80's movies

I love love LOVE 80's movies! They are so fun to watch! I have been doing speed paintings during the Christmas break between semesters, just to keep practicing digitally. This started as a speed painting, but I was loving working on it so I decided to pull it together and work a few more hours on it. Can you guess who this is? And what movie he is from? He's from an 80's classic...(don't scroll down too far unless you're wanting to see the answer)

So I have been hearing a ton about the Breakfast Club and I have been dying to watch it. Then one day I saw it was on tv so I watched it and it was great! This is Judd Nelson in a clip from one of the scenes in that movie. If you haven't seen it I highly recommend watching it. I know I could work on it, and I still might, but I guess we'll see :)

Pirates!

The final exam for Children's Book Illustration was to illustrate three consecutive pieces for a story, maintaining character consistency. The story began with...

A stormy night on the sea and three pirates fighting to get to shore

They reach the shore and marvel at how beautiful the island is that they've landed on.

They build shelter and enjoy a feast

Merry Christmas!

Goodnight, sleep tight, don't let the....sugar plum fairy eat your dreams? Wait what? 

Under the Sea

Like my rendition of the Little Mermaid?? Okay, okay, I'm just kidding...but she does have red hair. This project was to create a fantasy world. We had to follow certain guidelines to reach our final pieces and it was really interesting to see how others pieces turned out. Here is what I came up with. Enjoy!

Anna Nicole Smith

I had an assignment to create what could be a TIME Magazine cover. The piece had to be proportionate to an actual TIME Magazine. We had to show a famous person who had fallen on hard times. i.e drugs, alcohol, etc. I chose to do Anna Nicole Smith. I didn't know too much about her but thought it would be fun to do a caricature of her. For those of you who are like I was, let me enlighten you a bit on who she was:

1: she was a playboy bunny

2. Married a J. Howard Marshall, a man 60 years older than her

    a. he was rich and many speculated she married him for all the money he was rolling in.

    b. After Marshall passed away, Anna tried to get his money but he hadn't written her in his will. So after a lot of court fighting she ended up receiving some...but not all she had hoped. 

3. She ended up dying of an accidental drug overdose. 

So here she is at Marshall's funeral excited that he finally passed away hoping she'll get his money. Let me know what you think! :D

Cult of Personality: Barbie

Barbie is a huge cult personality. There are women in the world who are surgically recreating themselves to look like exactly like her. They want to be Barbie. This piece is currently in Salt Lake City at the Utah Art Festival Gallery at "Art Space" along with about 10 other pieces of mine. Everyone should go check it out if you're wanting something fun to do, or in the area. The show runs from November 12-Dec 19th and the pieces are all for sale for fairly inexpensive prices! 

Utah Art Festival

230 S. 500 W. #120

Salt Lake City, UT 84101

The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse

I am in an Imagination and Visual Literacy class at UVU. One of our assignments was to illustrate an Aesop Fable. I chose to do the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. The story goes like this:

There are a lot of different versions that change details here or there but this story gives the gist of it. This drawing was done in graphite on Canson cold press illustration board.

Cake Splash

This was my last assignment for my Children's Book Illustration Class. Here's the story we had to illustrate:

"Jamie's mom helped her put the finishing touches on her birthday cake and the house was all set for the party as Oscar slept on the window sill. Suddenly Timmy let the dog out of the basement and the chase was on! Around the living room and under the couch they ran and as Jamie began to cry Oscar leaped right off the cake splattering it everywhere!"

Let me know what you think!

Little Pumpkin

So I'm working on a children's book and thought I'd give you a look at the cover I've done. I'm using this piece also for a couple classes which are helping me get my ideas headed forward.

Rhino Princess

Happy Friday! The UVU Illustration group does a sketchbook friday where we're given a theme and everyone shares what they've done. This weeks theme was a Princess Rhino. Here is mine. Enjoy!

Grandpa & Grandma

Okay, so here is the second project I was working on this summer. (the first one is really long so I haven't figured out how to scan that one in yet.) This is a surprise painting for my Grandma. My Grandpa died about 10 years ago, and my grandma has begun struggling a lot with her health. She is in an assisted living home and I hope this will make her happy.

I know a lot of artists use this technique, but I learned it from Donato Giancola. Although I am not really "into" fantasy art, I think  he is probably one of my favorite artists; he is amazingly talented, successful, and really nice guy.  So here are the steps I took.

Drawing: I drew the picture on Reeves paper (it's nice and soft and erases pretty easily)

Next, I made a photo copy of my drawing onto Mi Tientes toned paper. I then used mat gel medium and mounted it to my piece of board. Then, I painted a value layer with acrylic

Done! I finished it off with oil paint!

Rhinos love Balloons

Sometimes I get inspiration at the most random times! A couple weeks ago I was teaching my class at Creativity Art Studio about Surrealism. They were having a hard time understanding them and one of the basic examples I gave was to do something you wouldn't normally see. The first idea that popped into my mind I spurted out "a rhinoceros on a balloon". Immediately that sparked an image in my mind and I LOVED it!!! So I've been waiting weeks to get the time to do this sketch and here it finally is! Enjoy!

Work Drawing #3

This is another work drawing. It's of a girl named Linda Lomelino. She owns a cupcake shop, I think. PS for all you pinterest fans out there...I found her on pinterest looking for portrait reference and when I went to the link where the picture leads it took me to an awesome website where she just gives out tons of recipes. 

Anyway, here's the drawing:

Another Work Drawing

Here is another drawing while I've been at work. I really want to practice my portraits and make sure I get better not worse from lack of practice. This was just done in pencil and it's a reference from the internet.

Art Date

Trent and I are always looking for fun things to do, and we're also looking for time to do art. So last night we combined the two and did an art scavenger hunt. We went to the University Mall and each came up with 5 categories. They included: kids gone wrong in today's society, flirty/too sexy, heaven sent, stoner, working punk, boy or girl (as in "we can't tell, is it a boy or a girl?"), 300+ pounds, out of this world, animal, and odd couple. We didn't get all of them, but here are some that we did do. We met  up in the end and decided who won each one.
I got distracted and drew  multiple for a few of the categories because I really liked what I saw, so I didn't have as many. Trent won the scavenger hunt because his were awesome. Take a look:

 My first page 

 My second page

 Trents first page

Trents second page

He is an awesome artist. Here is more of his stuff if you're interested:

http://mrtoastedtoast.blogspot.com/

Sketching at work

The quality of this drawing isn't the best, so I'm sorry for that. This drawing is one I've been working at while work has been slow at both my jobs. This was done as practice from a photograph on the internet. I think this grandpa is so cute (really they all are!) . But because I'm working on it at work, I am using an old scanner and "paperport" to try and crop it and it's just not working. So sorry for the low quality but I hope  you still enjoy!

Banshee

I just got a job at the Creativity Art Studio in Orem by the University Mall movie theater. It was pretty amazing actually. Trent and I went there for a date and I brought my resume and the owner, Chris, hired me right there. Okay okay, so it's a second job...I don't get great hours so I'm still working in insurance, but Chris is having me teach some of the Kids Summer Camp classes...which is great!! I've taught my own classes the last two summers and thought about renting a space this summer, but decided against it with other stuff going on. (ps. here's their website http://creativityartstudio.com/ : I made the coolest milk and cookie cup btw! I'll post it when I get it back) Anyway, this first week for the summer camps is "Legendary Creatures"; so I was looking up different characters, researching what I wanted to teach when I came upon a banshee. I was interested because I always wondered what the difference was with a banshee and a witch besides a wailing scream and moan.
The definition I found described a Banshee as wailing (of course) mournfully at death but also described her as having silver white hair and carrying around a white comb which she'd use to stroke her locks. Anyway, I felt inspired so here:

I thought the one below was interesting. It just looked a lot different to me in black and white rather than toned.

So, I'm trying to not let myself slack off this summer. During the school semester's any free time I have is spent doing hours and hours of work on my projects, but then as soon as summer comes and I don't have actual deadlines I have a hard time staying productive. I'm currently working on a painting for an art show that's coming up in July. I have a piece that will be in the Covey Center for the Arts Summer Showcase, and am going to enter some in American Fork's Steel Days Art Show. But, while I'm working on the painting for this upcoming show, I still want to be doing some smaller pieces to show. So, here is a quick sketch I did. It hints at what this painting will be that's coming up....wait and see if you can guess the connection :)

Venus Fly Trap

My goal on this piece was to illustrate the deadly sin of "lust" conceptually. Concept Illustration has  been hard for me but I think this piece turned out nicely. (Not to mention that it could make a good children's book illustration about a fly too).

Boy Meets Girl

So here it is, the final from my acrylic painting class. The project was to do a city scape or landscape that was keyed with a cool color and something warm in the front. Of course that sounded a little boring to me so I decided I wanted to tell a story. Let me know what you think :)

Spring 2013 Semester

This semester is just getting over and it has been a fantastic one! I feel like I've been pushed so much in all of my studio classes and have done so much work that I have really improved within these last few months. I've been posting pieces from my Digital Painting class taught by Will Terry, but this other class has also pushed me hard. It's a lower division class: Media and Techniques 2 taught by the infamous Perry Stewart.

Perry gave us a ton of homework this semester (like he does every semester)-- 4 paintings a week, a minimum of 2 hours spent on each. Usually they were heads and took more than 2 hours. But you can definitely see my improvement. The semester before I took "Head Painting" and you can tell that my heads this semester are a lot better than the ones from last semester. You can see those here:http://www.kristylenderillustration.blogspot.com/2012/12/round-3.html and here:http://www.kristylenderillustration.blogspot.com/2012/12/end-of-school.html . The pieces in this post are all done in acrylic. I'll post my final for the class a little later when I have it completely finished.

I feel like these are my pivotal pieces; the pieces where I recognized I was getting better. So without further ado, here are my pieces: the older ones are at the end of the post and the more recent at the beginning:

High Key 

Low Key

Painting on a collage of materials

 This one isn't great, I know that, but everyone in the class decided to do a painting of Perry. It was pretty awesome so I decided to post mine :)

Anne Hathaway

Jaslene: Winner of ANTM Arbitrary Color

 Amanda Seyfried Caricature.

Mushrooms

Drybrush on Napthol Red background

Drybrush

Flat shapes with circles to soften edges

Ron Weasley, only painting the shadows

Flat value, hard edges