Hey, I’m back!
I was hoping to make an update last month, but I had quite a lot of stuff going on at home. Between trying to stay sane during quarantine and working on finishing ongoing personal art projects, I’ve been taking an online class called Comics & Sequential Art through The Art Students League. I have been enjoying it so much! I had been planning on taking a class at The League for several months now, and when I received an email introducing their online classes, I figured then and there was the perfect opportunity to begin. It’s been helping a lot with my creativity lull. I’m very excited to finally get back to focusing on comics again after so much time. Here are some of the things I’ve created thus far (of course there are more in the works):
Exercise 1: Create a 3-panel comic strip with another artist's painting or illustration as the center image (I tried to sketch out a painting from Impressionist painter Leonid Afremov, whose work I absolutely love).
Exercise 2: Create a 6-panel comic exploring different panel-to-panel transitions.
Other than this online class, I was finally able to finish my ArtSnacks alcohol ink piece (which I started in March). I made the last-minute decision of coloring in the background with a neutral tone to make the vibrantly-colored bracelets pop some more. Unfortunately, the process was not as simple as I hoped it would be. After using the Tombow ABT Pro markers from the ArtSnacks bonus box (which I enjoyed), I decided to order a gray-scale marker set directly from the Tombow website. Not sure if it was the particular marker I used that was defective, but the background became a streaky mess when I started. No matter what I did, I could not get an even tone and the marker kept drying out. As I tried to create a second layer (after letting the first dry), the dried ink would get rubbed off. This kept happening over and over, and I was left pulling my hair out of my head wondering what I was doing so wrong. Granted, I am very inexperienced in using alcohol markers, but I still couldn’t understand. I definitely need to watch some more tutorials for next time.
Thankfully, I had a couple of Copics saved from a previous ArtSnacks box which did the trick. It still wasn’t easy to work on the background, but after many grueling hours of undoing my mess, I was finally able to make it work. I am pretty satisfied with the result; just wish the process wasn’t so arduous and time-consuming. Here is the final:
I’ve posted progress shots on my Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/chasityc.art/
That’s all for now! I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy!
Hope to be back soon with another update!