c. billadeau

This gif is freakin’ perfect.

As I learned today that my last semester here at MCAD is now free.

We just finished up the annual design department merits last week, which has been stressing me (and all the other design majors) for freaking weeks now. A ton of folks in the graphic design, illustration and comic art majors put up their work to be judged by faculty and the design chair. I put about three long evenings worth of work into putting up a show that was on the wall for only three days, but

it paid off.

To anyone going to art college or thinking of going to art college: never, ever, EVER pass up the opportunity to enter a competition. This is TWICE now that I have been hit straight out of left field by considerable sums of money when I was just hoping to maybe see my stuff on a wall somewhere. And it’s just…amazing.

Don’t underestimate what you do. So many of my fellow illustration majors are far better artists and more skilled at what they do and yet, so many of them decided not to enter the merits competition. Or any other number of the national competitions out there, just because they don’t think they’ll win. That’s not the point.

Enter absolutely everything just to say that you tried; even if you don’t win this time, you will eventually–you just never know when. I’ve probably dropped several hundred dollars on entry fees and supplies to various publications and competitions through my college career, most of which I have not seen any return out of.

But now my return on my efforts has been eleven thousand dollars. And humbling amounts of recognition and priceless amounts of motivation to keep on going. All because I tried.

I forgot to upload these here!
I reminded myself to take screenshots while I was working on these two things and well, here you go. Now I can just point people here whenever they ask me how I make things I:< hahaha KIDDING I love answering questions; I am just really really awful with words! Seriously, I gave a demo in photopoops for one of my old professor's classes last week and it was a total disasterrr. So pictures it is.

Anyway, this next bit is copypasta from dA, where I posted these originally; this is more specific to the Lee piece, but it's generally the same process between either piece:

(1) THUMBNAIL: I whip through about twenty or so of these until I find one that I like best, then blow it up to fit my canvas. The key here is for me to remain loose and gestural; I am not even really thinking about the final product at this point, let alone how everything is going to piece together.

(2) ROUGH SKETCH: Setting my thumbnail layer to 10% opacity and creating a new layer, I start fleshing out the shape of ol’ Lee here. Details like clothing are relatively unimportant at this step, unless they’ve got a large presence.

(3) CLEAN SKETCH: “Clean”, as in, “clean as it gets”. So long as everything looks proportional, I really don’t spend too much time here cleaning up my lines, because no one sees these in the end, anyway (well, except for you guys).

(4) FLATS, GREYSCALE: I block out everything using the pencil tool and straight greyscale. In the end, I get a solid bitmap image that has no fuzzy anti-aliasing, which is important for the next few steps. This is actually the most time-consuming process; I take the time to carefully clean up the shapes because after this point, things will become more and more difficult to edit. When I’m done, I merge most of my layers into one.

(5) FLATS, COLOR: Because I used the pencil tool, I can take the floodfill bucket and simply drop in colors. Once I know my color palette, it takes like five seconds.

(6) SHADING: Using a darker color on a new layer, I go in (usually the face) and do a cel-like shading in places. Then I erase bits, creating the stripe “gradient” pattern that you can see in the 100% view there.

(7) TEXTURE OVERLAY: I vomit a couple of photographic textures onto the whole thing and mess around with layer functions to get something satisfactory. This time, I used a desaturated image of dirty plaster from my bff cgtextures.com, set to darken at 30% opacity. There’s no set way I go about picking textures or layer settings; I just poke around until something comes out looking cool. /very helpful, classi
Here, I also run around with a transparent gradient tool/layer mask combo and make things fade-y.

(8) COLOR & CONTRAST ADJUSTMENTS: Pretty self-explanitory; I can spend forever just tweaking the colors with all the adjustment layer options that photopoops gives me. This is also where I add in a couple of soft gradients to beef up color or contrast in places (i.e. the blue glow behind Lee).

AAAAAND it’s done. c: That should take away some of the apparent mysticism surround how I make things? haha jeez
If you have any burning desire to know something else that I didn’t mention up there, DON’T HESITATE TO ASK. I may just have to include moar screenshots to explain myself.

… y-yeah, I got no excuse this time.

Except that I have absolutely NO SHAME, apparently.

I had intended this to be a wee birthday gift for the excellent Tessa as it is next week, but I had time last night to draw it out and I JUST COULDN’T WAIT OK (which may or may not mean there could be moar)
IT JUST NEVER ENDS, I SWEAR.

now get outta here

So apparently I WON??

WHAT

I went to email a professor this morning about class and there was one in my ‘box from my thesis professor saying I had gotten $5000 and a scholarship to The Illustration Academy and I’m kinda

kinda

freakin’ out here

Jesus!! I was proud and felt accomplished enough just to be in the show! I don’t even know how to handle this!! I still feel like so many of these pieces were sure to win all the awards (Patrick Richardson‘s and Sachin Teng‘s are my favorites) because they are so so so much more marvelous AGH STOP VALIDATING MY EGOTISM GUYS ; ; ♥

I’m currently learning how to print woodblocks using the Japanese technique and it is so friggin’ difficult to get a consistent print with it. Especially when I know I can get way better results with a press. Anyway, I liked my sketch enough to post it, but it may be the only thing you guys see of this because this print is bound to fail!

On the upside, if it does, I can do another edition of this print with relief ink at some point in the future. The joys of printing!

THE SHORTEST FAQ EVER:
Q) Is that a woman.
A) No.

Because apparently some people were confused. I realize Anton is a bit flamboyant at times, but come on. I:< I was going to blab about my personal ties and process and whatever, but that comment during critique today really annoyed me for some reason, so meh.