Colors of the World

Hey there! So I've had a project in the works that I debuted on Monday: Colors of the World! It's an artistic project exploring different cultures around the world, looking at traditional arts, textiles, patterns, culture, language and much more. Each month I'll be working on a new culture or country, posting a photoshoot at the beginning of each month and following it up with blog posts over on the website, so check it out! It's in its beginning stages still, but by the end of the month there'll be something of interest for everyone, and I'd love to have your feedback and support! Here's the LINK, and a sneak peak...

Enhanced Illustration - Pencil, Pen, Paint and Pixels

Last week I was in London for a short course at Central Saint Martins. Part of the University of the Arts London, CSM is best known for its fashion department, having helped to prominence notable alumni such as Alexander McQueen, Sarah Burton, John Galliano, and Zac Posen (among many other notable fashion designers). But far from preferring the fashion department over all others, CSM has a huge variety of courses - and a truly excellent selection of short courses.

Tempted by several of their offers, I finally settled on a course titled "Enhanced Illustration - Pencil, Pen, Paint and Pixels". The course description promises to teach students to manipulate and combine hand-drawn elements in Photoshop, "all the while mantaining a personal, hand-crafted look to your resulting illustrations". As you'll have noticed from previous blog entries, I enjoy combining traditional and digital elements (the Japanese Tea Ceremony illustration comes to mind), but I booked this course when I hadn't yet started fiddling around with things much on my own, and had hoped to learn from this course the best methods to clean up a sketch and combine elements.

Now, I had learned a fair amount of this during my studies at the IADE Madrid, but I felt I was still lacking in professionalism. Unfortunately(?), in the months between booking the course and taking it, I played around a lot with Photoshop and my own drawings, finding that cleaning up my sketches tended to work better with ctrl+M (Curves) than fiddling with Brightness and Contrast, and that layering colors over lineart worked really well with a layer style called Multiply. (I spent quite some time playing around with all the layer styles to find out how they'd react - time well spent!) Imagine my dismay when the only Photoshop things the course really focused on were Brightness and Contrast, Hue/Saturation (ctrl+U), and Multiply! The rest was all taking scanned traditional elements and rearranging them in Photoshop.

So I didn't learn anything about Photoshop during the course - but I still found the course immensely interesting, and at times quite illuminating. The instructor, Bill Wright, was an excellent lecturer, bringing in videos, examples of previous students' work, and even other people to help and inspire us. While I didn't learn anything new about Photoshop, I learned about a professional illustrator's work, what different types of illustration there are, and tried out forms of illustration I had never tried previously - such as newspaper illustration.

For that project, we were each allowed to choose a newspaper article from a selection Bill brought along, and then had to present him with a concept before moving on to create a fitting illustration. He approved my concept for this tennis-themed article with little discussion, but gave me a lot of useful feedback during the process of creating the final illustration. The most valuable advice was to crop the image, zooming in and focusing on the action - and it really pulled it together. Before I cropped it, it looked something like this:

Still cute, but... nowhere near as good. (I also did away with the clouds.)

Then, there were all the other students. All female but for one lone male, we all came from different professions and walks of life, with people hailing from the UK, Germany, Chile, Jordan, and other countries. Twice during the week we printed out the work we'd done that far and gave each other feedback, saying what we thought turned out well and, sometimes, what we thought wasn't so great. For many pieces I found my tastes didn't quite match those of most others, but that made it quite interesting, actually.

I asked my two favorite artists there to let me share their projects on my blog, so check this out: Our first assignment was to take the concept 'kitchen' and draw objects, later assembling those into a colorful composition in Photoshop. Here's my end result, followed by the work of Dina Fawakhiri (from Jordan) and Bernardita Errázuriz (from Chile).

Sophie-Therese Lupas

Dina Fawakhiri

Bernardita Errázuriz

Aren't theirs gorgeous? Mine pales in comparison, though the image is refreshing when on its own. Dina and Bernie used such vibrant colors and powerful compositions - and I love the bold lineart.

They also gave me permission to post their final projects, for which we were to create at least two illustrations with a common theme and present them on the final day of the course. I chose to illustrate the hostel I was staying at (click on the images to see them bigger):

Dina did three beautiful illustrations with a theme of finding one's way to a woman's heart:

And Bernardita did a lovely collection of illustrations based on her family.

Lovely, aren't they? Thank you, Dina and Bernie, for letting me put them up here. And a reminder to everyone reading this: Just click on any photo (in the blog post) to see it bigger! The details are really worth looking at.

In conclusion, the trip to London decidedly was worth it! I hope the other participants feel that way, too.

Butterfly Paintings - Behance!

Just a short post to let you know that my best butterfly paintings can now be viewed on my Behance page! I think I'm done painting butterflies for the time being; there are other things to attend to! Check them out, and let me know what you think. I'm particularly pleased with these ones you haven't seen yet:

Poem Illustrations

A little glimpse at what I'm currently working on...

"What's that?" chirped Ben, a baby bird,
And, pointing with a tiny wing,
He lifted wide his beak to sing,
"What's that?  What's that?  of everything,
To learn another brand new word.

Poem excerpt courtesy of Anastasia C. Moser, illustration by Sophie-Therese Lupas.

Turtle Illustration

I'm working on a digital painting of a sketch I did the other day:

Clearly, my skills at drawing animals without a reference are pretty terrible. Thankfully, it's easy enough to find photo references, and upon finding a nice photo of a turtle I set about recreating it digitally.

The original image

My digital version! As with the sunset from last Friday, I completely painted over the original photograph.

I do quite like the idea of a girl riding the turtle, but I'm afraid I'm still working on it! Here's a work-in-progress image, and I have to say that I'm quite pleased with the idea to copy part of the turtle's shell pattern to create a lace top for the girl's dress. So sweet! Lots of work still to be done, though.

So that's my current art project! Takes a while to paint all that. (I fear it'll take me a long time to get the girl's face right, too!) As always, click on the images to see them bigger!

Sunrise

This morning I got up far earlier than normal - at the shocking time of 7 AM! (Yep, I've been spoiled these past few years, what with my 9 AM wake-up call.)

Basically, I went and hung around a cold apartment while men drilled and scraped and generally fixed up terrible water damage behind me. Fun? I used the time to work on my digital painting a bit, using the wonderful new computer I lugged down the hill. (Lugging it back up was worse.)

I spent quite a bit of time simply reacquainting myself with my Photoshop brushes (including some extra ones, such as this brush pack by DanLuVisiArt that I really need to work with more), before using a few brushes from the aforementioned pack to recreate this photo (by "Michael from Minnesota"):

Isn't it gorgeous? I had a lot of fun recreating it, but I have a lot to learn (and work on) still. Below is my rendition, achieved by painting over the original until none of it was visible anymore. (Click to enlarge!)

The clouds, in particular, need more work (or just more effort - I slapped those down first, so they're the roughest part of the painting), but apart from those, I'm really pleased with the result. I'll do more such paintings in the future, I think - copying really helps you learn how to create something realistic and apply that new knowledge to other paintings!

But seriously, those colors... *sighs happily*

Welcome To My Blog!

Having just finished my job at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, I decided to take some time to work on all the ideas I didn't have the time for while employed, as well as brush up on some creative skills that need polishing. So, for the next few months, I hope to post on this blog once a day on a variety of subjects as I work on my projects! The main two topics are art and fashion, but I also want to work on my language skills (particularly Russian and Korean), read those books and watch the movies that I really should have seen by now (I'm getting very tired of telling people, "Oh, I've heard it's very good! No, I'm afraid I've never seen/read it,"), and educate myself on assorted things like history, politics, and philosophy.

Each different topic will have its own tab at the top of the blog, and topics such as history and literature will fall under 'culture', with special tabs reserved for art projects, fashion projects, and languages. 'personal' will be reserved for announcements, special posts, and the like, and 'featured' is where posts about other artists, shops and more will end up.

If you like, you can get email notifications for posts by entering your email address into the "Follow by Email" box at the top of the page, right under the "About Me" section. --->
That said, let's get right to it!

Cheers,
SOPHIE