to make the viewer bounce back and forth, but I think the whole illustration just looks kind of stagnant and hard to read at this stage.

Just a goofy in-class assignment for professional practices class.  I think we had around an hour and a half (though less in reality) to get the assignment, conceptualize, execute, and (in my case) print.

A rough value study for a future personal illustration that blends the fantastical with memories of my childhood, specifically all the weird stuff I did/put in trees.