Some Paintings #8
An update on what I've been making lately
Edutopia: 3 Reflection Questions to Help You End the Year Intentionally
Budget: $500
Initial email: April 29th
Sketches: May 2nd
Final: May 7th
This was for a reflective piece targeted towards teachers as they come to the end of a school year.
Sketches:
My art director liked the sketch in the middle, so I painted it out roughly and then ended up finishing up on Procreate:
Full Bleed Journal: What is Lost
Budget: N/A
Initial email: Mar 25
Sketches: Apr 7
Final: Apr 11
This was a fun assignment: one of my regular art directors teaches a design class at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Full Bleed Journal is the publication that the students in the program work on, and she wanted to allow them to “hire” and art direct illustrators.
The piece was about the tricky ways we draw hard lines in the sand while debating political issues. The piece focuses on the debate about abortion in the US, but touches on many others.
My sketches focus mostly on how pregnant women often bear the brunt of political gestures and hardline debating:
The art directors liked the sketch on the far right with the angry people within shards of glass pointed at the one pregnant woman.
Bloomberg Weekend - Trump Chaos Leaves Australia Holding the Pacific Line
Budget: N/A
Initial email: Apr 21
Sketches: Apr 23
Final: Apr 25 with edits (you’ll see what I mean) on May 1
This piece was about how behaviour from Trump has left Austrailia to maintain America’s interests/relationships with various Pacific Islands as China seeks to fill the vacuum created by the US.
Usually when I send sketches, I have the image files labelled sketch 1, 2 and 3 and then provide a little description for each sketch. The descriptions are also numbered with the relevant number. In this case, I’d mislabeled my descriptions. So when my AD said I was approved to go ahead with Sketch 1, I didn’t bother to check my descriptions and went ahead and completed an image based on the file I’d labelled ‘Sketch 1’:
To which my AD said, “This is lovely, but just so we’re clear, this is not sketch 1”. I, of course, freaked out, but Bloomberg was really nice about the mix-up
. They gave me a little bit of extra time (and paid me a rush fee for the new piece)
(Thank you to my friend Anshika for posing as a hand model with the cake dome she’s said she’ll lend me someday.)
My time this year has been dominated by work on books, and as a result, I feel like my editorial output has been quite scant. Taking stock of what I’ve done for these newsletters is always helpful, since I can no longer open Instagram to remind myself of recent work (this is a good thing, don’t worry).
Leaving you with an old study from the Doctor Who episode that will always make me bawl. I’m a Rose Tyler loyalist, but Ncuti was robbed. I was suddenly motivated to get back into the show purely to catch up on his season (I’m only on Series 8)
